'Street Saints'
This article from the Houston Chronicle by Richard Vara talks about the emergence of a new kind of Christianity -- a traditional Christianity -- that is taking place all across our land. This is the Christianity that Jesus taught. The Christian life played out through our daily lives -- not just talked about in church or discussed in seminary. It is bringing the love of God to a people hungry for spiritual and physical food. What will it take for us to finally realize that Christ came and taught and ministered -- not in the church -- but in the world with the people? What will it take for us to finally realize that we are called to leave our sanctuaries and go forth in His name to minister to others? I pray that we will finally come to see that church is not a place that we go but the people we are, and that we are never more Christians than when we serve others in His name.
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(From the Houston Chronicle http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/headline/features/2941736)
Faith-based aid transforms belief into action, yet it's often unheralded
By RICHARD VARACopyright 2004 Houston Chronicle
In Barbara J. Elliott's eyes, street saints are all around us.
They help the homeless find not only a bed but dignity through employment. They help break the bonds of drug addiction, teach English to new immigrants, shelter battered women, or do something as simple as handing out cookies at an after-school program.
"I want to light fires," said Elliott, the founder and director of the Houston-based Center for Renewal, a resource center for faith-based community and social-service organizations. "I want to be part of what I hope will be a revolution of the heart, (for believers) to take their faith out of the sanctuary and into the streets. I want people to understand that every one of us who is a person of faith has really been charged to go and be an apostle.
"If that were to happen across the country," she said, "we would have a very different country."
Elliott has seen the changes that religious social service and community-renewal programs have made. She highlights the best of them in Street Saints: Renewing America's Cities (Templeton Foundation Press, $24.95).
Several Houston organizations are featured, including The Brookwood Community, a ministry to the physically and mentally handicapped, and No More Victims, a ministry to kids with incarcerated parents.
Her purpose in writing the book "was to raise the visibility of street saints, those people who are doing the remarkably hard work of loving these human beings into wholeness."
Among them are the saints at Open Door Mission, an East End ministry to the homeless.
"This is one of the great examples of an organization that through faith and love is changing the hearts of the people they are dealing with," Elliott said in a quiet classroom at the mission. "The thing that impresses me is that rather than just giving a place for homeless men to stay, which is a virtuous thing, they are also helping them leave homelessness."
Open Door offers a nine-month drug- and alcohol-recovery program that includes Bible study, prayer and daily work. About a third of the 214 residents go through the program, she said, and 72 percent remain drug- and alcohol-free one year after they leave.
Elliott is convinced a religion-inspired love of neighbor can motivate the needed volunteers to enlist in faith-based organizations. Those groups, in turn, can attack poverty, broken families, drug and alcohol addiction and other social maladies.
She said her conviction is shared by President George W. Bush, who established a White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives early in his first term. He successfully promoted federal legislation to allow faith-based groups to bid to provide social-service programs.
Open Door Mission is not funded by the government, however, because it is "a faith-saturated program," she said. "Faith is the substance of what they do; it is not just an add-on.
"Federal money may not be used for religious instruction or religious materials," said Elliott, who once worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison in the Reagan administration, and was the first director of legislative information for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Federal funds may go toward secular goals such as GED preparation, homeless shelters and meals for the hungry.
Another program Elliott praises is InnerChange Freedom Initiative, sponsored by Prison Fellowship International. Launched in Texas in 1997, it provides Bible study, counseling, prayer and Christian education for inmates. After their release, former prisoners are assigned a mentor and a home church to help with jobs and other needs.
Elliott cites research that found only 8 percent of program graduates return to prison, in contrast to 20 percent recidivism among a group of inmates who did not participate.
It is important for the religious community to participate in social work, she said.
"This is the job of the church. This is the job of the individual people in their own community to be the connective tissue, to be that presence of transforming love.
"It is not just about doing social service, it is about loving people," she said. "The churches that are involved with this kind of work find they are attracting people without even attempting to."
Elliott's own involvement in helping others began in 1989 while she was living in Germany and after having worked as a correspondent for the Public Broadcasting Service. She took stock of her spiritual life and found it wanting.
"I had done a lot of things the world called important, but I had never asked God what he wanted me to do," said Elliott, who was raised in the Episcopal Church but is now a Roman Catholic. The divine answer came quickly when Eastern European refugees poured into West Germany and she became involved in helping them with shelter, food and other necessities.
She listened as refugees talked of how their spiritual and religious convictions helped them survive and defeat communism. She collected their stories for her first book, Candles Behind the Wall, which brought invitations to speak at universities, congressional committees and East European legislatures.
"I was convinced that the disproportionate effect that people of spirit had in Eastern Europe had a counterpart in the inner cities of America," she said.
Returning to the States, she worked for the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty and directed an awards program for faith-based, nonprofits around the country. After moving to Houston in 1997 because of her husband's job, Elliott founded the center to help faith-based groups with expertise and education.
"The object of the game is not to get to receive government money," Elliott said. "The object is to get them to the resources of the community at large to do the important work they are doing that one one else can do.
"The people who are working at the grass roots are reaching a place the government cannot touch and even the large social service institutions cannot touch."
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