Christian Coalition, a pro-family grassroots citizen organization, today released The Samaritan Project, a bold and compassionate agenda designed to combat poverty and restore hope. In addition to offering a legislative agenda, Christian Coalition is launching several major initiatives to take direct action in restoring communities and combating the nation’s pressing social problems. This agenda follows the Coalition’s highly successful Contract with the American Family, which was pursued through the 104th Congress.

The Samaritan Project is a dynamic eight-point agenda that calls for laws to protect young families and reduce out-of-wedlock births, provide Hope and Opportunity Scholarships for children, reduce juvenile and gang-related crime, add a tax credit for charitable giving, encourage economic opportunity through Empowerment Zones, and allow states to use private or faith-based drug rehab programs. The Coalition’s independent initiatives will include implementing a Racial Reconciliation Congress this May as well as providing financial and other assistance to 1,000 places of worship that are reaching out to impoverished communities around the nation.

“What the cities of America need more than bold government programs are changed hearts and transformed souls,” noted Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed. “It is time for religious conservatives and their estranged liberal brethren to unite to strengthen the essential building blocks of the family and the church for urban - and American - renewal.”

“Big government, and its attendant bureaucracy, has not worked,” said Rev. Earl Jackson, Christian Coalition’s community development liaison. “This is a task and a responsibility which requires us to join together. We will devote a significant part of our long-term agenda towards strengthening the family, private and faith-based community institutions, and neighborhoods, as a critical step towards helping those who are impoverished.”

The Samaritan Project

· Strong Families - Enact legislation which amends the Social Security Act to provide additional abstinence funding. Pursue additional funding under the Family Preservation and Social Services Act to states which require couples with young children to receive counseling and undergo a waiting period prior to divorce.

· Hope and Opportunity Scholarships - Pursue a national demonstration program which, ideally, provides scholarships to low-income children in 100 of the most impoverished, violent, or drug-ridden school districts, giving low-income parents an alternative and the same opportunities for their children that others have.

· Safe Neighborhoods - Provide a financial bonus to states which not only reduce their juvenile and gang-related crime rate, but which have adequate policies in place to address the growing juvenile crime rate.

· Charitable Giving - Establish a $500 tax credit for taxpayers who give both financial assistance and at least 10 hours of volunteer time to a private community service organization that serves the poor. There are several other complimentary proposals in Congress for the establishment of a charitable tax credit; we are supportive of those efforts also.

· Racial Justice - Hold a Congress on Racial Justice to encourage greater understanding between people of all races and focus on strengthening the family, improving education, creating jobs and opportunities, and more effectively working together across racial and cultural lines.

· Empowerment Zones - Expand economic opportunity, spur growth, and create new jobs with Emmpowerment Zones in 100 impoverished communities by providing tax relief on the start-up costs for new businesses as well as ongoing incentives to provide jobs to those in the inner-city and transportation to those jobs.

· Faith Solutions - Remove the obstacles that keep faith-based drug treatment programs from ministering to soul as well as body by allowing states to use private drug rehabilitation programs. Prohibit discrimination against faith-based drug treatment programs.

· Revitalize the Church - Assist 1,000 places of worship to reach out to neighborhoods and communities in need by the year 2,000. Activate Christian Coalition network of 125,000 churches, as well as members and supporters to provide further support to inner-city churches as they combat both material and spiritual poverty in our inner-cities.

Additional Items

· Religious Freedom Amendment - Continue to work towards the enactment of a constitutional amendment to protect people of faith from discrimination in the public square.

· Partial-Birth Abortion - Enact into law a ban on partial-birth abortions.

· Federal Funding of Abortion - Legislation prohibiting federal funding of organizations which perform or promote abortions overseas, as well as legislation regarding Title X family planning and physician-assisted suicide will continue to be priorities. Federal funding of abortions in the federal employees health benefit plans, in the District of Columbia, for federal prisoners, and under Medicaid, as well as the ban on federal funding of human embryo research will also be monitored.

· $500 per Child Tax Credit- Enact a $500 per child tax credit, providing an immediate and tangible benefit for overtaxed families and allowing them to keep more of their hard-earned income.

· Other Issues - Passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment and legislation which will privatize the National Endowment for the Arts and the Legal Services Corporation, and other initiatives.

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Welfare is not a right, judges say (National Post, 021220)

Provinces win power struggle with poverty groups

OTTAWA - Canadians do not have a constitutional right to guaranteed state welfare support, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled.

By a 5-4 decision, the judges rejected the argument of welfare-rights activists who argued the constitutional protection for “security of the person” under the Charter of Rights included a guaranteed standard of living.

“The frail platform provided by the facts of this case cannot support the weight of a positive state obligation of citizen support,” said Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, writing for the Supreme Court majority.

But she went on to suggest the law could conceivably evolve in that direction. She said it would be a mistake to view the Charter as “frozen” and incapable of novel interpretation, and such judicial interpretation “should be allowed to develop incrementally” as new issues arise.

William Robson, vice-president of the C.D. Howe Institute, said the ruling appeared to confirm Parliament’s right to control the public purse. He said if the court had ruled in favour of constitutional payments it would have involved the raising of taxes to pay for it.

The case centred on Louise Gosselin, from Montreal, who argued that Quebec’s welfare rules in the 1980s violated her Charter of Rights guarantees to equality and life, liberty and security of the person.

Her lawyers said provincial rules — which reduced benefits for able-bodied recipients younger than 30 who did not participate in job training or education — amounted to age discrimination.

Ms. Gosselin said she was forced to rely on shelters and soup kitchens because her benefits were cut to $163 per month. Recipients older than 30 received $448 monthly under the program.

“Social assistance is a right, not a privilege,” her lawyer, Carmen Palardy, also argued.

A number of poverty advocates joined the appeal saying it was time the Supreme Court included the poor as a protected group under the Charter.

The Quebec government, joined by Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia and New Brunswick, argued provincial governments must design social policy, and not be limited by the courts to simply handing out cash payments.

“There is no obligation on the state to provide that standard of living by handing money to all those who claim. Rather, the obligation on the state is to assist persons in recognizing their right to an adequate standard of living,” lawyers for Alberta argued.

They said the Charter’s drafters intentionally excluded social and economic rights because the Charter’s purpose was to limit government action, not to impose obligations on government.

Provincial governments cautioned that including economic protection in the Charter could have enormous implications on everything from rent increases to the supply of public housing and the cost of food, prescription drugs, water, electricity and gas.

Two dissenting judges — Justices Louise Arbour and Claire L’Heureux-Dubé — accepted the claim that Ms. Gosselin and other under-30 welfare recipients had a right to an adequate living standard.

“The exclusion of young adults from the full benefits of the social assistance regime substantially interfered with their fundamental right to security of the person,” Judge Arbour wrote.

Ms. Gosselin filed on behalf of 75,000 young Quebecers she claimed suffered under an alleged discriminatory law.

The lawsuit sought damages from the Quebec government of more than $500,000. The Supreme Court, at a hearing in October, 2001, was warned that the tab across the country could reach billions of dollars if the judges sided with Ms. Gosselin.

“It is utterly implausible to ask this court to find the Quebec government guilty of discrimination under the Canadian Charter and order it to pay hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to tens of thousands of unidentified people, based on the testimony of a single affected individual,” wrote Chief Justice McLachlin.

In a 5-4 ruling, the majority of the judges embraced provincial welfare plans — known as workfare.

Work-for-welfare programs are a “common sense” initiative to break the welfare cycle of dependency and despair, Chief Justice McLachlin said.

“Instead of turning a blind eye to these problems, the government sought to tackle them at their roots,” she wrote.

The court compared such schemes to an old Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Ms. Gosselin, now 43, took solace in the fact that the ruling was close. “What counts is to not lose hope, to continue to believe in the value that we live in a democratic society,” she said at a news conference at her lawyer’s office in Montreal.

The case was closely watched by legal analysts who viewed it as a groundbreaking test of the Charter’s parameters.

“We would have hoped that the Supreme Court would have come out to recognize that it’s a profound violation of the equality rights of poor people when governments set social assistance rates at a level that makes it impossible for people to live,” Martha Jackman, lawyer for the Charter Committee on Poverty Issues, said outside the court.

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Supreme Court embraces work-for-welfare programs (Montreal Gazette, 021220)

Quebec woman argued she was due minimum income from the state

Governments across Canada could save billions of dollars in welfare payments after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled yesterday that a Montreal woman doesn’t have a constitutional right to a guaranteed minimum income from the state.

The majority of judges on the deeply divided court embraced controversial provincial welfare plans — known as workfare — that reduce benefits for able-bodied recipients who do not join job-training or education programs.

The 5-4 ruling was a defeat for Louise Gosselin, who failed to persuade the majority that Quebec’s welfare rules in the 1980s violated her Charter of Rights guarantees to equality and life, liberty and security of the person.

Work-for-welfare programs are a “common sense” initiative to break the welfare cycle of dependency and despair, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote for the majority.

“Instead of turning a blind eye to these problems, the government sought to tackle them at their roots,” she wrote.

The work-for-welfare rule has been adopted in several other provinces, including Alberta and Ontario, which sided with Quebec. They argued that welfare is a social responsibility but not a constitutional right.

The decision effectively tossed out a 17-year-old class-action lawsuit that Ms. Gosselin filed on behalf of 75,000 young Quebecers, alleging that provincial rules — which reduced benefits for able-bodied recipients under 30 who did not participate in job training or education — amounted to age discrimination.

Ms. Gosselin said she was forced to rely on shelters and soup kitchens because her benefits were cut to $163 per month. Recipients over age 30 received $448 monthly under the program.

The lawsuit sought damages from the Quebec government of more than $500,000, including interest. The Supreme Court, at a hearing in October 2001, was warned that the tab across the country could reach billions of dollars if the judges sided with Ms. Gosselin.

Ms. Gosselin’s life was complicated by a history of psychological problems and drug and alcohol addiction that made it difficult for her to hold down a job. She also failed in her unprecedented argument that the Charter of Rights should be dramatically expanded to include economic protection for the poor.

Now 43, Ms. Gosselin took solace in the court’s close ruling.

“What counts is to not lose hope, to continue to believe in the value that we live in a democratic society,” she said at a news conference at her lawyer’s office in Montreal.

The case was closely watched by legal analysts who viewed it as a groundbreaking test of the charter’s parameters. “We would have hoped that the Supreme Court would have come out to recognize that it’s a profound violation of the equality rights of poor people when governments set social assistance rates at a level that makes it impossible for people to live,” Martha Jackman, lawyer for the Charter Committee on Poverty Issues, said outside the court.

Provincial governments had cautioned that including economic protection in the charter could have enormous implications on everything from rent increases to the supply of public housing and the cost of food, prescription drugs, water, electricity and gas.

