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Kordell Richardson's mother, a devout Baptist, taught her children never to accept a handout. But when Richardson separated from her husband more than 20 years ago she faced a dilemma. She suffered from asthma, had two young girls at home, and a third was on the way.

A neighbor encouraged Richardson, of Battle Creek, Michigan, to apply for welfare assistance, and she began receiving a monthly stipend through Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). "They helped me all right—they helped me get in such a big mess," Richardson recalls.

"There was nothing else I could do at that time," she says. "I was pregnant, I couldn't work."

From the start, Richardson says she strived to become self-sufficient. She found a babysitter for her girls and took piecemeal jobs. "Every time I would make a little money, thinking I could safely get off welfare, I got dragged back into it." Richardson tried numerous government-conceived strategies to wean her family from public aid. "It was a dead-end situation," she says. "They always had some program, but it didn't last long enough for you to really benefit, or it closed down."

In 1995, Richardson moved to Lansing, Michigan, where she qualified to rent an apartment at a government-subsidized rate of $8 a month. Her Section 8 caseworker, Mary Ann Harkema, directed the local affiliate of Love in the Name of Christ (Love INC), a community clearinghouse of area churches that links laypeople with neighbors in need.

Harkema encouraged Richardson to obtain work experience through volunteer opportunities. Eventually Richardson landed a paying job, but she told Harkema, "I'll go crazy 'cause I'm going to have some money now, and I'm going to spend, spend, spend." Harkema introduced Richardson to Quality Living, a Love INC 36-week, biblically based life skills class conducted by South Church of the Nazarene in Lansing. She went from welfare to being a homeowner in two years. Richardson, baptized in October, is now a budget counselor in the program at South Church.

"If they can get a handle on a budget, they can get in control of something in their lives," Harkema says. The Lansing Love INC, one of about 100 affiliates nationwide, helps support the Quality Living program in a dozen area churches. In all, 125 families in Lansing have gone through the program, which places churches in a mentoring relationship with families transitioning from welfare to work. Only 10 percent have dropped out.

"True compassion is living with someone, loving, and being close to someone during their ups and downs over a long period of time," Harkema says.

Richardson knows that South Church's help enabled her to break free from welfare. "They didn't just say, OK, this is how you do it," she says. "They were my friends."

WILL CHURCHES FILL THE BREACH? Richardson's metamorphosis has come in the midst of an upheaval in the federal welfare system. Two years ago, Congress passed legislation that ended welfare as America has known it since the New Deal (CT, April 7, 1997, p. 46).

Welfare-reform legislation has been a tremendous success if measured solely by reduction in the number of welfare cases. But when it comes to reducing the number of people trying to escape a lifestyle of poverty, reform has a ways to go. And willing churches have a historic opportunity to help poor people across the board, meeting their spiritual needs as well as their need to earn a living.

The radical overhaul of the system has been based partly on the assumption that faith-based assistance to the poor could not only provide a buffer, but help transform lives far more effectively than the government ever could.

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December 7 1998, Vol. 42, No. 14