“Faith-Based Collaboration:
Transforming Congregations and Communities
How Christians in social work can help
bridge the community – congregational gap.
NACSW Audio Conference
September 30, 2002
William L. Raymond, MSW
FaithWorks Consulting Service, LLC
184 E. 26th Street
Holland, MI 49423
616.394.9212
www.faithworksconsulting.com
The following workshop is designed to help Christians in social work think through an expanded role in community and congregational based settings. Over the years social work has seemingly emphasized an individual or family based clinical perspective, in isolation from a broader community and systemic perspective. It is the contention of the presenter of this workshop that these emphases need not exist in isolation from, or competition with, one another. The following information is in an “expanded outline” form and will form the basis of discussion and interaction for the audio conference. The information is presented, not as a last word or the definitive word, but as fuel for discussion and sharing of perspectives. I believe that the information presented here needs to be taken into consideration as we continue to discern what it means to be Christians in social work and what it means to live out faith and practice in communities, agencies and churches.
Session I
Congregational Readiness
Partnership Issues between Human
Service Organizations and Congregations
“When lawyers settle all the disputes, when teachers do all the teaching, when doctors do all the curing, then people lose their capacity to do these things and the result is an ever enlarging cycle of dependency and need. The professions can even contribute to the problems they are seeking to resolve.”
Edgar Cahn, Time Dollars
While the majority of employees of social service agencies intend no malice, the poverty industry, by its very nature, is geared toward self-perpetuation and the continued custodianship of its clients rather than toward their self-sufficiency and independence.”
Robert Woodson, The Triumphs of Joseph
“Current social work theory encourages an underestimation of capacity and exaggerates incapacity. It relies heavily on the “myth of intimacy” – the relationship between the professional and the client – and thereby reduces attention to environmental causes of stress and communal sources of strength.”
Harry Specht and Mark Courtney,
Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission
“The community . . . may be displaced by the intervention of human service professionals acting as an alternative method of problem solving. Human service professionals with special expertise, techniques and technology push out the problem solving knowledge and action of friend, neighbor, citizen and association. As the power of profession and service system ascends, the legitimacy, authority and capacity of citizens and community descend. The citizen retreats. The client advances.”
John McKnight,
The Careless Society
“The professionalization of problems which remove people from the natural setting may provide temporary relief, but it also depletes a community of experience and resources for dealing with . . . problems in the future. In bypassing existing helping structures (or failing to create them with the people) we may systematically lower the adaptive capacity of many human populations and weaken those indigenous resources which in times of crises may be the only ones available and cooperative."
O. Ramirez, as quoted by Paulette Moore Hines in Carter & McGoldrick, The Changing Family Life Cycle
Mary Pipher – Observations on Therapy and Mistakes Therapists Make
1. “Therapy has pathologized ordinary human experience and taught that suffering needs to be analyzed.”
“The intense emotions we all feel – anxiety, anger, despair – all have been labeled pathological and ‘treated” by therapists. This pathologizing of ordinary behavior makes it impossible for families to survive a therapists scrutiny. Overt fighting is harmful, while covert fighting is passive/aggressive. Either the parents handled conflict out of sight of their children so that the children had no model for handling conflicts, or the parents fought in front of their children and traumatized them. Either parents are too present or too absent, too distant or too intrusive, too controlling or too relaxed. It’s lose/lose for parents and all children can feel victimized. The game was rigged so that there were no right answers.
2. We have focused on weakness rather than resilience or strength.
“The focus on weakness is widespread in our culture. Victims and victimizers attract attention. Their stories are the ones we hear. The heroes with daily courage tend to receive less attention than violent villains. Therapists follow in both a cultural and professional tradition when we focus on pathology. Therapists have generated much more writing on mental illness and victimization than on mental health and strength.
3. We have encouraged narcissism and checked basic morality at the doors of our offices. We have confused ethical and mental health issues, empathy and accountability.
