In October 1994, Mississippi Republican Governor Kirk Fordice unveiled a bold "Faith and Families" initiative to transfer certain welfare responsibilities in his state from government to churches and civic institutions. The program aims to link each of Mississippi’s 5,000 churches with welfare families. The adopting churches are to provide emotional support, moral guidance, "life skills" training, transportation, and help finding employment, so that the recipient can exit public assistance.
This unique effort has received generous coverage from the media, with CBS, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other outlets reporting variously that 165 churches were "actively involved" within the first year; that 175 churches had adopted 75 families; that 152 churches are mentoring 89 families. But these reports are inaccurate.
I recently spent a week in Mississippi investigating "Faith and Families." During that time I managed, to my own great surprise, to investigate fully half of the program’s active churches. The reason: A year and a half into this experiment, only 13 institutions are involved in face-to-face relationships with "adopted" families.
Yet, despite this tiny response that is so much at odds with the political promises and media reports, I did not come back from Mississippi discouraged. Quite the contrary. And the pages that follow explain why.
Officials at Mississippi’s state welfare agency, the Department of Human Services (DHS), pride themselves on the simplicity of the Faith and Families concept. But even simple ideas can be laborious to implement. Weak administration is the most immediately recognizable, and reparable, of the program’s difficulties. From the outset, only two part-time workers have consistently staffed the program. Ronald Moore, an African-American pastor who oversees a pair of Baptist churches, is the field coordinator for Faith and Families. Margaret Luckett, a harried but pleasant DHS official, earmarks half of her time to the program. Additional coordinators are now on their way.
A second obstruction to progress by Faith and Families is bureaucratic suspicion. "The thing that scares people the most within the bureaucracy is: ‘What if it works? Then I’ll be out of a job!’" reports DHS official Larry Temple. "Faith and Families is going in a totally opposite direction than what this agency has been all about. We’ve been about getting out the [welfare] check—how fast, how many. And Faith and Families asks, ‘Why are we sending out checks? Let’s fix it so we don’t have to send them out any more.’" Government social workers, the principal front-line contacts with AFDC recipients, aren’t actively sabotaging the initiative, but some are unsupportive and perfunctorily pass along to clients (who must volunteer for the program) only the barest information about it.
The third and most serious obstacle to Faith and Families is suspicion on the part of prospective beneficiaries. Some AFDC recipients, used to the checks that come without demands, fear that joining the program means the church will "have control over my life." Luckett and other program backers say they hope to combat this with more public information.
Faith and Families has had more success in recruiting churches than in enrolling clients, but here too the numbers have been disappointing. As of early March, only 207 churches—fewer than 5 percent of the state’s total—had signed on. Reverend Moore cites three main hurdles to increasing church involvement. First, since the initiative was launched during an election year, some churches initially thought it was a political stunt that would fizzle out. It wasn’t and it hasn’t. Even churches that oppose Fordice’s Republicanism are now grasping this. Second, DHS’s introduction of the program left the erroneous impression that participating churches would assume financial responsibility for adopted families. In fact, enrolled clients continue to receive AFDC, Food Stamps, housing benefits, and Medicaid. Third, "some in the church community felt that they weren’t brought into the process on the ground floor," according to Moore. He agrees, and says he’s counseled interested policy-makers outside the state to avoid Mississippi’s mistake in this area. But he’s confident that a dialogue can fix this problem. State officials are receptive to suggestions; they emphasize that Faith and Families is a novel program, and that welfare administrators are learning as they go.
Along Interstate 55 my blue rented Chevy glides past billboards advertising 3-for-$12 T-shirts. An exit and 15 miles of flatland later I keep my appointment with Reverend Juanita Booker of the Bennett Chapel Full Gospel United Methodist Church, located in the delta’s impoverished Carroll County. Booker first met her Faith and Families’ adoptee, Denise Thomas, in the spring of 1995. Thomas, a 27-year-old mother of three, was a "rowdy street lady," says Booker. "She was on a 12-year probation for attempted murder. She’d been shot, abused, raped, and left for dead." Shaking her head, Booker continues: "She’d been a drug user and a drinker. She’d come from a dysfunctional family, and she wasn’t much of a mother. When I saw her through my physical eyes, she was a pitiful person. But through my spiritual eyes, I saw one of God’s children who needed some guidance."
Thomas had come to Bennett Chapel for free food and was stunned to find a woman minister there. Something about Booker attracted her, and she returned the following Sunday to worship with the tiny congregation. Within a few weeks, Thomas was regularly attending church; it made her "feel happy" for the first time in her life. Booker began contacting Thomas almost daily.
