Although the church has long been a core institution in the African American community, it has rarely been directly involved in government- or foundation-sponsored social service programs. A Denver program designed to bring churches into collaborative relationships with each other and with other helping agencies suggests they can play an even greater role in the community. This is the third in a series of three articles on community building approaches that are paying off in urban America. PNS associate editor Joan Walsh, a Bay Area based journalist, authored a recent report for the Rockefeller Foundation entitled "Stories of Renewal: Community Building and the Future of Urban America."

They call her "Miss Reverend Gay."

Pastor T.H. Gay doesn't look much older than some of the teenage girls she works with, but in just five years this smart, serious minister at Denver's Grace and Truth Full Gospel Church has developed an impressive "outreach ministry" that includes mentoring, tutoring, a drill team, and an occasional trip to the local beauty college.

Gay credits God for her inspiration, but she's also grateful to the Metro Denver Black Church Initiative, which provided seed money and technical assistance that let her find partners to expand her work. "The initiative helped us learn to collaborate without competing, and provided a bond with other ministers," Gay notes.

Since 1994 the Initiative has provided over $400,000 to fund a range of activities and services for low income families. The grants go to dozens of church-based groups that provide everything from tutoring and counseling to social services to keep children out of the foster care system. A project of Denver's Piton Foundation, in partnership with national funders, it has become a model for how to tap the power of the black church to rebuild low-income neighborhoods.

Piton's Grant Jones traces the roots of the initiative's back to a 1988 grant he made to the Agape Christian Church, to start a Community Outreach Services Center in the city's Five Points neighborhood. "Frankly I wasn't thinking about it as a church-based project, just an opportunity to get some programs in a neighborhood that needed them."

The success of that early partnership -- today, the Center is a Five Points institution -- suggested to Jones that the black church might be "the sleeping giant in the community building field."

Clearly it has huge potential as an agent for change. The heart of the African American community since slavery, the church remains a catalyst for spiritual, social and political renewal, and the recipient of some $2 billion in donations from African Americans every year, an estimated 90 percent of all such donations.

Churches already minister to a range of secular needs, with food banks, senior programs, tutoring efforts and informal assistance to congregants who fall on hard times. Yet government and foundation funders have tended to bypass churches -- in part, because they worry about subsidizing spiritual proselytizing, but also because few churches have aggressively pursued the funding they could capture, suspicious of the strings attached to public and private dollars.

Denver's Black Church Initiative moved into that historical gulf cautiously. It began by looking at what churches were doing already and found three quarters of Denver's black churches sponsored some kind of secular program, but less than half were offered regularly, and only 34 of the 274 efforts had any kind of outside support or funding.

Jones presented those findings to a group of 60 ministers. The group favored an initiative that would support partnerships between churches or of churches with outside agencies. They wanted technical assistance on grant writing, management, and collaboration. Maybe most important, they wanted opportunities to develop relationships between pastors who were interested in expanding their outreach ministry.

Today the Initiative has catalyzed an impressive range of services to low-income families and children, working with a broad spectrum of churches, from small, non-denominational churches like Pastor Gay's, to New Hope Baptist Church, one of the largest black churches in Denver.

"You're talking about a church and a pastor who you might think has done it all," says New Hope's Rev. James Peters, who worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "But it took the Black Church Initiative to get me doing tutoring again, to get me collaborating with another church -- a collaboration that's hard, but worth it."

The involvement of pastors like Peters draws others. "As a young minister, it's invaluable for me to be able to rub shoulders with someone like Reverend Peters, who's really been a mentor for me," says Rev. Richard Wright, pastor of House of Prayer, a small non-denominational church. Wright was a career firefighter and long-time youth volunteer who three years ago felt a call to start a church, with his wife, to minister to the teenagers and young adults trying to make it on their own in their neighborhood.

The Black Church Initiative secured church-management training for Wright, and helped him collaborate with two local churches on a computer training project for young people. He's about to start a fatherhood program for young men in his community, and a residence for homeless young women. "There's no place else but the Initiative where I could have gotten this kind of help," Wright says.

In Denver, Grant Jones found that divisions of class, denomination and ideology can be obstacles to an outreach ministry, even among African American congregations. Some inner city churches draw more congregants from black families who have left the neighborhood than from the low-income families who live nearby, and developing programs that meet the needs of both groups can be challenging.

The initiative addresses those issues with patient support. Jones saw early that most churches have neither the staff nor the experience to write polished grant proposals so he and project coordinator David Washington visit every site that applies for funding. The initiative sponsors workshops to help ministers build administrative and outreach skills, and last year added a retreat for ministers and their wives, where they could discuss the challenges an outreach ministry can pose to a marriage. As one participant, Rev. John Shaw, put it, "Sometimes healers need healing, too."