Houses of God are trying to save other houses along with souls.
As the nation’s foreclosure epidemic touches more and more homeowners, churches and religious organizations are working to help their flocks — by providing counseling, financial help or simply offering up their locations for outside groups to host counseling sessions.
Church staffers say they’re overwhelmed by requests for assistance and that they’re often unable to help everyone who asks.
“Things are horrible,” said Jayne Mazur, director of Catholic Charities of Pueblo. “We get a hundred phone calls for help a day, and we can schedule a dozen people for consultation. For every person who calls, we have to turn away two or three. It’s very difficult.”
In Pueblo County, where four to five families a day lost their home to foreclosure last year, Catholic Diocese of Pueblo offers housing counseling, first-time-homebuyer classes and helps negotiate refinancing from lenders.
“Trust factor” with a church
Colorado, which led the nation in foreclosures in 2006, dropped to eighth place by mid-2008 as other states’ filing rates increased faster. Yet the state’s foreclosure rate remains high, with one in 390 households receiving a foreclosure notice, according to mid-year statistics.
“I think, from what I hear, a lot of money is flowing through churches to help people keep their homes,” said Ryan McMaken, with the state housing division.
The Catholic Church seems to make the single biggest concerted effort, McMaken said; however, no one is tracking how many other churches are involved and how much they’re giving to stave off homelessness for their congregants.
Crossroads Church in Loveland, a nondenominational megachurch, provided the venue for a Home Preservation Fair in July sponsored by Sen. Ken Salazar and the nonprofit Credit Counseling Services.
The church was a good place to hold classes on foreclosure and refinancing, credit counselor Sara Gilbert said, because many financially troubled homeowners are wary of lenders, brokers and other financial advisers.
Some 50 people attended the fair.
“People are reluctant to seek help, afraid to ask questions,” Gilbert said. “There’s a trust factor there with a church.”
One of the places people go when they can’t make their mortgage payment is their church.
“Just a Band-Aid”
“We’re seeing more people coming to us for help all the time,” said Randy Weinert, spokesman for Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of Denver, which encompasses northern Colorado. “We keep track of how many people we help. We don’t know how many we turn away.”
In fiscal year 2007-08, which ended June 20, Denver Catholic Charities gave $1.5 million to help 2,200 households with rent or mortgage assistance and 3,361 households with utilities.
In Pueblo in 2007, the diocese paid out $450,000 for rent, mortgage payments and utility assistance.
“It’s all homelessness prevention,” Mazur said. “If someone comes to us one month behind, we can sometimes help. Two months behind, it’s much harder. By three months, it’s getting hopeless.”
Gilbert, the credit counselor, said the financial help churches provide is often only a temporary fix.
“On the pastoral level, a church helping a few members with one or two emergency payments is just a Band-Aid, not a solution,” she said.
Metro CareRing, a nonprofit started in 1974 by five downtown Protestant churches and still supported by faith-based organizations, serves 30,000 working poor a year with utility assistance and a food pantry.
Liesl Pyle, with Metro CareRing, collaborates with Jewish Family Service to run the HOME Alliance Program, which provides rental and utility assistance and intensive case management to help clients stabilize.
“We get many, many frantic calls about foreclosures from first-time callers,” Pyle said, “Our program is not set up to assist with mortgage payments and the high amounts, $1,500 and more, needed to stop foreclosure. We do not have enough funding to do mortgages.”
The Pueblo Diocese and Denver Archdiocese can afford to help any given household only once in a 12-month period.
“We help people and we do it with dignity and respect, but we are a very small finger in a very large dike with more and more pressure building behind it,” Mazur said of religious organizations. “We are not the answer.”
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com
