By Chris Lovett

It's a late Sunday morning along Washington Street in Dorchester. Near the intersection of Harvard Street, at Four Corners, there's an open door at Revival Deliverance Temple Church. From outside, the words of a preacher can be heard, alternating with voices singing hallelujah and hands clapping in rhythm. Despite the 80 degree heat, men walk the street in somber gray suits, some carrying books of scripture.

Closer to Codman Square, at Grace Church of All Nations, the windows of what used to be an A & P supermarket are full of worshippers. If the church could be mistaken for a store, it would have to be a thriving business. But, on weekdays, most of the church doors are closed and the idle storefronts give Washington Street an appearance of economic decline. An idle church on a weekday is normal, but what makes Four Corners abnormal is the high concentration of churches, many in what used to be commercial space.

That concentration of churches, and what it means for the surrounding neighborhood, is explored in the recently published book by Omar M. McRoberts, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood. Some activists in Four Corners feel their neighborhood is "overchurched" and underserved by many of the 29 institutions Roberts counts in the "religious district." But some clergy, including those who have yet to read his book, feel unfairly accused of ignoring the local community. And they point out that the low-rent space filled by churches would otherwise be vacant seven days a week.

Since the early 1990s, Four Corners has taken steps toward recovery from economic decline and street violence. As McRoberts notes, neighborhood groups took those steps with help from some of the area's churches. But this is a far cry from the church-led campaigns for neighborhood revival in Brooklyn and the South Bronx, not to mention the role of churches in some parts of Boston.

As McRoberts views the "religious district," there are two barriers to making it a neighborhood asset. One is that many of the churches fill niches, drawing members from a large geographical area. Some are primarily made up of immigrants or migrants from other parts of the United States. Others draw members to a particular brand of faith that might have few followers in the surrounding neighborhood.

Another barrier is that most of the churches only rent their space. Should Four Corners experience an economic upturn like those in Codman Square and Grove Hall, the churches would be more vulnerable to displacement. They would also have less reason to help create improvements that could force them out of the neighborhood.

Now an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, McRoberts visited a number of Four Corners churches during his graduate work at Harvard in the 1990s. He found that some churches viewed "the street" as a place for outreach and service, exemplified in work with at-risk young people by the Azusa Christian Community. Others saw "the street" as a place for recruitment, and still others as a place of evil to be avoided.

For a number of the churches, estrangement from the neighborhood was part of a larger, spiritual distance between heaven and earth. Immigrant worshipers transposed distance from their native countries into the language of "spiritual exile," while others were at odds with the temptations of secular culture. The forerunners to these churches are the "spiritual strivings" described by W.E.B. Du Bois a century ago as the attempt by African Americans to surmount the values, perceptions and barriers of a predominantly white society. Those strivings would later take shape in the social engagement and leadership of the black church in the civil rights movement. But the estrangement from the mainstream also has something in common with the attitude of Dorchester's first white settlers, the dissenting Protestants who arrived from England in 1630 to set up "God's Plantation" in a "hideous wilderness."

Despite their differing attitudes toward the neighborhood, McRoberts notes that clergy in most Four Corners churches, even if feeling "in the world but not of it," viewed themselves as activists who were changing the world. In some churches, especially those made up of immigrants, changing the world often meant doing the job of a specialized settlement house, helping members with literacy, social service and job referrals.

Among Holiness and Pentecostal Churches McRoberts observed how emotionally charged ritual had the power "to level social distinctions." This is what one pastor called the "trickle-down" approach to social change. As a form of salvation through a church, even through the company of its members, this is a long way from the introspective quest described by one of Dorchester's early Puritans, or the "inner loneliness" the Max Weber saw in the "spirit of Protestantism" among Europeans. But all these forms of spiritual salvation transform individuals from within, and they have all been hailed as a way to help believers improve their secular lot as well, especially when struggling to get a foothold in the middle class.

While McRoberts wrote that he routinely saw "profound events of psychological healing and subjective empowerment," he also found limited benefit for the surrounding neighborhood. He argues the lack of local involvement by churches, along with a lack of secular institutions like community development corporations, hamper neighborhoods like Four Corners from competing for resources.