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Habitat Founder and President Receives Highest Honor “Methodists Bestow on Anybody” (Christian Post, 041213)

Habitat for Humanity International (HHI) and its founder were awarded “the highest honor the people called Methodist bestow on anybody,” at the campus of Emory University, on Dec. 8, 2004. The two were given the 2004 World Methodist Peace Award – an honor given to dozens of other notables in the past including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

According to the United Methodist News Service (UMNS) both Millard Fuller, founder and president of HHI, and Rey Ramsey, president of HHI’s board of directors, were given the award to recognize their “contributions to peace, reconciliation and justice.”

In receiving the award, Fuller was quoted as saying the honor has been “more meaningful” because it is a peace award that comes from Methodists – a group involved in larger number in Habitat than any other faith group or denomination.

Fuller took note that while Habitat is “non-denominational” or “non-doctrinal,” it is “openly and unashamedly a Christian organization.”

“From the very beginning,” he said, “I have wanted to bring the various Christian denominations together to work and to build, side-by-side, with love and peace in our hearts.”

Meanwhile, Fuller took note that people of other faith traditions are often involved in the building and receiving of Habitat-built homes.

At that light, Fuller said he considers HHI’s work to be a peace-making endeavor to build bridges between people of different faiths. Such instances include that of Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, and Christians and Muslims in the Philippines, according to UMNS.

“Walls of suspicion and hostility are coming down as walls for houses go up,” he said during his brief acceptance address.

According to UMNS, Fuller also “quoted extensively from John Wesley” in expressing his appreciation to the Methodists. He said that he, like the World Methodist Council that presented the award, stands for “peace, opposition to the death penalty and understanding that faith alone, without works, is dead.”

“It ain’t easy,” Fuller said, “but it is the way of Jesus. It is the way of the cross. And ultimately it is the best way.”

The award ceremony was attended by representatives from the World Methodist Council (WMC) and HHI. International guests included His Eminence Sunday Mbang of Nigeria, chairperson of the council’s executive committee; the Rev. Brian Fletcher, president of the Methodist Church in Ireland, which nominated Fuller and Habitat for the award; and Peter Faquarson, director of the Habitat program in Northern Ireland.

The WMC, headquartered in Lake Junaluska, N.C., represents 76 different denominations in the Methodist/Wesleyan tradition, with 40 million members and a constituency of 75 million (UMNS).

HHI, established 29 years ago, has active members in 100 countries, daily building homes for low-cost to needy families. In August 2005, Habitat projects it will build its 200,000th house for its millionth person. It will have taken nearly 30 years to reach that milestone, but Fuller projects housing for the next one million will be completed in six years.

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Civic Groups Remain Relevant (Christian Post, 050507)

Associations that once formed a critical piece of American social life are on the verge of extinction. The problem is often framed in terms of the familiar “old versus new” conflict. “As older members die off and younger generations find civic groups irrelevant, membership in centuries-old civic clubs like the Moose, the Elks, the Optimists and others is dwindling,” reports Marc Lallanilla in a recent ABC News story.

And so the issue appears really to be one of demographics. The antiquated and obsolete social clubs and groups are in the process of dying off, replaced by more efficient and relevant Internet chat rooms and virtual communities. The social process of natural selection is at work, weeding out the elements of society that don’t deserve to flourish.

After all, critics point to the shortcomings of all-male fraternal societies as cause of their own decline. According to Lallanilla, “Most groups relegated women to provisional or auxiliary participation in a handful of select activities. And by excluding Jews, blacks, Asians and other minorities, these once-powerful fraternal organizations may have paved the way to their own demise.”

Shouldn’t we then celebrate the death of such archaic “old boy” networks? Despite being afflicted by the sin and disruption that marks all human activities, civic groups like the Elks and the Lions do much that is praiseworthy and beneficial for society. And while Lallanilla admits that changes have been made within many of these groups to combat racism and other forms of discrimination, “change may have come too late.”

There is no doubt that flawed aspects of voluntary associations and fraternal societies have contributed in some part to their decline. The lion’s share of blame, however, ought to be laid at the feet of the modernist view of individuality, which minimizes the importance of community and social structures.

In the words of theologian Stanley Grenz, who passed away earlier this year, “The modern world is an individualistic world, a realm of the autonomous human person endowed with inherent rights.” While there are many elements of this modern world that are compatible with biblical Christianity, Grenz writes that “we must shake ourselves loose from the radical individualism that has come to characterize the modern mind-set.”

And it is just this radical individualism that has undermined the vitality of civic and community groups, rendering them “irrelevant” in the minds of many. This was hardly the view of the founders of America, who realized the importance of a vibrant civil society. The First Amendment implicitly promotes voluntary associations by stating that Congress shall make no law infringing the “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.”

Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that the right of association is a “fundamental” right, and in the Constitution, such rights, “even though not expressly guaranteed, have been recognized by the Court as indispensable to the enjoyment of rights explicitly defined.”

This coheres well with the view of sphere sovereignty articulated by Dutch statesman and theologian Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920). Kuyper argued that social spheres enjoy independence or sovereignty, in that they are not created by the state but derive their authority and existence directly from God.

He emphasized that this idea should be identified as “sovereignty in the individual social spheres, in order that it may be sharply and decidedly expressed that these different developments of social life have nothing above themselves but God, and that the State cannot intrude here, and has nothing to command in their domain. As you feel at once, this is the deeply interesting question of our civil liberties.”

And here we see the continuing importance and relevance of the structures of civil society, including voluntary associations like the Elks and Kiwanis Club. These kinds of groups form an indispensable buffer between the individual and the State, fulfilling what Kuyper called the “organic life of society” as opposed to the “mechanical character of the government.”

The proper view of civic groups is one that embraces the comprehensive nature of the human person, as social individuals. We should embody attitudes neither of radical individualism nor of extreme communitarianism, but rather of balanced individuals within community. Civic groups and voluntary associations are anything but “irrelevant” within such a rich and complex view of human society. Indira Gandhi once said, “People tend to forget their duties but remember their rights.” In this case, it is our duty to exercise the right of association.

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Jordan J. Ballor is associate editor with the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty in Grand Rapids , Mich.

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Heroes of the Half-Measure: Christian Advocates for Government Charity (Christian Post, 050707)

Ahead of the G8 conference in Gleneagles, Ireland, this week (July 6-8), a spate of poverty-relief efforts have sprung up to huge public attention. The One Campaign has been the most prominent, supported by pop icons like Bono and George Clooney and Christian leaders like evangelical pastor Rick Warren.

But The One Campaign is just the headliner of a group of like-minded initiatives, most often identifying themselves with one biblical prophet or another (like the Micah Challenge and the Isaiah Platform). What is similar in all these movements is an emphasis on the role of government in providing assistance to the poor. But it is precisely this aspect of the initiatives that is most problematic from a Christian perspective.

One of the most common refrains from Christian leaders calling various governments to action—whether those of Canada, the U.S., or other member states of the United Nations—is that governments are the only entities capable of providing the level of material assistance that is needed. In the words of a speaker to a denominational assembly I observed last month, “Civil society is never enough.” The message is that churches can never hope to match sums like the $40 billion the G8 has proposed to cut debt among some African nations.

This attitude simply does not give Christians enough credit, both for what they have done and what they might do if challenged. In the U.S. alone in 2004, private individuals and corporations gave a record $249 billion to charity, with religious organizations as the single largest recipient group at $88 billion.

This is more than double the debt-relief offered by the G8, and this is reached even though Christians as a group do not give nearly at a level in accord with the biblical principle of the tithe. The Barna Group reports that only 6% of American Christians gave 10% of their income to churches or parachurch organizations in 2004. Imagine the possibilities if Christian leaders spent more time admonishing the members of their flock to meet their biblical responsibilties! Sadly, many seem more concerned with politicking than with calling the church to its higher standard.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Christians attempting to hold governments accountable for the promises that they have made. And even with the huge levels of generosity shown among Christians, it is true that governments like the U.S. do have much more in the way of material wealth to spread around.

But the irony is that the entities with perhaps the most assets to spend on poverty relief (governments) are the ones that are least able to do so effectively. The secular nature of democracies, which vigorously separate “proselytizing” and faith elements out of charity work, is a serious hindrance to the efficacy of compassion.

This restriction prevents governments from addressing anything but the material needs of the poor. While Christianity has always recognized the rich and complex body and soul anthropology of the human person, secular governments only have the tools to enact part of the solution.

So why are Christians so eager to endorse what is at best a half-measure? Jesus showed us the relative priority of the spiritual over the physical when he asked, “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?” (Mark 6:36 NIV).

Some kinds of Christian charity have been making this error for decades. The National Council of Churches (NCC) ignores the fact that acts of Christian mercy must always be done with a view toward the spiritual welfare of the recipient, as it continually engages in relief efforts while explicitly condeming “proselytizing.” But what the NCC calls proselytizing, other Christians call evangelism. Is not the “cup of water” to be given in Jesus’ name? (Mark 9:41).

Richard Baxter, the famed sixteenth-century Puritan missiologist and theologian once wrote, “Do as much good as you are able to men’s bodies in order to the greater good of Souls. If nature be not supported, men are not capable of other good.” This accords well with both the biblical injunctions against neglecting the body in favor of the soul, or the soul in favor of the body.

The book of James challenges us in the same way, “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?” (James 2:15-16 NIV).

A true vision of Christian charity is one that embraces the whole human person, physical and spiritual. In the same way that we cannot ignore material concerns in ministering to a person’s spiritual needs, the service of the body must be done in view of the greater purpose of Christian missions: the salvation of souls. And this is something the government simply cannot do.

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Jordan J. Ballor is associate editor with the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty in Grand Rapids , Mich.

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Why Christians are the ‘first responders’ (townhall.com, 050914)

Chuck Colson

Reporters covering the evacuation of New Orleans last week have noticed an interesting phenomenon. People who have lost everything are staying in shelters. And who are running those shelters? Churches.

Christians were the first to arrive on the scene—literally the first responders—the first to help with the devastation in New Orleans, even before the first government assistance arrived. And Christians shouldn’t be surprised at this, even if reporters are.

Because throughout history, Christians have been passionate about human dignity. We believe all humans are made in the image of God. This is why Christians throughout history have rescued abandoned babies, fought slavery, and passed child labor laws. Today, we care equally for the mother dying of AIDS in Africa, the six-year-old sex slave in Thailand, and the homeless family in New Orleans.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Prison Fellowship staff and volunteers are also caring for a segment of the population that hasn’t gotten much sympathy: prisoners and their families.

Angola Prison, a huge, maximum-security prison near Baton Rouge, has faced the burden of housing several thousand displaced prisoners from New Orleans. Most of these prisoners will live in tent cities set up on the grounds of Angola. Richard Payne, Prison Fellowship’s national director of Operation Starting Line, along with a group of volunteers are driving a trailer filled with toothbrushes, soap, towels, socks, blankets, and water from North Carolina to Angola.

