• Churches seek “new normal”: While many churches say donations are increasing, a new poll shows that most are facing a new economic reality, says The Christian Post. A survey of more than 1,000 churches released Monday by the group LifeWay showed that nearly 75 percent of churches raised enough to meet their budget requirements so far in 2011. But demand for social-services aid is so high that many churches say they still can’t meet demand, so they are continuing to look for volunteers and other resources to help them stretch their budgets.
• Incentives for Jews to live in Detroit: Jewish charities in Detroit are attempting to raise $100,000 to encourage young Jews to move to and remain in the Motor City, writes The Detroit Free Press. The project, called “Do It for Detroit,” will offer subsidies of $250 a month to young Jews to live in the city. Recipients of the subsidy must agree to host one community event a month.
• Homeless in Ohio pay it forward: After local residents in Lorain, Ohio, complained of panhandling and other disturbances, a group called Pass It On Ministries organized a group of homeless people and church volunteers to clean up the town’s City Hall, according to The Morning Journal, in northern Ohio. Volunteers cut grass, pulled weeds, and collected trash around City Hall.
• Slower pace for ground-zero mosque: The organizers behind the controversial Muslim community center and mosque planned for near ground zero may scale back the project, according to The New York Times. The group has hired a professional fund-raising staff, but it may never become the $100- million 15-story center that they initially envisioned, and construction may not begin for another five years.

JDub Records, which was created in 2002, was hailed as a new breed of Jewish nonprofit that would rely on popular culture to reach young people. It put out 35 albums, released three gold records, and drew more than 150,000 young Jews to its concerts and parties over the past nine years, according to a news release that announced the closing.

It also had a hand in creating and popularizing several other innovative Jewish nonprofits, including the Six Points Fellowship–an incubator for Jewish artists–and Tablet Magazine, a highly regarded online publication of Jewish culture. None of those projects will close.

But the organization is best known for discovering Matisyahu, who became popular on MTV in 2004 after JDub produced his first album, Shake off the Dust … Arise.

It is not clear exactly when the organization will close, and JDub officials would not comment Tuesday.

“The decision to close was entirely financial, as the challenges facing our business model are too great to overcome,” the organization said. “JDub earned half of its annual budget from mission-related revenue, including album sales, concert tickets, and consulting fees, and the other half from foundations and individual donors.”

JDub was started with a grant from the Joshua Venture Group, an incubator of Jewish nonprofits. The Joshua Venture Group, which was started in 2002, helped several innovative Jewish organizations, including Heeb Magazine, get off the ground. But most of the organizations have had trouble sustaining themselves due to lack of donor interest.

“The collapse of the music business in the decade that JDub has existed, combined with recessionary effects and aging out of the cohort of Jewish “start-ups,” made securing the necessary operating support an insurmountable challenge,” JDub said in its release.

This is the thinking behind “58,” a new effort backed by 10 major nonprofits. The project will be led by Scott Todd, a senior adviser at Compassion International, one of the organizations sponsoring the project.

According to the World Bank, 1.4 billion people live in extreme poverty, which means they are living on less than $1.25 per day.

His antipoverty organization—which includes the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee, HOPE International, and Living Water International—wants to call attention to the causes of extreme poverty and the organizations that are working to help eradicate it.

The group has built a Web site that will highlight hundreds of organizations that are working to fight poverty. And it is trying to mobilize Christians through a social-media campaign that it hopes will drive people to the Web site—with the goal of turning some of those Web visitors into donors.

Mr. Todd says his effort is sort of a Giving Pledge for the Christian masses. However, instead of asking a handful of billionaires to pledge half of their money, “58” is asking millions of people to give only a small percentage of their income.

“We don’t have to give away half of our wealth,” Mr. Todd said. “We could give an additional 1 percent away, and the annual flow would exceed [the total given by those on] the billionaires list.”

The project is rooted in the biblical passage of Isaiah: 58, from which it takes its name.
In that passage, the prophet Isaiah tells the Jews that their fasts are meaningless because they are rooted in greed and desire for personal gain. If they really want the world around them to improve, the prophet tells them, they need to fast for the right reasons–to help those around them and to cleanse themselves of wickedness.

“This is the message we need to hear again today,” Mr. Todd says. “We need to live out what Isaiah writes. It begins with a new hunger—a felt, compelling force within us that desires that kids will not die of preventable causes, that sees the pain and feels it and is almost angry about it and wants it to stop. There is an apathy we see among our own Christian brothers and sisters.”

Mr. Todd says that 58 will try to show its beneficiaries that it is Christian people who have provided help to them.

“We come from a Christian faith. We believe that we have the answer,” he says. “We don’t think it is manipulative in any way. But if that makes some people uncomfortable, that is just the way it is.”

