PRACTICAL QUESTIONS GREET BUSH PLAN TO AID RELIGIOUS GROUPS

WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 — On the other side of the Anacostia River from where
the federal government reigns, in a neighborhood awash with drugs and
poverty, the Rev. Herbert B. Chambers is open for business.

His office is the nave of the Young Memorial Church of Christ Holiness, his
desk a plastic-sheeted folding table. From there he works his cell phone,
an antipoverty broker navigating public and private social programs as
skillfully as lobbyists work Congress and the bureaucracies across the river.

The Catholics donate the food he distributes. The Episcopalians opened up a
job center in his 100- year-old parish house that a wealthy suburban church
helped rehabilitate. Freddie Mac, the mortgage buyer, underwrites a program
for violent youth. And the Department of Housing and Urban Development pays
for housing for mothers with AIDS and their children.

Mr. Chambers is one of the "social services entrepreneurs" President Bush
wants to attract to his program to give more federal money to religious
organizations. Young Memorial is one of the few congregations — there are
only 10 percent nationwide — that try to find jobs and housing for the poor
and care for their drug problems, as well as feeding and clothing them.

But Mr. Chambers has misgivings about the president's program that have
nothing to do with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, long
taken to ensure the separation of church and state. For religious groups
working on the front lines, Mr. Bush's approach raises practical questions,
too.

Mr. Chambers said he was worried that strings would be attached to the
money, that there would not be enough government counseling for novice
churches to make sure they spend the money effectively and within federal
guidelines, and that the paperwork would be unendurable.

"If Mr. Bush does his faith-based mission I will commend him but I'm not
basically looking for more money," Mr. Chambers said. "I've got enough
partners helping me now. When you invite Big Brother into your life you can
spend your day filling out papers."

Nonetheless, Mr. Chambers was an early, if skeptical convert to asking for
federal money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which
started the first federal religion-based office in 1994 under former
Secretary Henry G. Cisneros.

"I've had enough experience and I've got these volunteers to make sure I
spend the money correctly," he explained. "But if you make money available
to some of the small churches you have to help them manage it or they're
going to get into trouble. Some of these ministers have never seen $10,000
and if they don't spend it right, Big Brother will put them in jail."

Anna Forbes Towns, who as the head of HUD's first religion-based effort was
the official charged with helping African-American churches win grants,
says a number of difficulties face the new administration.

Several years ago, when hundreds of mostly African-American churches were
burned in a rash of arson in the South, HUD invited them to seek grants to
rebuild. Fewer than 50 did so, Ms. Towns said.

"Right now these churches are overwhelmed," she said."If this is to succeed
we need to show churches how to connect with community leaders and the
government."

In several recent studies, churches and other religion-based charities were
identified as among the most effective institutions now helping the poor.
At the same time, the studies suggested, these institutions were incapable
of replacing the government in delivering social services.

"The federal government and businesses are pretty far down the line for
solving problems," said Suzanne Morse, executive director of Pew
Partnership for Change, a nonpartisan group that released one of the studies.

"The one message we got is people believe their government has to step up
to the plate and deliver more than bandages," Ms. Morse said.

Housing Secretary Melquiades R. Martinez promised that the president's new
plan would be "much more expansive" and would "ensure that faith-based
organizations have the same opportunities to serve the poor as any other
organization."

But Mr. Chambers has limited patience with the government. He lets
Sylvester Servance, a lawyer and church volunteer, make the dozens of phone
calls required to persuade the local government to approve a $1 million
grant to rehabilitate another apartment building for women who have AIDS.

"We have to write monthly reports for the government," Mr. Chambers said.
"We're open to site visits and inspection of files at any moment. But the
more active you are, the more these people come running to you with grant
proposals."

Before he became a full-time pastor in 1987, Herbert Chambers worked in the
circulation department of two Washington newspapers, first the now-defunct
Washington Star and then The Washington Times, rising to become its
circulation manager for Prince George's County in Maryland.

"Anything I know about management and this city I learned at those
newspapers," he said.

At the newspapers, he also helped find summer jobs for teenagers, and at
Young Memorial Church he has made youth a special focus.

A church in McLean, Va., a Washington suburb, helped buy a huge tent Mr.
Chambers erects every spring when warm weather settles in. Slowly, more
than 200 young men, nearly all with drug problems, start camping out there,
eating the food from the Catholics and dressing in the clothes donated by
Episcopalians. Drug counseling comes later, and prayer is voluntary.

"You don't have to force Jesus down their throats," Mr. Chambers said. "Our
character demonstrates who we are and besides, a lot of people have eaten
at our table, worn our clothes, spent our money and never found Christ."

Last month 12 of his young adults did find jobs through the Samaritan
center at his parish house. Some of the prostitutes and drug dealers who
sought his help have since relapsed.

But he does not know if his congregation of 250 people could support
another partnership program.

"Mostly we provide the people in need and other organizations provide the
services," he said.

Rectors of parishes in upper-middle-class Northwest Washington echo some of
his views.

The Rev. Jim Donald of St. Columba's Episcopal Church, who can call on a
wealth of professional help from his congregation, two dozen of whom work
as grant writers, said that when he was involved in an earlier
rehabilitation of an old house for 14 residents his group had to file
papers "as if we were building a 5,000 unit apartment complex."

"We're all doing a lot of work and we'd like more money, say that trillion
and a half tax cut," he said. "But once you get into working with the
government you get into a kind of bureaucratic hell."