Even before Booker and Thomas were matched through Faith and Families, Thomas adopted the middle-aged preacher as her mother. When Thomas’s case manager told her about Faith and Families several months ago, "officially" matching Thomas and Booker was an obvious step. Thomas started working part time at Bennett Chapel. But this, while important, was the least significant of the changes produced by her relationship with Booker.
Just as the designers of Faith and Families hoped, the friendship has transformed Thomas’s character. This "street lady" who had always dressed in tight shorts and skimpy T-shirts walked confidently into Booker’s home for our interview in a tailored blue and green dress, hair carefully styled, burgundy lipstick enhancing the ready smile she flashed at Booker throughout our conversation.
"My life wasn’t going too far," Thomas admitted to me. "Before I met Pastor Booker, I was just a lady out there that didn’t care about nothing. I used to have a nasty attitude. Pastor Booker taught me how to treat people nice. She taught me how to carry myself—because I didn’t even know how to dress! And she taught me that fornication was a big sin. So I went and got married" (to the boyfriend she’d been living with).
"I act different now," Thomas continues. "People see me and they say, ‘Denise, is that you?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, this is the new me." Thomas’s transformation has affected her children, too. She used to dump them off with anyone she could find and spend the weekend "at the jughouse." Now she spends more time with her two sons and her daughter, brings them to church, visits their schools, and pays attention to their grades.
"What I really needed in life was a role model," Thomas explains. "And I didn’t have one until I met Pastor Booker. Now I got a momma. And when I get out of place, she puts me back in my place."
Thomas’s willingness to accept Booker’s moral authority—and the beneficial transformation she’s experienced by practicing a new way of life—echo sentiments I heard from another Faith and Families participant. Jennifer Lockett was "adopted" six months ago by Covenant Presbyterian Church in Greenville, a small city of 47,000. Like Reverend Booker, Covenant’s pastor Jim Holland has invested enormous personal time in the relationship. Lockett and the church’s two other adoptees attend weekly luncheon meetings at Covenant, where they discuss everything from résumé preparation to child-rearing.
"Reverend Holland has given us the get-up-and-go," Lockett declares enthusiastically. "We have better attitudes." Holland won credibility in the ladies’ eyes by transporting them to job interviews, being available to talk by phone at all hours, and helping two of the women enroll in a certified nurse’s assistant program.
"I want my children to see mom doing right," Lockett stresses. "I don’t want them to come back and say, ‘Momma, you fussin’ at me about this, but everything I’m doing, I’m doing because you’re doing it.’ I want them to be able to say ‘My momma raised me well.’"
Reverend Holland volunteered for the program because "philosophically and theologically" he agreed with Fordice that the welfare system failed to address the spiritual needs of people. Faith and Families, on the other hand, deals not just with symptoms but with causes. "I don’t care how competent you are or how much education you have," Holland says. "If you can’t delay gratification, persevere, be punctual and honest, then all your skills mean nothing."
Moral guidance was central in both Booker and Holland’s friendships with their adopted families. Nevertheless, the two ministers also addressed employment concerns. They’ve discovered that locating appropriate jobs can be tough. So, in isolated and job-scarce Carroll County, Booker dreams of establishing a for-profit evening and weekend childcare center staffed by Faith and Families’ adoptees.
Participating churches in urban Jackson have had an easier time placing their adoptees into jobs. Stronger Hope Baptist Church has helped five of its adoptees secure full-time employment. With Stronger Hope’s help, Ronda Aldridge went from a waitressing job paying $2.15 an hour to a salaried social work position earning $23,000. Aldridge, who had been pursuing her college degree before volunteering to participate in Faith and Families, says "I’d already done the hard part; I just needed a little push."
Of course, adoptees with less education have to accept lower-paying jobs. But just getting welfare recipients into the workforce at all is a big step toward financial independence. Stronger Hope helped 21-year-old Krystal Kelly get a $4.25/hour job at a local supermarket. Kelly is convinced that the church really wants to help her be successful. By contrast, she says, "nine times out of ten government social workers acted like they didn’t want to be bothered."
While the personal attention that churches provide welfare recipients is the foundation of Faith and Families, not all congregations know how to conduct charitable outreach that builds character through relationships. Many churches just duplicate the government’s approach to welfare by providing food, clothing, and cash to needy people, with little personal interaction or follow-up. Thanks to their Faith and Families experience, though, some churches that previously followed the conventional "give ’em stuff" approach to mercy ministry are shifting to a new, far more effective strategy built on personal involvement.