Prison Fellowship-Alabama has also responded by housing Katrina victims. Until Katrina hit, Alabama field director Deborah Daniels had been working on a project to convert an abandoned nursing home into transitional housing for ex-offenders. Now she’s preparing the home to serve as temporary housing for some 350 displaced persons arriving from New Orleans and Biloxi, Mississippi.

And we haven’t forgotten the children of prisoners, either. Jean Bush, Prison Fellowship’s executive director for Louisiana, contacted many of the 195 Angel Tree churches in the state’s northern and central parishes to help provide housing for evacuees. She’s also found a way to provide Bibles for any who want them.

We recognize that local churches will not be able to carry out Angel Tree at Christmas this year as planned. So, Prison Fellowship has already begun a national campaign to raise funds to locate the now displaced Angel Tree children and to purchase gifts for them.

As the story of Hurricane Katrina begins to fade out of the news, as it inevitably will, we must not let our memories fade with it. Loving our neighbor requires perseverance. Those rendered homeless by Katrina will need help for years to come—and as we have recently seen, we cannot always rely on government help. Are we, the Church, willing to stick it out that long—to love our neighbor for as long as it takes? Yes, it’s easy to write a check—I’m sure we have all done that. But are we also willing to take people into our homes, to feed them, baby-sit their kids, help them find a job?

Christians reaching out to those who suffer offer a tremendous witness to secular observers—a witness to the fact that throughout history, whenever there are people who suffer, it is Christians, just like now in New Orleans, who are the “first responders.”

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‘Dirty Harry’ Christians (townhall.com, 050915)

Marvin Olasky

Where’s the ACLU? This co-mingling of government and religious resources must stop! Church groups, asked by local and state officials to take charge of feeding programs at government shelters like the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, also held worship services and passed out Bibles. Pastors prayed with evacuees, offering spiritual as well as material help. The horror!

Where is the press vigilance? Instead of exposing this blatant attempt to destroy the separation of church and state, reporters quoted New Orleans evacuees such as Dorothy Lewis welcoming the Christian service because she (obviously with false consciousness) believed that God saved her family: “I can’t go to sleep for thanking him. I wake up in the morning thanking him.”

Reporters uncritically quoted Protestant minister William Lawson telling the evacuees — in a government building! — “God hasn’t forgotten you, no more than he had forgotten Job.”

Here’s why the usual critics are generally silent: Christians are the Dirty Harrys of social service in today’s America. The 1971 film “Dirty Harry” starred Clint Eastwood as a San Francisco cop hated by the liberal mayor but called upon when the going gets rough. In the movie, the Eastwood character gains his nickname because he takes on the most difficult tasks the city can offer. “Now you know why they call me ‘Dirty Harry,’” he tells his partner after heroically saving one person from death: “Every dirty job that comes along.”

Many people, including Muslims and atheists, are getting their hands dirty in post-Katrina help. So are government and nonprofit professionals. But everyone knows that church groups are key.

Remember the insurance company commercials in which the family provider is suddenly gone, leaving a ghostly frame where the photo once was? That would be our situation if strict church-state separationists had their way and Christians were not able to offer material and spiritual help in public spaces, sometimes with a piggybacking of resources.

In short, when a Katrina crisis occurs, our “separation of church and state” turns into a marriage, with government and religious entities linked in providing aid to victims. Is that a crime? Not constitutionally.

Here’s one quick history lesson already familiar to some: The First Amendment opposes any “establishment of religion,” but it does not advocate “separation of church and state.” Thomas Jefferson wanted separation, but that was just Long Tom giving his opinion in an 1802 letter — and what worried many folks then is no longer on the table.

The concern 200 years ago was that one denomination would receive governmental backing, as the Anglican church did in Virginia and other colonies before the Revolutionary War, with all people forced to support it financially whether they agreed with that theology or not. This was what “establishment of religion” meant to the generation that rose up against British tyranny.

Only in recent decades have strict separationists twisted the First Amendment to impose gag rules on Christian leaders in government buildings or social service centers.

And yet, the World War II saying is still relevant: “There are no atheists in foxholes or rubber rafts.” As Katrina has placed hundreds of thousands in rubber rafts, those hostile to religion have been quiet. Some journalists have even uttered words of admiration.

Orlando Sentinel columnist Lauren Ritchie examined a church-led Katrina relief effort northwest of her city and concluded, “You ROCK, Lake County. ... You stepped forward. Actually, you ran forward, trampling anything in the way, your hands filled with offerings of cash, food, clothing and furniture. You left First Baptist Church of Leesburg scrambling to take the donations.”

Scrambling ... and that’s how it should be. Advertising posters for Dirty Harry proclaimed, concerning the Clint Eastwood character, “You don’t assign him to murder cases ... you just turn him loose.” Christians, turned loose, are doing well so far, through God’s grace.

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Purpose Driven in Rwanda: Rick Warren’s sweeping plan to defeat poverty. (Christianity Today, 050923)

In 2002, God dropped a pebble into the pond of Kay Warren’s life in the form of a magazine article about HIV/AIDS in Africa. Three years later, the ripple effect has reached all the way from her home in Orange County, California, to Africa.

It’s still gaining strength through the PEACE plan, a bold ministry vision from Kay’s influential husband, Saddleback Church’s Rick Warren. I traveled to Kigali, Rwanda, with the Warrens and 42 other American evangelicals in July, where they joined 9,000 Rwandan Christians in launching the first “Purpose-Driven Nation” initiative to harness businesspeople, politicians, and pastors against the nation’s biggest social problems.

Kay told Christianity Today seeing that article was “an appointment with God … he intended to grab my attention.” The news photos were so graphic that she covered her eyes and peeked through just enough to read the words. There was a quote box in the middle of the article that read: “12 million children orphaned in Africa due to AIDS.”

“It was as if I fell off the donkey on the Damascus road because I had no clue. I didn’t know one single orphan.” For days afterward, she was haunted by that fact: 12 million orphans.

Unable to block it from her mind, Kay began to get mad at God, praying, “Leave me alone. Even if it is true, what can I do about it? I’m a white, suburban soccer mom. There is nothing I can do.” But that did no good.

After weeks, then months of anguish, she realized she faced a fateful choice. She could either pretend she did not know about the HIV/AIDS pandemic or she could become personally involved.

“I made a conscious choice to say, ‘Yes.’ I had a pretty good suspicion that I was saying yes to a bucket load of pain. In that moment, God shattered my heart. He just took my heart and put it through a woodchip machine. My heart came out on the other side in more pieces than I could gather back up in my arms.

“It changed the direction of my life. I will never be the same. Never. I can never go back. I became a seriously disturbed woman.”

Through this period, Kay said nothing to her husband. Warren’s 2002 book, The Purpose-Driven Life, had in a matter of months skyrocketed into national bestseller status. Selling at up to 1 million copies per month, it has been the best-selling new book in the world since 2003. With that title and his earlier one, The Purpose-Driven Church, Warren has sold 26 million books.

Warren says when his wife finally told him God was calling her to the front lines of ministry against HIV/AIDS in Africa, he responded, saying, “That’s great, honey. I’m going to support you. It’s not my vision.”

“But nothing is as strong as pillow talk,” he added. “God used my wife to grab my heart.”

Because of the millions in book sales, the Warrens all of a sudden had become wealthy. Warren’s celebrity also sprang forward, and he is ranked as the second most influential evangelical after evangelist Billy Graham among surveyed pastors.

With this newfound affluence and influence, the couple says they made five decisions: They did not upgrade their lifestyle. Warren stopped taking a paycheck from Saddleback. He repaid 25 years of his salary to the church he founded in 1980. They created three charitable foundations. They started “reverse tithing,” meaning they live on 10% of their income and give away 90%.

In 2003, Bruce Wilkinson, The Prayer of Jabez author now ministering in Johannesburg, South Africa, invited the Warrens to help lead an HIV/AIDS conference with his own wife, Darlene. The Warrens agreed to go. He led a Purpose Driven conference for 90,000 African pastors, using digital satellite downlinks.

After it was over, Warren said to his hosts, “Take me out to a village. I want to meet some pastors.” They took him to Tembisa, a huge and desperately poor township outside Johannesburg. Local evangelists there often plant new congregations, using large blue-and-white striped tents. In many instances, homeless widows and orphans live in the tent during the week and also worship there on Sundays.

When Warren arrived, the tent church pastor boldly walked up to him, saying, “I know who you are. You’re Pastor Rick.”

“How in the world do you know who I am!” Warren exclaimed.

“I get your sermons every week.”

The pastor told Warren that once a week he walks 90 minutes to a post office with an internet connection. He downloads Warren’s sermons from Pastors.com and preaches them on Sundays.

“You are the only training I have ever had.”

Cut to the heart, Warren says, “I burst into tears. I thought, I will give the rest of my life for guys like that—the real heroes out in the bush.” That night, Warren sat under the African sky and prayed, “God, what are the other problems that you want to tackle?” Warren told CT, “God gets the most glory when you tackle the biggest giants. When David takes on Goliath, God gets glory. What are the problems so big that no one can solve them?”

Around this time, Warren says he was driven to reexamine Scripture with “new eyes.” What he found humbled him. “I found those 2,000 verses on the poor. How did I miss that? I went to Bible college, two seminaries, and I got a doctorate. How did I miss God’s compassion for the poor? I was not seeing all the purposes of God.

“The church is the body of Christ. The hands and feet have been amputated and we’re just a big mouth, known more for what we’re against.” Warren found himself praying, “God, would you use me to reattach the hands and the feet to the body of Christ, so that the whole church cares about the whole gospel in a whole new way—through the local church?”

The Warrens returned to Southern California, still not fully understanding what lay in store for them. Kay says God handed her a Polaroid and new things kept appearing in the picture.

Warren had 18 pages of notes from his trip and began further developing a conceptual framework for his emerging vision. He described the problems that harm billions of people around the world as the “global giants.”

Warren labeled the five giants:

* Spiritual emptiness. “[People] don’t know God made them for a purpose.”

* Egocentric leadership. “The world is full of little Saddams. Most people cannot handle power. It goes to their heads.”

* Poverty. “Half the world lives on less than $2 per day.”

* Disease. “We have billions of people dying from preventable disease. That’s unconscionable.”

* Illiteracy. “Half the world is functionally illiterate.”

Next, Warren, an incurable lover of slogans and acrostics, wrote out an acrostic, peace, to match up against each of the five global giants:

* Plant new churches, or partner with existing ones.

* Equip leaders.

* Assist the poor.

* Care for the sick.

* Educate the next generation.

Finally, Warren, whose Purpose Driven curriculum has trained 400,000 pastors from 162 nations, decided to put at the heart of the PEACE plan the local church and its members. “Every revival and spiritual awakening in history starts with the peasants, not with the kings. It starts with average, ordinary people,” Warren says. “There are not enough superstars to win the world. It has to be done by average people.”

