Special Report

That’s a lot of cans of soup. It’s more than a few boxes of clothes, and it’s more than almost any agency or church can add to what it already is collecting to help the poor, economists and the heads of charity agencies say.

National charities have been impressing upon congregations the fact that they will likely be called on to fill the gaps created by $54 billion in federal public-assistance cuts that will hit between 1997 and 2002. Divided equally among the country’s 350,000 churches, it comes to right at $155,000 each. Local leaders want to know where the money and extra services are supposed to come from.

“We can’t do it, and it’s crazy for them to think we can,” said Maudine Holloway, director of Community Developer Enabler Inc., an Anniston agency that operates a food pantry and provides financial help for the needy. The agency’s cupboard was running close to bare recently, despite regular church donations and a tractor-trailer load of potatoes. “Not unless the community does a whole lot more than it’s doing now.”

History proves that probably won’t happen, said David Beckman, director of Bread for the World, a national charity based just outside Washington, D.C. The nation’s rate of charitable giving is one of the few economic constants, he said.

And skeptics of increased church giving say the recent trend has been to donate less to the poor and to keep the money in the church to build million-dollar recreation centers, schools, sound systems and fancy facilities that serve as a cocoon from the grim realities of the outside world, especially the plight of the poor. Besides, they say, the churches that can raise thousands of dollars generally aren’t in areas where poor people would come for help.

“Getting involved tends to mean (churches) set up a clothes closet or a food pantry, not that they find $80,000 to sponsor child care for families while they go back to work,” said Kimble Forrister, director of Alabama Arise, an anti-poverty agency based in Montgomery. “It’s a whole other level, and they don’t understand that.”

Those factors trump one of the wild cards Congress played when it passed the welfare-reform bill President Clinton signed Aug. 22. When Congress was debating the landmark legislation that some said would reverse 60 years of welfare, much was made of the private sector’s ability and willingness to help adults and children who couldn’t make ends meet under the new time limits, work requirements and tougher eligibility standards. Many a representative pointed to churches and charities as sources for jobs, food, clothing and financial assistance for those who would fall between the cracks.

“We know that as generous as people have been and as exuberant as churches have been in taking up cans, they have not kept pace with hunger,” said Beckman, whose non-denominational citizens’ group lobbied unsuccessfully against the reform package. “There has to be more than that. God didn’t send Moses to Pharaoh to take up a collection of canned goods.”

Anniston’s Center for Concern dispenses 140 cases of food a week to needy families. Sister Mary Roy, the center’s director, shares Beckman’s doubt that more food will come pouring in to make up for the area’s share of $26 billion in cuts to the federal food stamp program. She’s had 2,678 families ask for help this year, including 567 who’d never needed a handout before.

While she doesn’t oppose the idea of welfare reform, she said it must come in a fashion that allows healthy people to work to support themselves. Jobs have to be found for those people — and quickly, she said.

Perhaps helping welfare recipients find jobs will be the best way churches and charities can serve the 22,000 Alabama adults currently on welfare who will have to get jobs, analysts say. Some churches, especially in Birmingham and large metropolitan areas, are stepping up to provide information about job opportunities and training, Forrister said.

Preachers can use the pulpit to persuade their members to hire welfare workers so they can lift themselves off public assistance without calling on strapped charities, said Jack Shelton, director of the Rural Services and Research program at the University of Alabama. Church members can call on business owners to give discounts on work-related services welfare workers will need, such as providing professional clothing, car maintenance or photocopying for résumés. Some may even organize car pools to help workers find reliable transportation to their jobs.

Churches can also lend a hand by having their members act as government watchdogs, said Larry Brown, director of the Center on Hunger, Poverty and Nutrition Policy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. Brown, who drafted a justification for vetoing the welfare-reform legislation President Clinton finally signed, said it’s up to middle-class voters to push the government to analyze the impact of reform and who it’s hurting. Middle-class voters may think reform doesn’t affect them, but in coming years, they’ll be asked to dole out even more money if the reform measures fail.

“It is, in essence, a human experiment, and one the government wouldn’t or couldn’t try with any constituency other than the poor,” Brown said. “It’s absolutely Draconian — if not Darwinian — to think about the impact. That must be measured.”

Sister Roy hopes the community realizes that the current level of giving to churches and charities won’t meet the needs of the poor. She shudders to think what will happen when more and more people on welfare are knocking at her door to get help that isn’t there.

“I do say no, and I hate saying no to people who really need help,” she said. “Certainly if any quotation from the Bible is true, ‘The poor will always be with you’ is. I hope people realize that.”