DATE: Saturday, October 4, 1997             TAG: 9710030012

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B8   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   48 lines

PORTSMOUTH'S JEREMIAH SUMMIT ANSWERING THE CALL

Fed up with thriving criminality in their city and the deterioration of many neighborhoods, hundreds of Portsmouth residents assembled in 1996 and 1997. They marshaled grass-roots backing for safety-enhancing and community-building initiatives.

Law enforcement responded with better-targeted community-based policing. City Hall stepped up code enforcement and other activities aimed at upgrading decayed neighborhoods.

The coming together continues to be a force for betterment. The Jeremiah Summit scheduled for Sunday at Portsmouth's Willett Hall could become a similarly salutary force.

Virginia's welfare-to-work mandate, which kicked in Wednesday, was the catalyst for the Jeremiah Summit. The conclave promises to bring clergy and laity from more than 30 churches together with representatives of 26 agencies that deal with a wide spectrum of human misery. The meeting will acquaint the churches with existing social services and, in nine workshops, spark conversations about how the two groups could cooperate to help the needy: the homeless, the malnourished, the disadvantaged young, the impoverished aged.

Just about everyone agrees that honest work is preferable to idleness, financial self-sufficiency to financial dependency. The pioneering welfare reform promised by Republican Gov. George F. Allen during his successful 1993 campaign was subsequently voted overwhelmingly by the General Assembly with bipartisan support. The reform legislation placed tight limits upon public assistance, pressuring welfare recipients to seek employment.

The reform also challenged localities, both the private and the public sectors, to (1) guide and aid welfare recipients toward jobs and (2) provide help as needed to former welfare recipients making or unable to make the transition to work and to their families.

The outgrowth of discussions begun by a handful of clergy, the Jeremiah Suummit will seek to add religious institutions' spiritual, human and material assets to the mix of secular resources already coping with the welfare-to-work challenge. The summit will have the added benefit of bringing black and white together for the common purpose of helping human beings in need. Such an enterprise builds community and fosters healing across America's costly, tragic racial divide.

Every major faith tradition - in the West, the Judeo-Christian tradition predominantly - commands adherents to minister to the unfortunate. The Jeremiah Summit is obedient to that command. May it also prove fruitful.

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