“There are millions and millions of local churches around the world and now we have the technology to network them.” This mobilization strategy, Warren says, also incorporates two ideas from Luke 10. Individuals would be sent out in teams, and on entering a village, they would seek “a man of peace.”

“Find the man of peace. Bless him. He blesses you back. Who is the man of peace? He’s influential and he’s open. He doesn’t have to be a Christian. Find a non-Christian who’s influential and open—a Muslim or an atheist.”

As Warren was developing the PEACE plan, Kay was getting the brush-off from secular HIV/AIDS activists and judgmental church members. But she was undeterred. “I pretty much thought that anybody who had HIV was gay. If they were gay and had HIV, they probably deserved it, because they had lived a lifestyle of risk. Therefore, I didn’t really have to care very much about them. Not a pretty attitude. I’m not proud of it, but it is where I was.”

The Warrens began to educate themselves and their congregation intensively. At first, even HIV-positive members of Saddleback were fearful of disclosing their status. That has changed. This fall, Saddleback will host “Disturbing Voices,” its first international conference on HIV/AIDS. Kay said, “Three years later, people walk up and go, ‘Hey, how’s the HIV ministry going?’ It’s the topic of conversation. I love it. I love what God is doing.”

The PEACE Plan is Tested

In late 2003, Mike Constantz, a Campus Crusade for Christ leader, was looking to join a new church. He and his wife had returned from an overseas assignment to work with Campus Crusade in Southern California.

One Sunday in October, author Bruce Wilkinson was Saddleback’s visiting preacher, and he spoke about his book, The Dream Giver. It’s a Pilgrim’s Progress—like story in which the main character discovers not only his dream, but also God’s higher purpose within it. That message had such an impact that Constantz and his wife decided to join Saddleback. Then in November, the Warrens spoke during Sunday worship about the PEACE plan for the first time. Constantz was invited to a private briefing.

He was sitting in Saddleback’s executive conference room. “The very, very first impression was: There’s nothing new there! Planting churches, equipping leaders, assisting the poor, caring for the sick, educating the next generation have all been done before. In fact, I had been involved in doing some aspects of almost all of that in 27 years of mission work.”

Constantz was sitting and listening and Warren kept talking. But it triggered in Constantz a flashback to 1976.

“The further he went, it was like going back to when I was at the University of Colorado as a student. I had a chance to be in Dr. Bill Bright’s living room the summer of 1976.”

Bright, the late founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, laid out his vision, telling Constantz and others: “Here’s what God wants to do in the whole world.” Then and there, Constantz committed himself to a career in Christian mission.

“As I sat and listened to Rick, it was like listening to Bill Bright, but on a much grander scale. It was not only the breadth of the Great Commission, but the depth of the Great Commandment.”

Constantz was shocked, saying to Warren, “If you’re serious about this, this is the biggest thing I’ve ever heard in mission.” And almost immediately, Constantz was thrown into a professional crisis, because Warren asked him to quit his job with Crusade and join the PEACE plan staff.

For the next six weeks, Constantz struggled over whether to accept Warren’s offer, especially since his wife sensed no such call to leave. (Crusade policy requires couples to serve together.) His wife told him, “If God calls you to Saddleback, then I’ll go with what you feel like God’s leading is.” But top leaders granted them a waiver, allowing her to remain on the Crusade staff.

Warren had recruited others, too. Curtis Sergeant, a prominent missions strategist at the Southern Baptist International Missions Board, also joined the PEACE plan. Along with senior staff from Warren’s Purpose Driven organization, they all put new energy into further developing the plan.

During much of 2004, the PEACE plan moved forward. Describing their progress, Constantz draws on President Kennedy’s famous 1962 speech that set in motion America’s quest to put a man on the moon. Constantz says the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions were all worked on simultaneously, and the PEACE plan is following that strategy of phased development toward the same big goal.

So for the last 18 months, Saddleback has dispatched local church members on pilot projects in 42 nations. One of the most controversial aspects of the PEACE plan is to place local church members at the front lines of ministry alongside other local church members in the developing world.

Warren hopes to enlist 1 billion individuals through their congregations and small groups for mission projects. This mobilization of church and small-group members will walk them through three steps: personal PEACE, local PEACE, and global PEACE.

He says parachurch organizations have for decades been on the leading edge, and the local church was left behind. “In denominations, you pay, you pray, and you get out of the way. Let the professionals do it. The revolution I believe in and want to bring about reverses the role—the local church on the front edge.”

Warren also expects more and more congregations to adopt his Purpose Driven model that organizes churches around five key factors: fellowship, discipleship, worship, ministry, and evangelism. So far, 30,000 American churches have participated in the first program, “40 Days of Purpose.”

“Personal computers have brand names. But inside every pc is an Intel chip and an operating system, Windows,” Warren says. “The Purpose Driven paradigm is the Intel chip for the 21st-century church and the Windows system of the 21st-century church.”

Once an individual church adopts the Purpose Driven model, there are many more moves to make. They describe those steps as moving around a baseball diamond. The goal is mission-minded disciples. Warren says, “You can’t get the church to jump from total selfishness, where they want all the sermons about ‘How do I avoid stress,’ to caring about Angola.”

“How do you get them to become a world-class Christian?”

That question led Warren to another developmental idea that calls for each individual Christian to have experience in four ministry venues:

* Jerusalem: Ministry in your town or neighborhood.

* Judea: Ministry in your county.

* Samaria: Cross-cultural ministry in your area.

* Uttermost parts of the world: International ministry.

Locally, Saddleback tested the compassion of their members by asking 2,600 small groups (“40 Days of Community”) to provide three meals a day for 40 days to the 40,000 homeless of Orange County in 2004.

“It took 2 million pounds of food and 9,200 volunteers,” Warren says. “For most of those members, it was their first experience with a poor person. Touching, helping, smelling. Their lives are changed. So you did it in Santa Ana, don’t you think you could do it in Uganda? It’s a baby step for the PEACE plan.”

Warren said all five elements of the PEACE plan are being done by great organizations. But he says, “Nobody has been able to do them through the local church together, combined. That’s what makes the PEACE plan unique.”

Local Church in World Context

In many ways, Warren’s local-church emphasis is not new—it’s been at the core of Christian ministry from the earliest days. What may be new is the globalized context.

Some see Warren’s focus on working through local churches as strategic and inspired because church planting is a growth business. Right now, there are about 3.7 million congregations worldwide. By 2025, 1.2 million new churches may open, pushing the global total to 5 million, if estimates from the International Bulletin of Missionary Research (IBMR) prove accurate.

A handful of elite leaders believe Christian missions are undergoing a tsunami-like paradigm change. IBMR missions scholar and numbers guru David Barrett and his colleagues colorfully describe the first half of the 21st century as the “age of total information instantly accessible to all.” They estimate that 350 million Christians and 8,000 denominations are online. They communicate in 4,000 languages and have produced 2.7 billion Web pages.

It is these technological innovations that allow local churches all over the world to be connected to any other church or ministry directly: New technology allows them to bypass bureaucracies and denominational hierarchy at will. Web-based computer systems, global cell-phone networks, and greater international air travel all enhance the ability of local church leaders to work horizontally. The Jesus Film Project, the Alpha Course, and Warren’s own Purpose Driven movement are all global examples of a new kind of collaboration. This technological flattening of the globe, described in journalist Thomas Friedman’s recent book The World Is Flat, is leveling the playing field for bishops and pastors as much as for corporate executives and small businessmen.

Warren also believes government-driven programs have proven to be ineffective against HIV/AIDS, malaria, corruption, and other global social ills. These multiple crises outstrip the capacity of traditional Christian missions, individual governments, and even the United Nations. For instance, fatalities from HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa create about 100,000 new orphaned children each month. The size and complexity of such problems overwhelm almost any program. And it’s a common observation that billions of dollars in aid and development has created a dependency that has only made large sections of Africa worse.

“The compassion industry isn’t working,” says Dwight Gibson, formerly a top leader with World Evangelical Alliance. Seeing these emerging changes, Gibson joined Geneva Global, a new-paradigm missions organization in Pennsylvania. Its vision is to help donors “give wisely” to projects with verifiable life-changing results. Gibson is bullish on Warren’s PEACE plan, saying it’s like a “disruptive technology” that will prove its value once understood and implemented.

But other parachurch leaders remain cautious and concerned. They suspect the PEACE plan will prove to be difficult to implement nationwide at the grassroots. Religion scholar Alan Wolfe, in a recent Wall Street Journal commentary, expressed the skepticism of many when he said, “A country like Rwanda faces political and social problems beyond the reach of even the most earnest and popular humanitarian efforts.”

Traveling around Rwanda, I met pastors, missionaries, and parachurch leaders who were frank and honest about the enormous challenges they face and the unintended consequences of well-meaning programs, spawned from the outside, not the grassroots. Right now, HIV/AIDS grant money is flooding into African nations like Rwanda. It’s drawing some of the nation’s most talented local individuals into HIV/AIDS programs. But other programs focused on killers like malaria are getting very little new money.

Reaching the Unengaged

As Saddleback leaders began testing their PEACE plan model, they began to better understand the challenge of ministering to 6,000 unreached people groups in a new way.

Of those 6,000 groups, 3,000 have very few new churches being started. “The hope to get to the remaining 3,000 for church planting is now going to fall on the local church around the world,” Constantz says. PEACE plan leaders want to change the thinking of everyday churchgoers and professionals who volunteer their expertise overseas. Ordinary church members would be given “just-in-time” training in order to get to the field quickly. Professionals would be guided to develop simple kits (“church in a box,” “clinic in a box,” “business in a box”) that volunteers could use.

While Saddleback staff have joked that the “church in a box” would include one of their pastor’s signature Hawaiian shirts, Warren proves himself a master of capturing the imagination of leaders with innovation and simple ideas. The “business in a box,” for example, is based on moving villagers beyond subsistence living. Warren references the popular saying: If you give someone a fish, you feed them for a day. If you teach someone how to fish, you feed that person’s family for a lifetime. “I want to teach someone to sell fish.” By teaching sales and marketing skills, villagers may grow their economy through trade.

Such training may go beyond microeconomics. One leader told me Rwandans have the potential to produce more fruits and vegetables than they consume. Leaders want to help Rwandans find more export markets.

In developing ideas for the “clinic in a box,” Constantz one day sat down with medical professionals who attend Saddleback. He asked them how many villages they could reach in a year, and they said about 20.

“I said, ‘Okay. That would be good. Love that idea.’ But I said, ‘In South Asia alone there are a million villages, and they all could use your help.’ “ When these professionals recognized the size of the need, they began developing simple things like a dental hygiene kit that trained volunteers could use overseas. Constantz says professionals have a critical role, but there will never be enough of them to overcome poverty globally.

As teams went overseas, Warren found himself ever more in the spotlight. Political and business leaders worldwide were reading The Purpose-Driven Life and demanding one-on-one spiritual counsel. At one point, Warren was conducting a weekly, invitation-only telephone conference call Bible study for more than 100 leaders from international corporations.