“Therapy’s non-blaming language has its uses, but it has also produced a sort of moral mush. . . Without standards of conduct we are all simply pursuing our own hedonistic agenda. . . Therapy can be a kind of ‘lay confession’. ‘I’ll tell you my screwups if you’ll absolve me of guilt and let me keep on doing what I want.’ . . . We are a polarized society. The ‘right’ focuses on accountability while the ‘left’ focuses on empathy. Both sides are right. A society without accountability is a dangerous place. A society without empathy is fascist. A healthy society must say to its members ‘We empathize with your troubles, but you must behave properly.’ A decent society teaches both empathy and accountability. On both counts we are all in this together.”
4. “We have focused on individual ‘salvation’ rather than collective well-being.”
“Therapy has contributed to the cultural shift from collective political action to individual mental health. We’ve encouraged self-analysis at the expense of social change. We have treated morality as a personal and pragmatic matter, not as a community concern. We have abdicated responsibility to speak to the moral & social issues of our time. Our focus has been too narrow. We need to know how client’s lives affect other lives and the world at large. . . Lives are meaningful and satisfying when they involve commitment, justice, truthfulness and community.
5. “We’ve suggested that therapy is more important than real life.”
“Even at our best we can inadvertently ‘inflict help’ on others. (Sometimes) we have led people to believe that only trained professionals can offer support and guidance. That’s not true. Much of the best guidance comes from spouses, family, friends and co-workers. Life is first. Clients may learn to trust in their relationships with therapists. But therapists should be transition relationships for them. After us they can trust other people and make some friends or reconnect with family. At best a therapist is a consultant who helps people process life thoroughly. In terms of priorities for loyalty and attachment, therapists should come after family, friends and co-workers. We care about them, but we are hired help.”
From Mary Pipher, The Shelter of Each Other, pages 113 – 130.
Observations on A New Practice and the New Practitioners
“The staff in successful programs take on an extended role in the lives of the children and families they work with. They think beyond professional services and help families to strengthen bonds with neighbors, churches, and other natural networks of support. They respond to the needs of families at places and times that make sense to the family – often at home, at school, or in neighborhood centers and at odd hours – rather than offering help only in places that may be convenient for agency staff but are far removed geographically and psychologically from those who use them.”
“In view of the growing interest in mentoring and other supports and services provided by non- professionals, it is striking how many of the characteristics of effective professional practice also apply to the involvement of volunteers. Extensive and systematic studies have now shown effective mentors and volunteers are not free-lancers who bypass all the structural impediments that have made it difficult to provide effective services in formal systems. Quite the contrary, they too are dependent on supportive structures to be effective. “You can’t turn volunteers and kids loose and hope for the best,” says Marjorie Wilkes of New York Mentoring. “It’s plain unrealistic to assume mentoring is easy or that you can do it on the cheap.” The strongest conclusion of a synthesis of seven years of research on mentoring was that effective mentoring requires program structures that support mentors in their efforts to build trust and develop positive relationships with youth. “Most volunteers and youth cannot be simply matched and then left to their own devices.” Programs must provide the infrastructure – including screening, training, and ongoing supervision – to foster the development of effective relationships.”
“In talking with researchers and practitioners about the importance of relationships, I have concluded that I have been observing the evolution of a new form of professional practice, often at odds with more conventional ways of working.”
The new practice has emerged, more pragmatically than ideologically, from many disciplinary origins, often in opposition to professional traditions. The touchstones of the new practice are new professional skills, new professional norms, new power relationships, and a new mindset about what it means to be a professional. Far from ‘coddling’ their clients, which worries conservative politicians, the new professional aims, quite consciously, to strengthen the ability of clients, students, young people and families to make the journey toward independence and to take greater control over their own and their children’s lives. To this end, practitioners elicit client strengths and assets rather than pathology.”
The family support movement has been one impetus behind the development of a new relationship between helper and helped, encouraging transactions that become a “problem-solving exchange between mutually respecting persons.”