The study, commissioned by Repair the World, a group that works to promote volunteerism among Jews, surveyed roughly 1,000 young Jews last fall and is believed to be the first in-depth look at volunteerism within a faith group, according to Jon Rosenberg, Repair the World’s chief executive. Many of the findings apply to any religious group, he says.

Repair the World was created by the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, the Jim Joseph Foundation, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.

Of the young Jews in the survey, 78 percents said they had volunteered at least once over the past year, which is a positive sign, Mr. Rosenberg said. Still, the survey results point to some challenges.

Only a third of respondents characterized their volunteerism as an integral part of their lives and do so at least once a month.

“Their volunteering is sporadic and episodic,” Mr. Rosenberg said. “It’s not skilled volunteering that is likely to be high impact around communities of need.”

The survey also found a huge gap in the volunteering habits of those who are more religious and those who are more secular.

Among those who are most religiously involved–who regularly attend religious services, observe the Sabbath, and follow Jewish dietary laws–91 percent said they had volunteered at least once over the past year and 53 percent said they volunteer regularly.

Those who aren’t as religiously active are also much less active as volunteers—61 percent said they had volunteered at least once in the past year, and 17 percent say they volunteer regularly.

Faith also had little to do with the volunteering activities Jews pursued: Only 27 percent of the young adults said that their volunteerism was based on Jewish values, and only 10 percent said that their volunteer work was organized by a Jewish nonprofit.

Mr. Rosenberg says the study points to the need for all groups to change the way they promote volunteerism.

Most young Jews, for example no longer connect to volunteer opportunities via traditional advertising but instead through social networks and friends.

Jewish groups must learn how to use those social networks so they can connect volunteers back to the Jewish community, he said.

Carla Rodrigues, a residential aide at Miami Rescue Mission’s Center for Women and Children, walks a fine line between the practical part of her job–helping the homeless get off the street permanently–and her religious desire to help her clients find Jesus.

She wants the women and children who are full-time residents at the mission to turn around their lives, to find jobs and permanent homes. But she admits that she finds it “sad” when she cannot also bring them closer to Jesus.

“As long as you have God, at the end of the race you might not have anything on earth, but your treasure is in heaven,” Ms. Rodrigues told me when I visited the mission several weeks ago.

Some 240 homeless people live at the Miami Rescue Mission, immersed in an intense 16-to 20-month program that is part physical and psychological rehabilitation, part  education in basic survival skills, and part what the mission calls a “discipleship” program.

Along with training comes a Jesus boot camp. Residents must attend prayer services and Bible sessions starting at 5:30 every morning.

And after they become stable, they are required to help out on the grounds of the mission or elsewhere in Miami for six months.

“Sometimes the only thing you can say to them is, ‘Will you just give God a chance to work in your life?” says Marilyn Brummitt, the mission’s director of community development.

The Miami Rescue Mission, which is financed through private sources, has two sister operations in Pompano Beach and Hollywood. Both of those receive about a third of their money from the state and local governments and therefore must shy away from including religion in their programs.

Their rehabilitation programs are essentially secularized versions of the Miami program. For instance, residents at the religious Miami Mission must accept eight principles of faith as part of their recovery, each of which is an acceptance of a different aspect of Jesus’s teachings. At the missions in Hollywood and Pompano Beach, the residences must accept principals related to living better lives. Both of the secular programs lack a Christian service component and both are considerably shorter–a year as opposed to nearly two years at Miami.

For some of the homeless, such as Dorothy Curry, the religious component is alluring. Ms. Curry, 60, has been in a nearby shelter since February and said she could not have gotten through the ordeal without God.

“I have been praying,” she said. “Everybody I meet in the shelters, they always talking about God. You have to sit on God when God take you places like this. There are reasons why he does that.”

The Miami Mission and the centers in Hollywood and Pompano Beach have graduated more than 150 of formerly homeless people from their programs during the past year, according to Casey Angel, the mission’s communications manager. And, he says, there is no difference in success rate between the religious and the secular programs.

So I put this to you for discussion: What do you think about social service groups evangelizing?

For many homeless people, life on the streets is hard on the feet.

Yet the Friday before Easter I witnessed a group of religious volunteers here doing something that I never thought imaginable—washing those feet and caring for them.

Nearly 2,000 of Miami’s homeless shuffled through the three campuses of the Miami Rescue Mission and its Broward Outreach Centers on Good Friday for the group’s annual “Thanksgiving in April,” a block party open to the more than 8,000 people who are homeless here.

Those who stopped by were offered a free meal, a haircut, a shower, and live entertainment.

Students at Barry University, in Miami Shores, who are taking podiatry courses, were recruited by the mission to provide basic foot care such as nail clipping and filing; homeless people also received socks and shoes that were donated by the Broward County sherriff’s office.

At the mission’s outposts in Pompano Beach and Hollywood, which receive state government money, the services come no-strings-attached. But at its main campus in Miami’s Little Haiti district, which receives all of its money from private sources, there was a religious catch.