But when Peb Jackson, a Saddleback staff member, personally had a chance to give Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, a autographed copy of The Purpose-Driven Life in 2004, not even Warren could have imagined what would show up next on that still-developing Polaroid picture that God had given to his wife.

A Purpose-Driven Nation?

This past summer, Foreign Policy magazine put together a failed-states index, focusing on 60 nations. In the top 20, there were 11 African countries at the highest risk, including Rwanda. Eleven years after the genocide, Rwandans are still burying victims and putting suspects on trial. Deaths from HIV/AIDS and the genocide have created within Rwanda one of the world’s greatest concentrations of orphaned children. Rebels cluster on Rwanda’s western edge, maiming and killing civilians. Democracy is limited and economic growth is spread unevenly.

But something unexpectedly spiritual is happening in Rwanda. William Beasley, a Chicago-area Anglican pastor, has been working with Rwandan Anglicans since 1998 and sees leaders converging their resources in new ways. “A country that was abandoned by the world has been adopted by the church,” he says.

Mark Amstutz, an international relations professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, visited Rwanda this summer to study the gacaca village tribunals. He says something spiritual is happening globally as well as in Rwanda. “Social scientists have it wrong. The world is not becoming more secular. It is becoming more religious.

“If there is going to be peace, it is going to be because religious people are contributing to moderation, tolerance, and conflict resolution.”

After Rwanda’s President Kagame read The Purpose-Driven Life, he wrote Warren saying, “I am a purpose-driven man.” He invited Warren and others to the capital, Kigali. In March, Warren, his wife, key Saddleback leaders, business leaders, Beasley, and several Rwandan Anglican bishops all gathered in Kigali with the political leaders. “It was one of these wild, divine moments that all these circles interconnected,” Beasley says.

“I fell in love with the country,” Warren says. “I say, ‘Lord, help me find out what you are blessing and help me get in on it.’ I think God is blessing Rwanda.”

Warren and Rwanda’s leaders jointly came up with the idea of Rwanda becoming the “world’s first purpose-driven nation.” A month after the March visit, Kagame and his wife traveled to Orange County, California, for Saddleback’s 25th anniversary. Then this summer the Warrens returned to Rwanda with Saddleback’s senior staff and evangelicals from around North America.

For six days in mid-July, American evangelicals were dispatched nationwide via military helicopters and suvs. Warren christened this effort as launch: Listen and learn. Assess the biggest needs. Uncover and utilize the “man of peace.” Nurture a coalition. Conduct leadership training. Hold a national rally.

During the day, Americans visited genocide sites, child-headed households, classrooms, medical clinics, schools, and churches. Each evening, Rwandans, including Anglican Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini, sponsored lavish dinners, and American evangelicals got their first exposure to roasted goat and traditional Rwandan dance with Christian lyrics.

“Rwanda touches something very deep inside of me,” Kay Warren says. “There’s just something about this bruised and battered country that’s gotten under my skin.”

On the weekend, what happened at Kigali’s Amahoro Stadium did more than touch the visiting Americans. On national television, Warren, outfitted in a black and white Hawaiian shirt, told 9,000 cheering Rwandans about their president, “I have looked inside this man’s heart and I have seen compassion. I have seen courage, and I have seen humility.” Warren placed his hand on Kagame’s shoulder and prayed for a blessing on him.

Local journalists were bug-eyed. One reporter told me, “We have to reconcile ourselves. We need purpose and a future. Rick is coming at the right time, and it is genuine.”

The next day, Rick Warren left Rwanda on the presidential jet to attend a meeting of African leaders in Senegal, then he went on to other meetings in Europe.

Back in Rwanda, Christians were sorting out their feelings and discovered their enthusiasm was mixed with worry. One well-educated Rwandan leader told me, “One reality that we have to face here is when a leader speaks, we follow even if we are not convinced.” Public support for the PEACE plan may not translate well long term to the grassroots, he said.

Others are more skeptical still. As Wolfe put it, “It has taken centuries for Rwandans to descend into the hell in which they exist. Not even becoming a purpose-driven nation is likely to bring them to heaven anytime soon.”

But Warren, in a reference to the genocide, told Rwandan pastors, “If the Devil gives you problems about your past, you remind him of his future.” Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana, who has probably worked more closely with Americans than any other Rwandan Christian, says, “I praised the Lord having the PEACE plan come from Saddleback. You know God is doing something when people in different places get the same idea before they are connected. It’s not just our idea. It’s our vision.”

Kay Warren, during a follow-up phone interview from her home in Orange County, said she had first come to Rwanda looking for the “monster” killers responsible for the genocide. But everyone looked average to her.

“Average people became monsters and let evil reign in their lives for a while. That means that I, too, could become a monster given the right circumstances.” She says it’s a lesson she could only have learned in Rwanda.

She also told me she’s searched diligently for that life-changing 2002 magazine article, but has failed to find it. The pebble disappeared, but the ripples live on. Later this year and in 2006, Saddleback expects to send out other PEACE plan teams to Rwanda and elsewhere worldwide, as their prototype is further tested in the field.

Timothy C. Morgan is deputy managing editor of CT. Additional reporting by Tony Carnes, CT senior writer, in New York City.

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Bible Belt Residents Most Charitable in Country (Foxnews, 051120)

PORTLAND, Maine — New Englanders remain among the most tightfisted in the country when it comes to charitable giving while Bible Belt residents are among the most generous, according to an annual index.

For the fourth year running, New Hampshire was the most miserly state, according to the Catalogue of Philanthropy’s Generosity Index. Mississippi remained at the top for generosity.

The index, which takes into account both “having” and “giving,” is based on average adjusted gross incomes and the value of itemized charitable donations reported to the Internal Revenue Service on 2003 tax returns, the latest available.

However, its methodology has been criticized and has helped give rise to new studies of charitable giving.

“We believe that generosity is a function of how much one gives to the ability one has to give,” said Martin Cohn, a spokesman for the Catalogue for Philanthropy, a Boston-based nonprofit that publishes a directory of nonprofit organizations.

Using that standard, the 10 most generous states were, in descending order, Mississippi, Arkansas, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Utah, South Carolina and West Virginia.

The 10 stingiest, starting from the bottom, were New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Minnesota, Colorado, Hawaii and Michigan.

But a study by the Boston Foundation concluded that the index presents an undeserved image of New England as a region made up of Yankee skinflints.

“If everyone in Massachusetts gave 100 times as much to charity as we do today and everything else remains the same, we wouldn’t get above the bottom half of the chart,” said David Trueblood, a spokesman for the foundation. “And no matter what Mississippi did, it couldn’t fall below 22nd or 23rd.”

The foundation proposed an alternate measure of generosity based on each state’s share of overall charitable contributions and income, adjusted for differences in taxes and living costs. Using that methodology, Massachusetts’ generosity ranking last year would be 11th, instead of 49th.

Another new study, conducted by The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University on behalf of a group of New England sponsors, also boosts the case for residents of the six-state region.

That study, which supplements IRS data with a survey of representative households, found that individuals in New England give less, on average, to charity than people in other regions, but that the percentage of New Englanders who do contribute is higher than the national average. It also found that contributors in New England tend to favor secular, rather than religious, causes.

Cohn said he was disappointed that the Boston Foundation chose to attack the index without understanding that its purpose is to promote discussion about philanthropy and that it never sought to hang a label on any state.

Trueblood said he wanted to move the discussion away from rankings and toward ways to get people to be more generous.

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Storm victims praise churches (Washington Times, 051202)

Louisiana residents gave churches higher marks than government agencies in responding to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and most prefer that the federal government control rebuilding funds rather than local officials, according to a Louisiana State University study.

On a scale of one (not effective) to 10 (very effective), residents gave churches the highest mark of 8.1, and New Orleans city agencies and state agencies received the lowest rating of 4.6.

“Louisiana residents were not particularly charitable when it came to evaluating government response ... but were considerably more favorable of the efforts of faith-based organizations and nonprofits, including local community foundations and the Red Cross,” according to the study.

Hundreds of churches and synagogues stepped up to help when municipal, state and federal governments faltered in their early responses to the devastation wrought by the hurricanes. They fed, clothed and sheltered survivors and raised more than $100 million to do so.

Nonprofits overall received the second-highest relief rating with 7.5, as did the religious-based Salvation Army, slightly ahead of the American Red Cross’ 7.4 rating. Insurance companies scored 5.2.

As for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — whose former director, Michael D. Brown, lost his job over the agency’s response to Katrina — and the federal government, which was criticized for its handling of the natural catastrophes, Louisianans gave them better scores than they gave both the state and New Orleans.

FEMA scored slightly higher than the federal government, receiving 5.3 and 5.1, respectively. But neither did as well as local governments other than New Orleans, which averaged a 6.5 score.

“First and foremost, the survey shows the tremendous generosity of Louisianans. It also illustrates that citizens recognize the tough road ahead ... that rebuilding will not come inexpensively or quickly,” said Kirby Goidel, co-director of LSU’s Public Policy Research Laboratory and principal investigator of the survey.

The survey said 39% of Louisianans had a friend or family member stay in their homes, and 14% provided shelter to someone they did not know previously. Fifty percent said they gave money to a religious organization.

The majority of Louisianans, 54%, said the federal government should pick up the tab for rebuilding, and a 40% plurality said they trusted the federal government to have primary control over how funds are spent.

Only 23% said local governments should control the purse strings, and 27% favored the state as the watchdog.

“While some understand that budget cuts will have personal impact, they also expect the federal government to step up to the plate to cover the costs of rebuilding,” Mr. Goidel said.

When asked which was most important before moving back to New Orleans, 58% said protection from a strengthened levee system is most important, while 37% said rebuilding quickly should be the top priority.

And, when asked how likely it is that they will attend Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans next year, 14% said they definitely would and 53% said “not at all.”

“The New Orleans region consistently rated all levels of government more negatively than other areas of the state,” according to the survey, which is a bad sign for Mayor C. Ray Nagin, a Democrat who is up for re-election next year.

Recent political polling also shows Democratic Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco is in serious trouble. Only 19% statewide said they would re-elect her, and only 10% in New Orleans still support her.

“Breaking the results out by political perspective, Republicans rated the federal government significantly higher, 6.0, than state or local governments, 4.3 and 3.8 respectively,” according to the report.

“Democrats gave low marks to government across the board, 4.7 to the federal government and 5.0 to both the state and local governments.”

The LSU Public Policy Research Laboratory survey was taken Nov. 3 to Nov. 18 and had a 3.9%age point margin of error.

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Unheralded Persons of the Year (townhall.com, 051222)

by Marvin Olasky

Time did well in selecting Bono plus Bill and Melinda Gates as its charitable Persons of the Year, but I wish it had also put a non-celebrity — maybe a volunteer Katrina relief worker — on its cover.

