c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Organizers of the Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future, who have been busy wooing the powerful of the corporate, foundation and political world, almost forgot leaders from volunteerism’s most important sector _ the religious community.

In recent weeks, these organizers have been scrambling to increase religious representation at the conference, which formally opens Monday (April 28) in Philadelphia _ a last-minute effort to remedy what some in the faith community view as an embarrassing failure.

Billed as an all-out, nationwide push to rejuvenate America’s volunteer spirit, the summit will gather thousands of leaders of business, nonprofit and private volunteer groups. Key players include retired Gen. Colin Powell, President Clinton and former President Bush, as well as a who’s who of child advocates.

Conspicuously absent until recent weeks, however, was the religious community, a group many acknowledge as the workhorse of American volunteerism. In the past six weeks, summit organizers quickly organized a committee of 10 key religious leaders, but the move came so late those leaders won’t be able to participate fully in the summit.

“I’m not faulting them, but I think there will be less of a rich exchange (of ideas) than there could have been,” said Roman Catholic Bishop Roger Schwietz of the diocese of Duluth, Minn., who is representing the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and who joined the project just in mid-April..

Schwietz said members of the Communities of Faith committee _ the hastily formed religious panel _ were advised this week by the White House they won’t be able to participate in a series of panel discussions with other leaders as they had requested.

Instead, the committee will have its own panel discussion.

The absence of religious leaders will be even more pronounced at the community delegate level, where few clergy are part of the teams being sent by localities to discuss ways of encouraging volunteers. In New Jersey, for example, four delegations of 44 community leaders from Newark, Paterson, Trenton and Camden include just two clerics and two other representatives from religious organizations.

“I think they are underrepresented, and it is a weakness,” said Glenn Jeffrey, a Minneapolis summit organizer who was shocked to find no key religious groups involved when he joined the project two months ago. “The communities of faith should have been brought in much earlier, as more of a strategic partner.”

Still, Jeffrey and participating religious leaders said they are making the best of the situation, and all said they believe summit leaders have now recognized the lack of religious representation as a mistake.

“I think there is a growing recognition amongst the coordinators that to turn out masses of volunteers, a lot of the recruitment will happen in the churches, synagogues and mosques of America,” said Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, D.C.

Saperstein said he believes the summit leaders have caught their mistake in time, but he conceded there has been a fair amount of bungling. He noted the timing of the summit has been a sore point with both Jews and Eastern Rite Catholics, because the date conflicts with both Passover and the Orthodox Easter.

He also noted religious leaders are adamant any push for volunteerism not take the place of the welfare overhaul debate. Religious leaders have been among the most vocal critics of recent welfare bills, arguing religious groups can’t fight the war on poverty alone.

“One of the strong determinations of the mainline churches is that however this effort develops, it not develop in a way that distracts from dealing with the policy issues of justice in America,” Saperstein said.

The Rev. Jim Wallis, editor-in-chief of the evangelical magazine Sojourners and another member of the religious leaders’ committee, agreed, adding the only reason he joined the group six weeks ago was the assurance the summit was just a beginning.”The people that conceived this summit primarily had business and corporate and big secular nonprofits in mind,”Wallis said.”I think that was a mistake. The majority of the dollars and volunteer hours come through churches. They just didn’t get that. It’s been kind of an education process.” In response to being initially ignored by summit organizers some of the nation’s top religious leaders, including many of those now tapped as co-chairs of the Communities of Faith committee, have organized their own independent roundtable on Saturday (April 26), just before the summit begins, addressing the specific issue of poverty and welfare reform.

The roundtable will bring together leaders from groups as diverse as the National Council of Churches, the Christian Coalition, the Salvation Army, Bread for the World, the Family Research Council, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the Progressive National Baptist Convention in an effort to forge some minimal consensus on how the religious community can respond to the new situation created by last year’s welfare reform legislation and the nation’s persisting poverty.

Jeffrey said he traced part of the problem in bringing the religious community into the summit at an early date to a reluctance of government to get entangled with religion, citing traditional concerns about the separation of church and state.

He also cited a historic reluctance on the part of some religious groups to get too involved with government for fear they’ll be prohibited from delivering a spiritual message.

“When I was asked to come on board and work in organizing,” Jeffrey said, “my first question was, `Where’s the church in all of this?’ The answer was, `They’re not very involved and tend to be problematic.’ I said, `We need to try and do something different, because this is too big and too important for the church to be on the sideline.”’

In the past two or three weeks, organizers have scrambled to invite about 150 religious leaders to be part of the audience but it came too late to change the makeup of community delegations, which will be meeting separately to design local and state strategies for drumming up volunteers.

“This reflects the mood of the country,” said pollster George Gallup Jr., who was invited to the summit in mid-April because of his views on religion. “In so many areas of life our leaders forget the spiritual dimension. You see conferences on youth, and the word `faith’ is not even mentioned. It’s really quite amazing.”

DEA END CHAMBERS