Preaching Beyond the Choir

Boston minister promotes vision for expanding faith-based charity

In a United Methodist church here, nearly 1,000 miles from his home in Boston, the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers 3rd delivers a rousing speech to a group of several dozen ministers, charity leaders, and law-enforcement officials, including the city’s police chief.

“There are thousands of young men and women dying on the streets,” says the 52-year-old Pentecostal preacher. “God is calling us to do something new, to move beyond simply preaching, to build a movement — somebody say amen!”

The controversial, outspoken Mr. Rivers has garnered widespread press attention for his role in what has been called the “Boston miracle” — a significant decrease in homicides and other violent crimes in the racially divided city of Boston. Newsweek, in a 1998 cover story, called him the “savior of the streets.”

Now, Mr. Rivers is taking his message on the road. As a roving ambassador for efforts to get religious groups more involved in solving social problems, he is working to duplicate the Boston example in cities such as Baltimore, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis, and Tulsa. Major foundations, as well as the White House, are closely watching Mr. Rivers’s efforts as an experiment in what it will take to expand the role religious organizations play in providing social services.

“Reverend Rivers is pioneering,” says James Towey, head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. “The people he brings together in each community are the people who can solve that community’s problems. They are taking it into their own hands there in their neighborhood. That’s why it works.”

The Ford Foundation has provided $750,000 to support Mr. Rivers’s effort to spread the Boston approach nationwide. And the Annie E. Casey Foundation has given $75,000 so Mr. Rivers can develop a handbook to explain how religious and law-enforcement groups can form coalitions and to hold a conference to promote his cause. Ford has also provided $350,000 to Public/Private Ventures, a nonprofit group in Philadelphia, to assist Mr. Rivers’s organization with management, financial, and other expertise.

Even with the recent money and attention, Mr. Rivers faces a daunting set of challenges. A magnetic entrepreneur who is happiest away from his desk talking with gang members on the street, he is now navigating and embracing the button-down world of organized philanthropy, with its focus on management and program evaluation. He estimates it would take as much as $10-million in coming years to “stimulate, assist, support, and assess” some 30 to 50 new religious-based efforts around the country aimed at reducing violence and giving a hand to young people through direct cooperation with law-enforcement and criminal-justice agencies. In addition to raising money, Mr. Rivers has to overcome numerous hurdles, including persuading black church leaders, many of whom are deeply suspicious of the police, to work with law enforcement, and continuing to incorporate Latinos into what was originally a mission focused on blacks.

Living Out Their Faith

Born in Boston and raised in South Chicago and North Philadelphia, Mr. Rivers spent time in a gang as a kid before attending an art school and later Harvard University. In 1988, he and his wife, Jacqueline C. Rivers, moved to Dorchester, one of Boston’s poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods, to live out their faith by serving the poor with other members of a black Christian group, many of whom had met at Harvard. They started a church — the Azusa Christian Community — and began reaching out to young people.

Three years later, Mr. Rivers had a life-changing talk with a drug dealer who explained the emotional appeal of gangs. “When Johnny goes to school in the morning, I’m there; you’re not,” the dealer said. “When Johnny comes home in the afternoon, I’m there; you’re not. And when Johnny goes out for a loaf of bread at the grocery store, I’m there; you’re not. I win; you lose.”

The conversation led Mr. Rivers to develop a specific response to the needs and dangers facing young people in his Four Corners neighborhood. He drafted what he called a “10-point plan” to combat the “material and spiritual sources” of violence by youths.

Atop the agenda: Get ministers and volunteers on the streets to patrol neighborhoods and counsel gang members; cooperate with law-enforcement and criminal-justice officials to lock up the bad guys; and offer refuge and help to young people in need, including education and employment programs and mentors.

With three other ministers, Mr. Rivers founded the Boston Ten Point Coalition, which brought more than three dozen churches together with law-enforcement agencies to identify and remove from the streets the most violent offenders. At the same time, the churches watched out for police excesses and lobbied for alternative or reduced sentences for young people who deserved a second chance, helping them with social services.