It would have been good to honor one of the 9,000 Southern Baptists from 41 states who volunteered 120,000 days during the two months after the hurricane hit. During that time, they served 10 million meals and pushed forward cleanup and recovery efforts.

Or how about someone from the Salvation Army: Those folks served nearly 5 million hot meals and over 6.5 million sandwiches, snacks and drinks from 178 mobile feeding units and 11 field kitchens, with each kitchen able to produce 20,000 hot meals per day.

Big numbers, and those were just two of the active groups. Many others also delivered food and supplies in a much more flexible style than the bureaucratic FEMA. Ronnie Harris, mayor of the New Orleans suburb of Gretna, flat-out said: “Church workers were the first volunteers on the ground. It is churches that have made the difference in Hurricane Katrina recovery.”

Many others concur, but some Christians worry that such church activity is the “social gospel” revisited, at the expense of evangelism. There’s reason for concern, because we are all prone to wander spiritually and to focus on what the world praises than on what it misunderstands or even abhors. And yet, evangelism is often most successful, in God’s timing, when those hostile to Christ look up in surprise at what Christians are doing.

For example, after Katrina, an atheist asked in the British left-wing Guardian Weekly why Christians “are the people most likely to take the risks and make the sacrifices involved in helping others.” You can almost see the synapses sparking in the writer’s brain: “It ought to be possible to live a Christian life without being a Christian or, better still, to take Christianity a la carte. Yet ... it is impossible to doubt that faith and charity go hand in hand.”

He’s right, and add evangelism to the mix: Faith leads to works, and works lead people to ask questions about faith. As the works of the faithful diminish the pride of the faithless — the British writer concluded that Christians are “morally superior to atheists like me” — Christian charity ploughs the ground for an evangelistic response: no, not morally superior, just touched by One who was.

Even hardcore U.S. anti-Christian publications couldn’t help noticing the difference Christian belief made during the post-Katrina days. The New York Times story described how church groups were doing better than government agencies, and didn’t even object (this one time) when those who “finish clearing debris or doing temporary repairs on damaged houses ... give the homeowners a signed Bible and say a prayer with them.”

On Christmas, we might remember how a long time ago another nation faced a disaster even greater than Katrina. Enemy soldiers occupied the land and imposed toady officials on a resentful populace. It seemed that God had been quiet for centuries, and some said He would never speak again. Then the ultimate act of Christian charity transformed every aspect of life. That deed began the transformation of everything around us.

God is always transforming old into new: hearts of stone to hearts of flesh, the former sites of abortion businesses into pro-life counseling centers, maybe even the disaster of Katrina into something positive for those who have broken away from poverty and despair in New Orleans and found new opportunities elsewhere.

Effective evangelism conveys that good news, starting with Christ’s birth and the way that millions of people gain rebirth through God’s grace. Evangelism is particularly effective when it combines words and deeds, as it did when the herald angels sang 2,000 years ago, and as it did once again when the unheralded deliverers of post-Katrina compassion sacrificed for others.

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Does American Charity Cheat the Tax Man? (Christian Post, 060118)

The generosity of Americans is a constant source of amazement. With charitable giving running at $245 billion a year, even the recent string of disasters – the Asian tsunami, Pakistan earthquakes, and Gulf Coast hurricanes – doesn’t seem to have “fatigued’ donors. The Center on Philanthropy at the University of Indiana estimates that some $5 billion was donated to Katrina and tsunami relief last year, and that philanthropic giving overall was actually spurred by these events.

So it was not a little surprising to read the lead article in the Winter 2005 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review and learn that U.S. philanthropy, whether aimed at educational programs or projects designed to help the needy, is “shortchanging” the poor. There’s more. Charitable giving is actually a “federal subsidy” that benefits wealthier people more than the poor, argues author Rob Reich. “The effect of these unequal subsidies is to increase inequalities between the rich and the poor, not only in education, but also in other domains of charitable giving,” he writes.

After a long exposition of the uncertain ‘redistributive’ effects of charity, Reich concludes that, “Given the evidence already presented, philanthropy does such a poor job of channeling money to the needy that it would not be difficult for the government to do better.”

Reich is a Stanford political science professor and is affiliated with the school’s Center for Social Innovation. Thus, he has ample credentials for qualifying as an expert on these matters. But he seems to have ignored or misunderstood some obvious truths about philanthropy: First of all, a gift of money or goods and the resulting tax deduction is only a government subsidy if you believe the money or goods belonged to the government in the first place. What’s more, wealthy people get a bigger write-off than poor people because poor people can’t give to charities – they’re poor. And, finally, private charity works faster, better and closer to the problem. The evidence that government does a sorry job of helping the needy is everywhere before us.

Not many Louisiana residents may read the Social Innovation Review, but they nevertheless have some highly developed conclusions about government help for the needy. Their conclusions were actually formed by personal experience with government helpers.

In a survey by Louisiana State University researchers, state residents were asked to rate the effectiveness of hurricane-recovery organizations on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being very effective. Church relief groups got the highest mark of 8.1. Next were nonprofits, the Salvation Army, and local community organizations, at 7.5. The Red Cross scored 7.5. Governments ranked lowest with Louisiana residents, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency at 5.3, the federal government at 5.1, and state and local governments at 4.6.

The real problem with government “charity” is that government takes a “one size fits all” approach to the problem of poverty. That, really, is all a bureaucracy can do. Government agencies are not designed to understand unique circumstances or to care about personal problems. And government certainly is not equipped to provide total coverage for major disasters like the Gulf Coast hurricanes. Government also pretends to distribute its help in an equitable and even-handed manner, an error of policy that results in waste, fraud and corruption.

Just wait till government auditors dig into the FEMA program that put hurricane evacuees into thousands of hotel rooms across the country, many of the rooms paid for but empty. To be sure, nonprofits don’t get a free pass on waste and fraud. Charities and relief organizations that failed to use donations smartly should be held to account. How many of those loaded debit cards given away so promiscuously to evacuees were used for real household needs?

From the declaration of the War on Poverty to the decade of the 1990s, some $5.4 trillion government (i.e., taxpayer) dollars were targeted to poverty programs. The poverty rates in 1990 were almost exactly the same as 1960. If government solutions were really about wealth redistribution, surely there would have been some positive movement in those thirty years. But the real movement of people out of poverty didn’t begin until policies were recast in a personal responsibility paradigm.

Historical evidence is quite clear: Governments do a bad job of alleviating poverty. Making social justice the equivalent of wealth redistribution isn’t a new idea, but it’s still a very bad one. So let’s drop all the talk about the government’s generosity in “subsidizing” American philanthropy.

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Karen Woods is Director of the Center for Effective Compassion at the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Mich.

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Perhaps a Better Prayer (Christian Post, 060524)

Thursday, May 11, Senate Chaplain Mike Morris delivered the following prayer before the guests and members of the North Carolina Senate:

“This morning we offer thanks, O God, for the unexpected blessing of a $2 billion surplus in the State Treasury. We’re also grateful for the Senators who understand such a sum. For the poor in our State, $2 billion is an incomprehensible amount — a different monetary language. In their world, a few dollars more each month means the difference between despair and hopefulness. So to those of us who know the meaning of $2 billion, help us also respond to the language of dollar bills and pocket change.”

After the prayer, I turned to a colleague sitting next to me in the gallery and said: “That prayer was decidedly progressive.” In other words, the suggestion of the prayer was that North Carolina lawmakers ought to take the surplus and dole it out in various government programs for the poor.

Unfortunately, we are living in a time when most people would offer a whole-hearted “Amen” to the chaplain’s prayer. Yet the chaplain is actually espousing a form of economic deviance — one far from the teaching of Holy Scripture.

There’s no doubt that Christianity is deeply concerned for the poor. But the Scriptures do not authorize the government to be involved in matters of housing, food, child-care, health-care, etc. Romans 13:3-5, the definitive text for understanding the role of government, says government is to bear the sword against evil doers and protect the innocent. The apostle Paul clearly delineates this to be the reason people should pay taxes — to provide for sufficient military, police, and court services; to protect the public’s right to life, liberty, and private property. It’s neither altruistic nor compassionate, however, when the government coercively extracts money from one group and gives it as an act of public charity to another — even when it’s needed! Such is just another form of violating the eighth commandment: “Thou shalt not steal.”

It’s hard to believe that America, which was birthed in part because of its opposition to unjust taxation, would so passively accept a tax burden that is considerably squelching its hopes at opportunity. Taxation that seeks a more equitable distribution of wealth by seizing the property and possessions of those who have in the name of those who don’t, significantly suppresses a nation’s ability to produce.

Moreover, this approach to economics undermines the strength of the national character.

Alexis De Tocqueville, the famous French philosopher, once warned: “America will last until the populace discovers that it can vote for itself largesse out of the public treasury.” For those who might not know, “largesse” means: “liberally vote themselves gifts and handouts from public coffers.”

Without question, today government has become the opiate of the people. We look to it to solve all our problems, but in doing so we preempt the genius of private enterprise, the power of private charity, and the profound influence of the church. All of these serve to make us a better people — to nurture the nation’s spirit — to serve the public more effectively. When the public begins to look to the government as a panacea for all its woes, the end is indolence, vice, and less liberty. Can we honestly deny this is where public or state charity has taken us?

No, Senate Chaplain Morris’ prayer shouldn’t receive an “Amen,” but an “Oh me.” It was, whether intentional or not, an unholy alliance with socialism — pure and simple. In a sermon titled, The Bible and Economics, Dr. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries rightly notes that such “[i]nstead of drawing people to the church and God who is the provider of every good and perfect gift, it leads them to a more and more secularized state and engenders more and more of a disbelieving populace. Furthermore, it leads to a loss of freedom, to tyranny as we sell our souls to the government store. More and more people are willing to sell their birthright for a mess of pottage or, as somebody said, a pot of socialistic message. They will end up as a people totally dependent upon the state and without liberty.”

Indeed, perhaps a better prayer before the N.C. Senate during a time of surplus would have been:

“Our Heavenly Father, forgive us, for we are wise in our own sight, yet far removed from the true wisdom found in Your ways. Though we sought to help, we created hindrances. Though we sought to give, we were actually stealing. In this chamber, we now scramble and fight over that which is not our own. Today we humbly consecrate the $2 billion surplus in the State’s treasury and vow to place it where it actually belongs. In repentance, we give it back to the people.”

I feel relatively certain they won’t be asking me to pray before the N.C. Senate anytime soon.

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Rev. Mark H. Creech (calact@aol.com) is the executive director of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, Inc.

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2 Unrepentant About Selling Katrina Gift (WorldNetDaily, 061121)

A church that wanted to do something special for Hurricane Katrina victims gave a $75,000 house, free and clear, to a couple who said they were left homeless by the storm. But the couple turned around and sold the place without ever moving in, and went back to New Orleans.

