Amazing grace: can churches save the inner city?

• Author: Worth, Robert
• Position: Effective urban ministries, Catholic schools, and the voucher issue

Bart Campolo is not your typical Christian evangelist. In his buzz cut and combat boots, he looks more like Vanilla Ice than one of those well-dressed people who knock on suburban doors and offer to tell you The Good News. When you ask him why he's dedicated his life to the struggling churches of north Philadelphia, he doesn't mention God at all. Instead, he tells you that one in four young African-American males in this country is under some form of correctional supervision--jail, probation, or parole. He also tells you what he has seen in recent years: a new baby boomlet of disaffected ghetto youth, raised in the era of crack cocaine and absent fathers, that is learning to play Mortal Kombat with real guns. Although he fiercely opposed the 1996 welfare cuts, Campolo will readily grant that government programs can't reach these kids. "What they really need is one adult who's willing to be a mentor--talk to them, show them the ropes," he says. That's where the church comes in. "Even if I didn't believe in God I would work in the inner-city church. It's the one hierarchical institution left in these communities."

Campolo, who has received a $1 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts to help Philadelphia churches develop youth programs, is part of an emerging movement to reach at-risk youth through inner-city congregations. The movement is rooted in battered, cash-strapped churches like north Philadelphia's Feltonville Presbyterian, where one of Campolo's fellow youthworkers drove me one Friday night last spring. As we walked up the orange-carpeted aisle, the dimly-lit wooden church throbbed with electric bass and drums. By the altar, under an electric-lit crucifix, a group of black and Hispanic children and teenagers clustered excitedly around a grand piano, while others stood in their pews talking and laughing. One of the girls, no more than 16, held a baby in her arms. The two supervisors, Tom and Gladys, clearly had their hands full. But after calling attention for a brief prayer, Tom managed to get the entire group to sing a song called "There is Hope".

In a world of broken promises,

Where the faithful are chosen and few,

Where men of valor are vanishing,

What can you do?

When commitments are crumbling around us

And lives shared for years fall apart,

Do we have any hope of completion

The race that we start?

The words may sound sad, but the truth is that there is hope for kids like these--or so thinks an unlikely coalition of politicians, academics, philanthropists, and writers who favor "faith-based" antipoverty work. Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation have long touted religion as the answer to poverty, but the recent crusade is more diverse. Last spring the billionaire investor and conservative activist Foster Friess toured churches and clinics in several cities with a retinue of Republican congressmen, soaking up inspirational stories and handing out checks. Meanwhile, a variety of liberal foundations were getting involved--Pew, Ford, Lilly, and others. The media have begun to get religion too. Jon Meacham wrote about the black church's crime-fighting potential in The Washington Monthly back in 1993, and in the past year the potential of inner-city religious institutions to help the poor in this and other ways has inspired a number of newspaper columns and a long New Yorker piece by Joe Klein. "When we started out this was considered a conservative issue," says John DiIulio, the Princeton political scientist who has helped the movement gain academic and political...