By 1999, the number of homicides had dropped from 152 nine years before to 31 for the year. (The figure rose to 68 in 2001 and inched down to 60 last year.) Some experts argue that the decrease would have happened without the special efforts by ministers and law-enforcement officials — who themselves had adopted sweeping new police and probation policies — because crime rates dipped in cities elsewhere as well. Others maintain that their efforts and cooperation were a major factor.

Whatever the reasons for the decline, says Christopher Winship, a Harvard sociology professor who has studied the matter extensively, the partnership was itself a second Boston miracle. “Both police and ministers came to realize that they had a common goal — to keep the next kid from getting killed,” says Mr. Winship. “Over time they came to recognize that their efforts could complement each other.”

‘Very Vocal’

Mr. Rivers withdrew from the Boston Ten Point Coalition several years ago to form a new organization aimed at copying its success, the National Ten Point Leadership Foundation. He says he was asked to withdraw from the coalition because other ministers resented him for getting lots of press coverage and differed with him on strategy. Others say he left because he rubbed people the wrong way.

“Gene’s approach in life is to sound the trumpet, don’t pull back,” says Mrs. Rivers, who is the executive director and co-founder of the national organization. “He is quick to speak out and be very vocal about it.”

In the last four years, Mr. Rivers and his national organization have advised churches, law-enforcement agencies, and governments in more than 50 cities in the United States and abroad. Many have expressed interest in starting programs modeled after those in Boston offered by Azusa church’s social-service arm, the Ella J. Baker House, located in a Victorian mansion that once was a haven for cocaine users.

Activities at the Baker House include mentor programs to help young ex-offenders avoid criminal behavior, substance abuse, and domestic violence; after-school computer labs that teach students African-American history and culture; and weekly strategy meetings with law-enforcement personnel, neighborhood ministers, and organizations that serve young people.

Key to its efforts is having many staff members and volunteers who live in the neighborhoods they are trying to help. “This is one of the toughest ZIP codes in Boston,” says Ken Johnson, the Baker House’s executive director. “The point is to be here all the time, partaking of the life of the neighborhood, exposed to the same risks as anybody else.”

Mr. Rivers has become so well known in his hometown of Dorchester and the areas around it that he has a hard time going out without being stopped by people whose lives he has touched through his charity work.

During an unscheduled trip to a coffee shop recently with a reporter, a young man came to the table and told Mr. Rivers, “I had no faith, no life, no hope without you.”

‘Spreading the Message’

Mr. Rivers has started to win similar attention in the cities where has he traveled in his efforts to spread the 10-point plan.

“Reverend Rivers, visionary that he is, has been instrumental in spreading the message across the country,” says Jerry L. Barker, chief of the Indianapolis Police Department. “The faith-based community is a very important ingredient. Many young people only really respect the church.”

Every Friday night, ministers and volunteers from the Indianapolis Ten Point Coalition meet together and bow their heads with “prayer warriors” before they fan out to walk the streets into the wee hours of the morning. The warriors are church members who do not participate in the walks but pray for the safety and effectiveness of those who do walk, and wait for their return.

Once a delegation is out in a neighborhood, “we don’t preach the young people, we don’t beat them over the head with a message,” says Rev. George N. Bolden Jr., executive director of the Indianapolis Ten Point Coalition. “We just let them know we are here, we love them, we have programs for them, and if they need anything, here’s our phone number. Just give us a call sometime.”

Founded in 1998, the Indianapolis coalition is one of Mr. Rivers’s success stories. With six full-time employees, dozens of volunteers, 17 board members, and 30 churches behind it, the Ten Point chapter provides mentors and employment training and works with young people in trouble with the law.

The Indianapolis Ten Point coordinates many of its programs with a long list of juvenile-justice partners. One judge refers all of the juvenile offenders caught with guns and other weapons to the coalition so they can be linked with mentors.

Many Obstacles

As Mr. Rivers sows the seeds of his mission, he has run into many obstacles.

For example, turnover at the top of the Tulsa Ten Point Coalition has slowed the organization’s development and was the result, he says, “of a small nonprofit trying to get up and running and finding a leader who is the right fit.”