“Take it up with God,” an unrepentant Joshua Thompson told a TV reporter after it was learned that he and the woman he identified as his wife had flipped the home for $88,000.

Church members said they feel their generosity was abused by scam artists. They are no longer even sure that the couple were left homeless by Katrina or that they were a couple at all.

“They came in humble like they really needed a new start, and our hearts went out to them,” said Jean Phillips, a real estate agent and member of the Temple of Deliverance Church of God in Christ. “They actually begged for the home.”

The church was also shocked by an ungrateful interview the couple gave with WHBQ-TV in Memphis.

“I really don’t like this area,” said Delores Thompson. “I really didn’t, and I didn’t know anybody, so that’s why I didn’t move in and I sold it.”

Thompson, reached at a New Orleans phone number by The Associated Press on Tuesday, thanked the church for its generosity but said she saw nothing wrong in selling the three-bedroom, two-bath house.

“Do I have any legal problems? What do you mean? The house was given to me,” she said. “I have the paperwork and everything.”

She refused further comment and hung up.

The church had decided that it would do something special for one Katrina-displaced family, in addition to its other efforts to help evacuees. The church set up a committee to find the right family and conducted several dozen interviews.

Delores Thompson, who did most of the talking for her family, told the committee that she had lost her job as a nurse and that her husband had lost an import-export business in New Orleans, committee member Joy Covington said.

The committee also heard how the family had lost its home and most of its possessions and how the children, a 14-year-old girl and 16-year- old boy, were eager to get back in school. The family said it wanted to resettle in Memphis.

After the church settled on Thompson, real estate agent Phillips helped her pick out the house she wanted, and it was bought in Thompson’s name. She took possession in February and sold it in September. Property transfer records for the resale list her as unmarried; the papers from the original sale list her as married.

“I feel like it was a sham or a ripoff,” Covington said.

The church hasn’t discussed legal action, but the members are upset because the house could have gone to a more needy family, Covington said.

Thompson claimed she and her family were living in an apartment supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but did not invite Phillips over during the house search.

“She didn’t want me coming over there,” Phillips said. “She’d say, ‘I’ll meet you.’”

Covington’s husband, Edward, said the family had been listed by FEMA as displaced. But he said the church took Thompson’s word for it that their house was destroyed.

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The Right Cares: Charitable numbers. (National Review Online, 061220)

An NRO Q&A

Conservatives aren’t mean? That’s what the numbers reveal, according to Arthur C. Brookes, a professor of public administration at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He recently took questions from NRO Editor Kathryn Lopez about his new book, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: So, conservatives really are compassionate?

Arthur Brooks: Yes, especially when it comes to private charitable giving. This, for much of America, is the “surprising truth” in my book’s title. For a lot of folks, this contradicts an entrenched stereotype that conservatives are stingy and venal because they tend to be against a lot of government income redistribution. According to one ham-handed (but amazingly popular) campaign sign in upstate New York before the 2004 presidential election, “Bush Must Go! Human Need, Not Corporate Greed.” When we look at actual private charity, however, we see conservatives do just fine. For example, conservative-headed families in 2000 gave about 30% more money per year than liberal-headed families on average, while (in these data, at least), earning 6% less income.

This is not to commit the opposite sin and say that liberals are all selfish (we often find that liberals give more than moderates, for example). It’s just that they are conspicuously not more privately generous than conservatives, in spite of the rhetoric.

Lopez: And conservatives are more generous than liberals — is it really that simple?

Brooks: No, it’s really not a question of politics per se — it goes much deeper, to the values that lie beneath political views. My book explores four areas of our culture that lead people to give, or not: religious faith, attitudes about the government’s role in our lives, the source of one’s income, and family. These are the big drivers of giving in America today, and the biggest is religion. Religious folks give far more than secularists in every way I’ve been able to measure. For example, people who attend a house of worship every week are 25%age points more likely to give to charity each year than people who never go to church, and give away about four times as much money. And this is not just a question of religious people giving to their churches, as meritorious as that might be: They also give and volunteer significantly more to explicitly nonreligious causes and charities.

Obviously, religion also correlates pretty strongly with politics, which is one reason why conservatives appear to give so much.

Lopez: Are there any surprising caveats?

Brooks: Yes. Most surprising is that the least privately charitable group out there tends to be secular conservatives, who give and volunteer even less than secular liberals, and far less than religious conservatives. For example, secular conservatives are only about half as likely as religious conservatives to volunteer. The reason secularists don’t drag down the conservative charity numbers overall is that there are three times as many religious conservatives as there are secular conservatives.

Lopez: Surely that religious people are generous isn’t that surprising, right? The collection basket is just a normal part of their lives, right?

Brooks: It’s probably not surprising to NRO readers, but it is surprising to a lot of folks out there, who see religion as superstition leading people to be less accepting of others, and religious contributions as little more than glorified country club dues. Many people I know find it almost unbelievable that religious people are 21%age points more likely than secularists to volunteer for totally nonreligious causes; or that they are about twice as likely to donate blood.

Lopez: Why does all of this matter?

Brooks: One of the most exciting areas of social science research involves the benefits of charitable behavior to givers, their communities, and our nation. There is a growing body of evidence that giving stimulates personal prosperity, strong communities, good citizenship, and a healthier nation. In other words, charity is not just about cash for services (which theoretically, the government could provide with tax revenues). Rather, it enhances quality of life for givers and those around them.

Lopez: How will being charitable make me happy, healthy and rich?

Brooks: Charitable giving and volunteering are tremendously pleasurable. They also empower givers, making them feel less like victims, and give people a lot of meaning in their lives. I have talked to clinical psychologists who actually prescribe volunteer work to their patients, with amazing results. Studies also show that givers are admired and elevated to positions of influence and authority. It is hardly surprising, given all the evidence, that givers enjoy (on average) higher happiness and prosperity than non-givers do. In fact, my research leads me to the belief that the single best self-help strategy is to serve others.

Lopez: What does your data mean for the term “bleeding heart”?

Brooks: According to the popular lexicon, “bleeding hearts” are those who most want to raise taxes and redistribute income from the rich to the poor. Yet the data show that these folks are actually less likely to give away their own money than are those whose hearts apparently don’t bleed quite so much. For example, people who disagree that “the government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality,” privately give away, on average, four times more money than people who agree.

And speaking of bleeding, one survey in 2002 asked people about their views on government welfare and how often they gave blood. It showed that, if everyone gave blood like “hard-hearted” opponents of government welfare spending, the nation’s blood supply would rise by about 30%. I won’t say which side is right about welfare spending (that’s a different question), but I will note that some may find irony in the link with private giving.

Lopez: Have you gotten grief in academia for your book?

Brooks: Not too much — at least not yet. Of course, there will be disagreement, and other scholars will probably look into my results, asking different questions and using new data. But that’s how research is supposed to take knowledge forward. In fact, one measure of the success of this book will be how it stimulates new work and discussion on charity, whether that work agrees with my findings or not.

I’ve had more pushback from some in the media, who occasionally suggest that the book is just part of a political agenda (for the record, I am a registered Independent). This often involves noting my affiliation with the American Enterprise Institute or some appearances on conservative talk radio. Nobody ever seems to point out that I am a professor at Syracuse University — hardly a hotbed of right-wingers — or that I’ve done public radio as well as Rush Limbaugh.

Lopez: Does your research pretty much guarantee that I will be getting more Christmas gifts than Arianna Huffington?

Brooks: Well, that depends on your friends! And even more, it depends on how much you give. I suspect Santa will be pretty good to Arianna Huffington this year, though.

Lopez: You’ve written too about the “fertility gap”? Are all the stingy liberal atheists going to die out?

Brooks: You mean, like Europe?

Lopez: If you could drill one fact from your research into congressional appropriators, what would it be?

Brooks: Government actions have unintended consequences for private charity. When the government subsidizes activities or regulates private behavior, it can and often does dramatically reduce charitable giving. And this has real consequences for individuals and communities. This is not an anti-government philosophy; it is an appeal to policymakers to remember that charity is an exceptional American value, and to respect it as such.

Lopez: What’s the single weirdest fact in your book?

Brooks: There are lots of strange facts about American charity. Here’s one that involves the differences between giving by the rich and poor: Americans with high incomes are more likely than poor folks to give directions to strangers on the street. In contrast, the poor are more likely to give a homeless person food or money. The practical implication of this is that, if you find yourself in a strange city and need directions, ask a rich person. If you need a sandwich, ask a poor person.

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Slavery campaign closes gaps among U.S. evangelicals (WorldNetDaily, 070402)

DALLAS (Reuters) - U.S. evangelical Christians are divided on global warming, the minimum wage and other issues, but they are united behind a new campaign to end modern slavery around the world.

Following a trail blazed two centuries ago, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and Focus on the Family, two U.S. evangelical groups whose leaders have disagreed over other issues, are both supporting a campaign against bonded labor, human trafficking and military recruitment of children.

The campaign, “The Amazing Change,” was set up by the makers of “Amazing Grace,” a movie about the efforts of William Wilberforce, himself an evangelical, to end British participation in the slave trade 200 years ago.

“We are carrying forward the banner of evangelical concern for human rights,” said Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Activists say it is crucial to highlight an issue that many people are unaware of.

“Most people you ask don’t know that there are slaves today,” said Pamela Livingston, vice president of the Washington-based International Justice Mission, a Christian-based organization that campaigns to free slaves overseas with a network of lawyers and social workers.

Its work has led to the freeing of 78 slaves from a south Asian brick kiln where they were forced to labor to work off unpayable debts. From 2004 to 2006, the efforts of its staff in Thailand led to the rescue of 129 trafficking victims in Malaysia and Thailand. During the same period in Cambodia, 183 victims of trafficking were released.

HISTORY

Evangelicals, a term that refers mostly to Protestants who place emphasis on personal conversion, draw on a tradition of Christian opposition to slavery in the U.S. South — although many white evangelicals were subsequent opponents of the 1960s civil rights movement to grant equality to blacks.

Recently, the U.S. evangelical movement has disagreed over issues such as whether to campaign to reduce reliance on fossil fuels to reduce global warming.

Cizik said the National Association of Evangelicals’ fights against slavery and climate change both stemmed from Christian compassion for the poor, who are seen as suffering most from increased droughts and food shortages.

By contrast, Focus on the Family, which has urged people to watch “Amazing Grace” and support the related campaign, has been wary of climate change action, seeing it as a distraction from efforts to end abortion and block gay rights.

But abolishing slavery, be it children kidnapped for warfare in Africa or women traded for sex, unites U.S. Christians on the left and the right.

Highlighting the diversity, Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a Christian conservative, and prominent liberal preacher Jim Wallis have both raised the banner for “The Amazing Change” campaign.

For those on the right like Brownback — a convert to Catholicism with strong ties to evangelical Protestants — it fits his “compassionate conservatism.”

“William Wilberforce and his monumental achievement ... is the story of heroic leadership and courageous action on behalf of the weak and marginalized,” Brownback, a candidate for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, recently wrote.

