60 Leaders Meet to Join Forces to Help the Poor

PHILADELPHIA — In what some called a historic step, nearly 60 top U.S. religious leaders, grass-roots activists and policy advocates gathered here last week to seek common ground in mounting a renewed national fight against poverty.

While no specific agreements or policy proposals were announced, participants said the most significant part of the meeting was that it happened at all.

“Today, we made a critical moral shift from the old, tired debate over welfare reform to the deeper and more biblical agenda of overcoming poverty in this nation,” said the Rev. Jim Wallis, an organizer of Call to Renewal, the network of evangelical and mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic social activist groups that organized the meeting.

“We created a new table here, and we will continue to build that table,” Wallis said.

Representatives from groups as diverse as the National Council of Churches and the National Assn. of Evangelicals, Pax Christi and Progressive National Baptist Convention, the Interfaith Alliance and Promise Keepers, spent the eve of the Presidents’ Summit on America’s Future in closed-door sessions breaking down stereotypes and identifying areas of potential agreement and disagreement, according to participants.

Among the major agreements: that as welcome as the summit on volunteering was, volunteerism cannot be a substitute for government action to fight poverty and racism.

“A merely private charitable approach would be an affront to prophetic biblical religion which also calls kings, rulers, judges, and employers to be accountable to the demands of justice,” Wallis said at close of the religious leaders’ meeting.

The Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, general secretary of the Reformed Church in America, said the meeting “was probably the most religiously diverse gathering of Christian leaders--certainly in this decade. And it was probably among the most significant.”

Granberg-Michaelson said he believed those present agreed that “our common ground is in our work with the poor and their fate. We found that we have more common ground [on that] than previously believed.”

According to participants, the group of nearly 60 leaders from across the political spectrum discussed a number of policy issues of immediate concern, including efforts to balance the federal budget, the impending cutoff of welfare benefits for legal immigrants and campaign finance reform.

Also brought to the table were what Granberg-Michaelson called “a whole variety of new innovative approaches” for long-term ways to involve religious groups more deeply in the fight on poverty. They included such controversial issues as the use of school vouchers and changes in the law that would make it easier for religious groups to receive federal money for delivering social services to the poor.

“We think, even when there was disagreement, that these are ideas that need to be explored with some urgency,” said Ron Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action.

At the same time, no immediate agreements were reached that would bring previously antagonistic groups into startling new alliances.

The Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, however, said such alliances should no longer be automatically ruled out.

“There was an awful lot of trying to find our way with one another,” Brown said, adding that groups’ stereotypes of one another “often get in the way” of working together.

But she also said that in some potentially difficult areas--especially issues around church-state relationships--”we only just began that discussion. Clearly, there are going to be some disagreements.”

Another area still without consensus, according to participants, was the “appropriate” role of government at all levels in anti-poverty efforts.

Lt. Col. Paul Bollwahn of the Salvation Army, however, said the religious groups came together “with a confessional attitude” and despite differences, “it is the crisis [of poverty and violence] that called us together.”

The Rev. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, the Christian anti-hunger lobbying organization, said he, too, was “struck by consensus that a hurricane is coming” for the poor as a result of welfare reform.

The Rev. Yvonne Delk, executive director of the Community Renewal Society of Chicago, said that by day’s end, the groups “began to question the relevancy of the way we define one another.

“We came together across these lines and found that there are some things we can say together,” she said.