The experience of Crossgates Baptist Church in suburban Brandon is an example of how Faith and Families is changing not only welfare recipients, but also the church folks who want to help them. Crossgates joined the program early on, adopting two clients: Frances White, an African-American mother of three, and Joyce Smith, a white mother of five. According to former associate pastor Mike Harland, the 2,000-member, white, middle-class congregation at Crossgates had already begun to shift from impersonal, government-style giving to "relational ministries" even before signing on to the governor’s program. But the church’s positive experience with Frances White confirmed they were headed in the right direction.
Associate pastor Harland, a laywoman named Faye Lucius, and a deacon named Ken Box teamed up to support White. She had been in a car accident that hospitalized her and cost her her vehicle and her job. Though enrolled in college, White had no way to get to class after the accident, not enough money to cover her rent and utility bills, no phone, and no working refrigerator. She was willing to work, but emotionally drained and financially straitened. "All the things I’d been trying to do were falling apart in front of me," White recalls with tears in her eyes. Within a few days of "adopting" her, Crossgates found her a working refrigerator, paid some of her bills, got her phone back on, and repaired her car.
While this material assistance was extremely helpful, the emotional support Crossgates’s volunteers provided was what really gave White hope. "In the welfare system, you are more or less a number," she says. "When you call in, it’s ‘What’s your case number?’ When Ken or Mike or Faye call me, they call me by my name. I get a hug or a handshake."
White returned to school and, through a Crossgates contact, secured a full-time position in the medical records department of a local hospital. Church members rejoice in White’s success—and in the ways the relationship has affected them. "Too often we are guilty of wanting to give money or clothes because that’s the easy thing," Lucius comments. "When you really get involved with someone personally, that expands your thinking." Lucius is thankful that her two children have had the opportunity to befriend White’s. Lucius’s parents had believed in Mississippi’s "separate but equal" doctrine, and Lucius argues that her generation—and her children’s—must tear down the dividing wall of race. Moreover, Lucius believes that Crossgates’s experience with Faith and Families has helped church leaders recognize they can make a bigger difference in people’s lives by walking alongside them than by just throwing money at them.
Because of its growing appreciation of relational ministry, Crossgates grieves over its failure to help Joyce Smith. Smith, unlike White, kept church members at a distance. She accepted the monthly financial support the church provided to her destitute family but never allowed Arnold Jackson and Dan Taylor, the men who’d volunteered to help her, to become her friends. The two men were dismayed when they learned Smith had dropped out of the GED program she’d been attending. Taylor tried to encourage her to stick with the program, but didn’t explicitly make the church’s continuing aid contingent on her doing so. Now he thinks perhaps he should have. Jackson is frustrated that Faith and Families staff provided so little guidance; for a full year DHS never checked with the church on how things were going with Smith.
In the Smith case, church members wanted to build a relationship but were inexperienced. Other Faith and Families congregations are similarly "feeling their way through." Cade Chapel Baptist Church, for instance, a large African-American congregation in inner-city Jackson, is currently working with three Faith and Families clients. One, Cynthia Hollins, lives a short drive from the church. She and her three kids share a cramped, subsidized garden apartment. I spoke with Hollins just after interviewing Hank Anderson, Cade Chapel’s principal Faith and Families volunteer, and was struck by the "disconnect" between the two.
In this instance, it’s Hollins who wants more personal contact and feels that the church is letting her down. "How can I put this," says Hollins, struggling for words. "Like, I’m ‘adopted,’ right? Me and my family. But...what are they doing? I haven’t seen them." Hollins is quick to express appreciation for the church’s offer to help her find employment. She calls the church people "sweet" and says it "feels good" that they’re trying to help her. But she also complains that they haven’t lined up any job interviews yet. And, she says, "They adopted me and my children. But they haven’t even met my children." She wants the church to provide her sons a "big brother" and offer them tutoring. But she admits that she hasn’t actually asked for this: "I just sit back and wait for them to call me."
Earlier, Hank Anderson described to me the plethora of services Cade Chapel is willing and able to share with its adoptees if they or their children need them: counseling, transportation, tutoring, job-training classes. He reports that he’s typically in contact with the adoptees twice a month, that he’s been actively seeking job interviews for them, and that, as far as he knows, none of them are having any problems with their kids.
"We want to be there for them," Anderson emphasizes. "Whatever they need, we’ll try to do it." But he is concerned about taking too much initiative and being "overbearing." Anderson’s not worried that the families will be reluctant to seek assistance: "These families will ask for anything." Indeed, he thinks Faith and Families staff could do a better job educating clients on what they should and should not expect from their "adopting" churches.