CONSERVATIVE

Some commentators note that Wilberforce’s conservatism may be attractive to some but many of his views look outdated.

“I think people like Brownback embrace Wilberforce because he was deeply religious and deeply conservative ... Do they know what they’re embracing?,” asked Adam Hochschild, author of “Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery.”

“Wilberforce was a man who was opposed to extending the franchise beyond the five percent or so of the British population who could then vote, who personally was uncomfortable around black people ... and who felt women had absolutely no role in politics,” he told Reuters.

Some critics of politically active conservative Christians in the United States — often dubbed the Religious Right — would say this profile fits their movement, which is suspicious of feminism and often lauds wealth and power.

Whatever their stripe, modern anti-slavery campaigners would do well to emulate some of the tactics of their predecessors — including an 18th century boycott of slave-grown sugar products in Britain, experts say.

For example, they could begin with the startling fact that it is legal to deposit money earned from the sweat of slaves or the trade of slaves into U.S. bank accounts — provided the cash was garnered overseas.

The problem, according to Raymond Baker, a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy, is America’s two-pronged approach to money laundering.

“There is one list for money derived from domestic crimes which is long. The one for foreign crimes is very short,” said Baker, author of ‘Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System.’

Not included in the list of money knowingly derived from overseas illicit activities are crimes such as slavery, environmental crimes and trafficking in women.

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Survey: Are Churches Doing Enough to Help the Poor? (Christian Post, 080423)

Most Americans believe their church is doing enough to help the poor but recorded increases in the national poverty level indicate that Christians are disconnected with the reality of people in need.

A national survey, released Monday, showed 67% of Americans – over half of whom attend church at least once a month – agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “My church already does enough to help the poor in my community.” Less than half (42%) said their church spends more money on itself than on the community.

But Steve Haas, vice president for church relations at World Vision, believes Christians are just “scratching the surface” when it comes to serving their communities.

Pointing to the latest U.S. Census Bureau statistics that show the national poverty level increased from 11.7% in 2001 to 13.3% in 2005, Haas highlighted the discrepancy between what Christians believe and what’s really happening.

The reason for the disconnect, he says, is ignorance and a level of fear.

“The definition of outreach typically of the church is proclamation. [But] outreach is my reaching out in some form of compassion that could be listening or an act of service,” Haas told The Christian Post. “Actions speak much louder than words.”

Giving churches an impetus to take church outside the buildings, World Vision partnered with two other Christian organizations – Outreach and Zondervan – to launch Faith in Action two years ago. The campaign, which takes place on April 27 this year, invites churches to take a “time out” by closing their doors on Sunday and mobilizing on service projects within their communities.

Faith in Action encourages Christians on a Sunday morning “to break the routine which is heavily set on this ‘being the church,” said Haas. “That is a building in which we meet. The church is the people who are sitting in those pews. We’re releasing them to go ‘be the church.’”

The majority of survey respondents (60%) said they would support their church if it occasionally canceled traditional services to donate that time to help the poor. Sixty% also said they would be more involved in helping the poor if they could do so with members of their church.

This year, over 300 churches have registered to close their church doors and serve their community Sunday morning. But not all churches have welcomed the idea.

“Where’s the Gospel? When are you going to share the Good News of Jesus?” some have asked.

Haas finds such critical questions laughable, noting that when hundreds of churchgoers descend onto a community to clean up or feed the poor for hours, someone is bound to ask where they came from and why they’re there.

“At that point, the church can share ‘I’ve been loved by an eternal lover who cared enough for me. My greatest response is to meet someone else in their time of need.’” said Haas. “The door’s wide open,” Haas said, to share the Gospel.

Responding to critics, Haas commented, “The importance isn’t shuttering the doors on Sunday. If people get wrapped up in that, they missed the reason for the exercise. It’s being church to their community. The meaning of that isn’t lost on Sunday.”

While doors close Sunday morning, congregants come together that night after a day of helping their community for a celebration service.

Haas says evangelism is both the proclamation of the Gospel and responding to human need. Neither can be neglected for the other.

Without “faith in action,” faith stagnates, Haas noted. And with more churches hopping on board to help the needy, Haas believes the Gospel is being proclaimed in bigger ways.

“What we’re excited about is the church is coming alive because they realized the robust expanding nature of the Good News of Christ.”

The survey was conducted on behalf of Faith in Action on Feb. 14-18 among 2,853 adults ages 18 and older, of whom, 1,703 ever attend religious services at a church.

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Christian Ministry Criticized for Planned Parenthood Partnership (Christian Post, 080527)

The nation’s largest Christian ministry dedicated to housing the poor has drawn criticism from pro-life groups recently over its joint partnership with the nation’s largest provider of surgical abortions.

In an agreement with Planned Parenthood, Habitat for Humanity is allowing the group to bypass zoning regulations in Sarasota, Fl a., that restrict the opening of abortion facilities “without the presence of a multifamily liner building.”

According to a statement released earlier this month by the Sarasota City Commission, Habitat for Humanity will reportedly facilitate the opening of Planned Parenthood in the area through a $10 real estate purchase from the group.

“We are excited to have Habitat be a part of the Planned Parenthood team,” a Planned Parenthood representative reportedly said after the agreement.

Jim Sedlak, vice-president of the American Life League, in response, blasted the move by Habitat for Humanity.

“Habitat for Humanity, which claims to be a Christian ministry, says that this was only a real estate transaction. However, Planned Parenthood could not open its abortion facility without Habitat’s help,” he explained in a statement.

Sedlack added that it was shameful for an organization like Habitat for Humanity to partner with a group that so obviously contradicted its goals of providing a “simple, decent, affordable place to live in dignity and safety” for everyone.

“I don’t see how building a residence next to an organization that kills babies, pushes pornography and covers up for rapists gives a family dignity or safety. We are calling on everyone to contact Habitat for Humanity and demand they break this agreement,” he said.

Found in 1976 as a Christian non-profit and non-governmental organization by Millard and Linda Fuller in Americus, Ga., Habitat for Humanity has built over 200,000 homes in its cause to provide housing for the needy.

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Rick Warren Launches Coalition to Combat Five ‘Global Giants’ (Christian Post, 080526)

LAKE FOREST, Calif. - Megachurch pastor Rick Warren recently launched a global coalition of pastors, business leaders and other institutions that aims to tackle what he deems as the most pervasive problems in the world today.

Warren went public with the initiative at the end of the three-day Purpose Driven Network Summit last week hosted by his home church, Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.

The P.E.A.C.E. Coalition will be an international alliance of churches, businesses, ministries, universities, and other institutions who will work together to address five “Global Giants” that affect billions of people worldwide: spiritual emptiness, lack of servant leadership, extreme poverty, pandemic diseases, and illiteracy.

The acronym for the plan is based on the five actions Jesus modeled: Promote reconciliation; Equip servant leaders; Assist the poor; Care for the sick; and Educate the next generation.

“I am confident about the P.E.A.C.E. Plan because it’s not my plan. It’s not a Westerner plan. It’s not a megachurch plan. It’s Jesus’ plan,” he told 1,700 pastors and Christian leaders during the May 20-22 conference.

Warren, who authored the best-selling Purpose Driven Life, called the plan “the most complicated thing” he’s ever done.

“It’s 100 times more complicated than the Purpose Driven Network,” he said. “What we are trying to accomplish will not be done in 10 or 20 years.”

Although the initiative is known as a “plan,” Warren refers to it as a “network of networks” that links public, private and church sectors.

In the network, the local church takes center stage in directing participating groups to produce a collaborative response to the problems. It goes beyond the parachurch ministry model where people “pay, pray, and stay out of the way,” according to Warren.

Dave Ferguson, pastor of Community Christian Church in West Chicago , Ill., said the effort allows local churches to “work directly with each other through a decentralized network instead of being separated by hierarchical silos.”

“I think a lot of pastors that I’ve talked to really felt that in the last few years their church got hijacked by politics,” Warren explained during a press conference last Thursday. “The answer we believe is not in politics …. The answer is in the church.”

The network will include professionals from cross-disciplinary fields but will be led by “amateurs” or those who do the work out of love.

The mission statement of the P.E.A.C.E. plan is: “Ordinary people empowered by God’s Spirit, doing what Jesus did, together, wherever they are.”

Saddleback Church will also provide free software – including a social networking system and global missions database – to facilitate communication between P.E.A.C.E. Coalition members.

The launch of the Coalition will coincide with the beta phase of the plan, known as P.E.A.C.E. 2.0. For the past four years, more than 7,700 Saddleback Church members have traveled in over 1,000 teams to 68 countries to test the initial phase of the P.E.A.C.E. Plan. Their reports and data have been compiled to map out the second phase.

At the conference last week, Warren said he hopes around 500 churches will participate in the launch and eventually train others who enlist later on.

Ultimately, said Warren, the goal is to mobilize 1 billion Christians worldwide to participate.

“Most churches only think about their own church and their own community,” he told attendants, who represented 39 countries and 50 states. “But our mission is the global glory of God.”

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Haiti Drops Kidnapping Charges Against 9 U.S. Christians (Christian Post, 100419)

Haiti has dropped all charges against nine of ten American Christians who were arrested in January.

Idaho Sen. Jim Risch was informed of the dropped charges Thursday afternoon by the State Department, according to Kyle Hines, a spokesman for Risch.

“The senator is pleased to hear that the charges have been dropped and is looking forward to the situation being resolved,” Hines told CNN.

Pastor Clint Henry of Meridian’s Central Valley Baptist Church welcomed the news.

“We knew that we were innocent so this is what we were expecting to happen. We hoped it would happen much quicker but praise God that has come,” he said, according to Idaho’s News Channel 7.

Though celebratory, Henry and the nine volunteers are in prayer for Laura Silsby, the leader of the team who remains jailed in Haiti.

The group – most of whom are from two Baptist churches in Idaho – attempted to take 33 Haitian children to an orphanage they were setting up in the Dominican Republic early this year. They were arrested and charged with child kidnapping and criminal association.

The volunteers say they simply wanted to help the Haitian children who lost their parents after the massive earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince in January. Complications, however, arose when the team was found without the proper paperwork and when it was discovered that many of the children they tried to transport had at least one living parent.

Most of the volunteers were released in February after being detained in Haiti for weeks. The ninth team member, Charisa Coulter, arrived home in Idaho last month. They were allowed to return to their homes in the U.S. on the condition that they promise to return if needed as investigators continued to examine the case.

Last month, Haitian Judge Saint-Vil brought additional charges of “organizing irregular travel” against the team after discovering an earlier attempt to take the children out of the country. The team attempted to take 40 children to the Dominican Republic on Jan. 26. The charge carries a penalty of three to six years of imprisonment.

With Silsby still in jail, the Haitian judge said earlier that he has until early May to decide whether to release Silsby or order a trial.

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