“These are obviously tricky waters. The balance between being supportive and being challenging, between providing security and new worlds to master, between building on family strengths without forgetting that family pathology also requires a competent response, is hard to achieve and maintain. So it is not surprising that many effective programs report that to achieve this balance, they pay careful attention in recruitment to personal characteristics and relevant life experience as well as formal education.
The new practitioner, then, especially in working with populations that have been disconnected from the supports traditionally provided by families and neighbors, is able to help reduce dependency and strengthen families by adopting a new, empowering and collaborative mode of professional practice.
From Lisbeth Schorr, Common Purpose – Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America. Doubleday, 1997. Pages 12 – 15.
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Prevalence of Selected Potential Barriers to Employment for Women Receiving Welfare and Not Receiving Welfare in 1991.Potential Barrier to Employment
/ Current Welfare Recipients % / Non Recipients %Medical Problems of the Household head
/ 17.06 / 6.87Not seeking work because of own medical problems / 10.41 / 2.20
Medical condition limits the kind or amount of work individual can do. / 6.65 / 4.67
Children’s Medical Problems
Presence of child with chronic condition / 20.70 / 10.88Mental Health Problems
/ 24.20 / 11.38Is depressed 5 – 7 days per week / 13.19 / 4.26
Is depressed 3 – 5 days per week / 11.05 / 7.14
Alcohol and drug use
/ 36.92 / 29.64Is concerned about being an alcoholic or has had recent problems at work or school because of drinking / 4.88 / 4.84
Some physical indication of problem drinking (shakes, loss of memory, drinking in the morning). / 19.98 / 9.46
Has used or currently uses cocaine or crack extensively (more than 100’s times) / 8.70 / 7.29
Has used or currently uses marijuana extensively / 15.67 / 14.54
Low Basic Skills
/ 64.49 / 22.23Extremely low basic skills (bottom decile) / 33.05 / 7.6
Very low basic skills (10th – 25th percentile) / 31.44 / 14.63
Presence of any barriers to employment
Severe barriers, excluding low skills / 31.54 / 16.86Severe barriers, including extremely low basic skills / 53.70 / 22.55
Moderate or severe barriers, excluding low skills / 65.88 / 45.29
Moderate or severe barriers, including very low basic skills / 89.10 / 55.86
Sample size
/ 517 / 4014Range of Estimates in the Literature of Potential Barriers to Employment Among TANF Recipients
Barrier to Employment
/ Low Estimate % / High Estimate %Serious Disability
/ 6.1 / 13.6Any health limitation / 16.6 / 28.5
Mental health problems / 2.0 / 28.4
Child with some level of disability / 11.1 / 21.1
Excessive or frequent drug or alcohol abuse / 4.9 / 37.0
Domestic violence / 6.1 / 80.0
Child welfare involvement / 3.2 / 20.0
Homelessness of housing instability / 9.3 / 48.0
Low skills (grade school education) / 10.0 / 30.0
From “Personal and Family Challenges to the Successful Transition from Welfare to Work”, by Krista Olsen and LaDonna Pavetti. The Urban Institute, May 17, 1996. Prepared for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation and the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Critical Issues Facing Faith-Based Organizations
as Providers of Community Services
Philanthropic Particularism
The tendency to "focus on particular subgroups" to the exclusion of others". There has been a tendency for the congregations to focus on what are perceived to be "safe" groups. There has also been a tendency to focus on internal issues and groups to the exclusion or neglect of external groups.
Philanthropic Paternalism
The tendency for those running voluntary associations (in this case churches) to be relatively well off and thus not sufficiently sensitive to or knowledgeable about those in need" (Monsma, When Sacred and Secular Mix, p. 22).
Philanthropic Amateurism
"The tendency for necessary professional skills and perspectives to be undercut or watered down by the pet nostrums of nonprofessionals". Monsma, p. 22)
Philanthropic Insufficiency
"The central failing of the voluntary system as a provider of collective goods has been its inability to generate resources on a scale that is both adequate enough and reliable enough to cope with the human service problems of an advanced industrial society". (Salamon, Partners in Public Service, 1995, p. 45).