Politics for a time hampered the vitality of the Indianapolis Ten Point Coalition, says Mr. Rivers. The affiliate was begun with the encouragement of then-Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, a Republican adviser to George W. Bush. But Mr. Rivers says that after a Democrat became the Indianapolis mayor, “black preachers and black politicians who didn’t like Goldsmith went after Ten Point for partisan reasons.” Still, the Indianapolis coalition has thrived and helped create Ten Point affiliates in Gary and Evansville.

A different challenge has been securing cooperation from older ministers of urban churches, some of whose members are increasingly disconnected from life in inner cities because they drive in to Sunday services from suburban areas, says Mr. Rivers.

“It’s sometimes easier for me to get a group of kids who are hanging out on the street organized for a good basketball game than to get a collection of black clergy with very healthy egos to walk around the corner together,” he says. “The black church is its own sovereign nation with its own liturgical patois, protocols, and rituals that one must master like a five-dimensional chess game. But the ministers will bless you as long as they are courted and treated respectfully.”

Mr. Rivers also has faced an obstacle in Washington. The National Ten Point Leadership Foundation was not among the recipients of the first grants made in October by the federal government’s Compassion Capital Fund, President Bush’s effort to help small nonprofit organizations and churches.

Some observers have speculated that Mr. Rivers was penalized by the White House for his close friendship with John J. DiIulio Jr., the University of Pennsylvania scholar who had a stormy tenure as Mr. Bush’s first adviser on religious charities.

Mr. Rivers declines to comment on the matter, except to say that his organization needs to “learn to fight smarter and harder for funds, and to network.” He adds: “Working the grant system of the federal government is a game. Everyone who goes to D.C. understands that. We have to learn that process, that system.”

One of the hardest things for Mr. Rivers personally is making the shift toward spending more and more of his time raising money for his current and future projects.

“I’m doing a lot of things that 15 years ago I would not have done: cultivating donors and doing development work,” he says. “Before I would have been in the ‘hood all the time playing Father Teresa, going to the court, running down to the jail — that would have been the real work.”

Influencing the Debate

How far Mr. Rivers is able to take his crusade in the next few years by nurturing Ten Point Coalitions in new cities and measuring their results could influence how far foundations and the federal government are willing to go to help religious charities perform social services.

Mr. Rivers says his main objective is to make sure religious groups get a fair test of the effectiveness of their antipoverty efforts.

He says he is not deterred by occasional setbacks in rolling out Ten Point chapters. “We’ll have fits and starts and successes and failures because that’s the nature of social movements,” he says. “And that’s OK, as long as we’re not deluded into believing that we are something we’re not or have accomplished something that we haven’t.”

There’s no time to lose, says Mr. Rivers.

The next few years will be a race against trends that threaten to overwhelm the nation’s cities, he says. As prisons now release a steady stream of inmates who got lengthy sentences during the past decade, cities will be filled with young people looking to put their lives back together.

Mr. Rivers believes he is part of a movement destined to succeed.

“The faith-based agenda is the wave of the future,” says Mr. Rivers. “The question is how smartly and strategically policy elites and folk in the philanthropic community engage this unavoidable reality.”

MINISTER’S 10-POINT PLAN TO MOBILIZE CHURCHES

1. Establish “adopt-a-gang” programs to serve as drop-in centers and sanctuaries for troubled youths.

2. Commission people to serve as advocates and ombudsmen for black and Latino juveniles in the courts.

3. Commission youth evangelists to do street-level, one-on-one evangelism with youths involved in drug trafficking.

4. Establish accountable, community-based economic-development projects.

5. Establish links between suburban and downtown churches and ministries to provide spiritual and material support.

6. Initiate and support neighborhood crime-watch programs near local churches.

7. Establish working relationships between local churches and community-based health centers to provide pastoral counseling for families during times of crisis.

8. Convene a working summit meeting for Christian black and Latino men and women to discuss the development of Christian brotherhoods and sisterhoods that would provide rational alternatives to violent gang life.

9. Establish rape-crisis drop-in centers and services for battered women.

10. Develop an aggressive black and Latino curriculum, with an additional focus on the struggles of women and poor people.