Clearly, this "disconnect" results primarily from a lack of communication between Cade Chapel, Faith and Families, and Hollins, a situation that could be rectified with a few phone calls. It is also rooted in the novelty of the "adoptee" relationship. When Cade’s pastor first met with Faith and Families’ Reverend Moore, he noted that his church was already working with poor families. "But what he didn’t realize," Moore argues, "was that he was supporting the current welfare system: he was simply giving donations, turning on lights and water, buying food and clothing. [The church] wasn’t finding out the total needs of the families and then helping them become responsible and accountable." That involves greater one-on-one-interaction and a willingness to risk being perceived as "overbearing." Faith and Families, says Moore, must teach would-be helpers to approach families "from the standpoint of, ‘What can I do for you to help you do for yourself?’"
Faith and Families is not only encouraging the poor to become self-sufficient and helping churches like Cade Chapel and Crossgates Baptist reform their methods of benevolence. It has also begun to reinvigorate civic connectedness. The friendship between an AFDC recipient and a church member—I’ll call them Tamia and Ellen—illustrates this.
Tamia was on welfare, living with an abusive boyfriend, and struggling through her GED course, when she volunteered for Faith and Families. An emotional wreck with no family support, she was adopted by a church and linked with Ellen, a retired school teacher. "Ellen talked with Tamia and helped her work through many of her emotional problems," explains DHS staffer Kim Turberville. "She was like a caring aunt." As the friendship grew, Tamia severed the abusive relationship, sailed through her high school equivalency program, and, with some help from Ellen, learned enough about various financial aid programs to enroll in community college.
Meanwhile, Ellen was introduced to the "other side" of Jackson. When one of Tamia’s aged neighbors needed eyeglasses, Ellen called Turberville to learn whether there was a community program that might help. There was. "So the church became interested in that program," recalls Turberville, her speech quickening with excitement, "and then church members started supporting it with their money and their volunteer time." What started out as a single friendship became a bridge between Ellen’s church and Tamia’s neighborhood. This is the key, Turberville argues, to changing the prevailing "it’s their problem, not my problem" attitude.
The same kind of bridge-building is happening between Christ United Methodist Church and North Midtown, another poor neighborhood in Jackson. Christ Church, a conservative, upper-middle-class, white congregation of 4,200 members, agreed to help build several Habitat for Humanity homes in Midtown, and urged their black janitor, Earl Owens, to apply for one of them. As a result, Owens recently moved his wife and three kids from their one-bedroom apartment to a new three-bedroom house. Excitement over this success raised Christ Church’s interest in urban ministry, and now the church has added a black minister to its previously all-white staff to spearhead an outreach effort in Midtown. Owens says the church has gained credibility with Midtown residents because congregants have "come into the neighborhood and gotten eyeball to eyeball with the people."
Long-time resident Dorothy Davis credits the church with reinvigorating the community’s dormant neighborhood association and reports that 50 kids and a dozen adults are involved in various programs put on by church volunteers in an apartment the church has rented in the neighborhood. The church’s Bible study and parenting classes have "given residents a place to come together," Davis and Owens say. And a new sense of hope, plus the Habitat for Humanity homeowners, are driving out the drug dealers. "For many years, nobody on these streets gave their kids bikes, because we couldn’t let them ride them here," Davis grins. "Guess what I bought my children for Christmas this year? Bikes!"
Sixteen centuries ago, the Church Father Gregory of Nyssa taught that "mercy is a voluntary sorrow that joins itself to the suffering of another." Ministry to the disadvantaged requires this personal engagement. The genius of Faith and Families is that it is built on recognition of this essential reality. Only by the tangible act of sharing another’s sufferings can moral authority and discipline be exercised and accepted as legitimate. Genuine mercy is not a vague "I feel your pain." Nor is it a willingness to join the sort of disembodied, universal "village" promoted by Hillary Clinton. These erroneous definitions barely move us past our current, sterile practice of discharging our civic duties by writing a check each April 15, with considerable grumbling.
What is needed to overcome the economic isolation and moral decay of today’s underclass, one Jackson pastor argues, is a return to the Biblical vision of Romans 15:1—"We then who are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves." This is what Ellen, Reverend Holland, and Pastor Booker have done.
Churches that embrace the relational ministry encouraged by Faith and Families deepen their own obedience to Scripture. They stimulate profound changes in the lives of needy people they help. And, over time, they also transform themselves and help reconnect long-separated communities in own hometowns. This is the sort of welfare reform that is desperately needed today within our religious institutions, in our state capitals, and, one hopes some day, from Washington.