"This isn't about churches not doing anything," he said at a discussion of his book last Wednesday at the Ella J. Baker House. "It's about the difference between neighborhood-based activism and other kinds of involvement in the social world." In his book, he warns that a shortage of local focus one the part of churches means that "more neighborhoods will fall through the cracks, with no institutions emerging as local advocates."

During the discussion, the executive director of the Four Corners Action Coalition, Marvin Martin was more blunt. He did credit some churches and ministers with helping the group work on public safety and neighborhood development needs. "There are other churches," he added, "that we come to and they have not responded, and I've been working here since 1995."

But there is disagreement about the physical dimensions of the neighborhood. McRoberts sees an area smaller than a square mile. Some pastors who describe their congregations as "local" stretch the definition far enough to include Roxbury, Mattapan, Hyde Park, Roslindale, and other sections of Dorchester. That's as different from the dimensions of a typical Catholic parish as it is from the service area of a CDC, community health center or Boys' and Girls' Club, even if the churches described by McRoberts have some of the inward character that was more apparent among Boston's Catholic parishes before Vatican II.

Ken Johnson, executive director of the House, says inward churches can change over time and become more outward. He says the need is for churches of Four Corners to grow by evangelizing, even if beyond McRoberts' notion of neighborhood boundaries.

"The gospel's not limited by the neighborhood," Johnson says.

He also argued that the diversity of Four Corners and the membership of its churches is too atypical to serve as base for conclusions about black churches in America.

McRoberts traces the history of "niche" churches in Boston's black community back more than a century, and he notes clusters of churches in other black neighborhoods around the country. But he contends his book is not exclusively a reflection on black churches. Indeed, one of the books he cites, Gerald Gamm's Urban Exodus, details the shifts in population and hold on territory among Jewish and Catholic congregations in Dorchester, Roxbur,y and Mattapan. While Gamm argues the Jewish congregations were less bound by territory, and neighborhoods around their places of worship more exposed to forces of change, he also notes those forces affected both faith groups, starting with widespread access to the automobile in the 1920s.

To supporters of faith-based programs in the federal government, many of the churches described by McRoberts might have appeal in their avoidance of movements for social change. After all, as one member of clergy put it in the book, social change would be useless without individual spiritual change. But McRoberts warns that having churches do the work done by territorial social service or development agencies might "rely on nostalgic, inaccurate" notions of community and church.

"There are a lot of churches that stay put but don't manifest any particular concern about the activity of the area," he said. "And if that lack of neighborhood focus activism comes from some deeper religious motivation about what the role of the church is, then I don't think any amount of money would turn that around.

"And if all it took was money to turn around a church that thought that its activism was primarily spiritual into a church that suddenly wants to run a multi-service agency, I think it would lead to a lot of cynicism about the motives of religious institutions."

One early argument against publicly funded faith-based programs can be found in the enthusiasm over the independence of American churches from government, expressed by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America. According to de Tocqueville, the state religions of Europe were no match for the power of independent churches in America to influence and command loyalty from their followers.

But even last week's discussion offered some possibility of collaboration between the religious and secular institutions. McRoberts suggested that churches faced with displacement by new development might be able to survive in Four Corners by a form of time-sharing. Boston neighborhoods with more success in community development might also be worthy of study for models of collaboration between religious and secular institutions. And those examples might even show how collaborations between religious and secular institutions could offset any drawbacks to dependence on government funding.

More difficult for social science to measure is how much any loss in territorial focus on the part of churches or worshipers might also be an adaptation to forces such as the high cost of housing. If the population of immigrants and working poor is more dispersed throughout the metropolitan area, the ability of its churches to maintain a tight geographical focus would have to suffer.

One more factor in the balance between the secular and the religious is the way in which people form the attachments that forge a community. If they are less drawn to the relatively impersonal character of civic engagement, they might prefer the greater intimacy of a religious institution. Given the capacity for growth and innovation among Boston's secular and religious organizations, it might be too soon to declare the fall of public life. But, as commuting patterns and work schedules change the way people live, religious and secular worlds might be pulled farther apart, with less in common and more in conflict.

Chris Lovett is the news director and anchor of the Neighborhood Network News, which is cablecast each weeknight on BNN-TV channel 9.