Before they could get to the podiatry service, homeless people had to have their feet washed by Christian volunteers, a custom taken from the story of Jesus washing the feet of the Apostles at the Last Supper as a symbol of his humility.

Homeless men and women sat in chairs as volunteers from local churches placed their feet in plastic basins, ran warm water over them, scrubbed them with brushes, and then dried them. Some of the volunteers said prayers for the people they washed, some prayed with them, and others just engaged them in conversation.

As she waited for her turn to wash her first pair of feet, Jane Haywood, a volunteer from the nearby Granada Presbyterian Church, said she was excited and nervous about the experience but not scared by it.

“It is an incredible experience, just the idea of being in that position, of being able to help someone in that way,” Ms. Haywood said. “It is what Christ did for me by humbling himself to be a servant to serve so that I can live.”

Caring for the feet of the homeless is a necessary service, said Marilyn Brummitt, the mission’s director of community development. “For the homeless, if you are walking on the streets and you walk, walk, walk, what do you think is the most important part of your body?”

Some, like a man who identified himself as Theo, went through the religious ceremony simply to get the podiatry care.

“It’s not a religious thing for me, but I thought about Jesus getting it. I know what it represents,” said Theo, who has been homeless for five years. “What does it mean to me? I was mainly trying to get some clean socks and a pair of them shoes.”

Others, like Joe Huff, 52, who has lived on Miami’s streets for two years, raised their hands in prayer as they were washed.

“It’s relaxing. It’s soothing,” he said after a volunteer named Christa washed his feet. “When you are out on the street, you can’t always shower every night, so you have to take care of your toes. Last year my feet got so bad—they scratched and I was digging them to the bone—I couldn’t walk.”

But strategically, the washing is a central part of the street fair, because it helps the homeless form bonds with people who can potentially help them, according to the mission’s communication’s manager, Casey Angel.

“It is nice for people to come out and have a meal and shower and a free haircut,” Mr. Angel said. “But [the foot washing] really means much more because it is a one-on-one connection.”

At each street fair, people can apply for a rehabilitative program to help them get clean, sober, and psychologically stable and then to provide them with job training and placement. Nearly all of those who go through the foot-washing ceremony apply, Mr. Angel said.

But Ms. Brummitt said that when she introduced the foot-washing program five years ago, she was met with skepticism—both from homeless people wary of others touching a sensitive part of their bodies and from volunteers.

“I didn’t have any feet washers that year. I actually appealed in the chapel during orientation for volunteers,” she recalled of the first attempt to run the ceremony. “I could have heard a pin drop. Nobody volunteered.”

Now groups argue over who will get to perform washing duties.

The study by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, in Hartford, Conn., combined the results of 26 polls taken to show the effects of the downturn and also analyzed data from more than 11,000 congregations.

It found that more than 40 percent of these congregations reported that their finances had stabilized in 2010.

In  addition, about 10 percent reported increases in revenue last year and 22 percent said that they had seen a drop in revenue during the recession but have since recovered.

The bad economy, however, was difficult for religious congregations.

Some 80 percent of congregations said that their finances had been hurt by the downturn in 2008, and 57 percent said that they lost money in 2010.

Since the recession started, nearly a quarter of congregations said they had to reduce programs and services to the needy, 27 percent delayed capital campaigns and building projects, and 9 percent laid off staff members.

And this came at a time when congregations of all kinds reported increased demand for help. Nearly half of all congregations reported a rise in the need for cash assistance among their congregants, 22 percent reported an increase in requests for emergency housing, and 24 percent said they received more requests for pastoral assistance.

Evangelical churches were hit harder than old-line Protestant churches because they are often located in less affluent areas, according to the report.

Though most of the data collected came from Protestant Christian denominations, the report also includes some information from Muslim and Jewish congregations. About 65 percent of Muslim congregations surveyed said that their income had declined (though the report warns that it may not have enough data to warrant its finding statistically significant). Some 83 percent of Conservative Jewish and 78 percent of Reform Jewish congregations surveyed said that they had lost money as the economy soured.

Let us know how your congregation fared during the downturn—and what strategies have worked best to improve finances and keep up with demands for services.

The complaint follows an announcement this week that the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability has formed a panel to determine whether churches and other religious groups should be held to the same financial standards that are required for other nonprofits.

Specifically, the commission is looking into whether religious groups should be required to file informational tax forms with the Internal Revenue Service. The group will also examine whether federal legislation is needed to clarify rules that allow clergy members to accept donations directly from congregation members.

Dan Busby, the council’s president, said he set up the panel at the request of Sen. Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who has been investigating the financial practices of mega-churches and televangelists.

Senator Grassley recently wrapped up a three-year investigation into the financial records of six large evangelical Christian ministries after alleging in 2007 that the pastors were regularly misusing donations for their own personal gain.