"It takes a lot of psychic energy to start with, to get beyond all of the name-calling and shibboleths that all of us carry around with us, to asking, where can we see God inviting us to act in ways that express God's justice and mercy?"

When Peter Peters was asked to represent the Diocese of Rochester at an ecumenical public policy meeting in Albany several years ago, he found the experience unsettling.

"Albany is a very unnerving place to be," he says. "It's a bit like Washington, D.C. -- big buildings, offices, bureaucrats and lots of things going on. I'd done a bit of lobbying and advocating before, but not a lot, and so I found myself asking, why do I feel this way and how does the church gain confidence to be part of this process?"

Upon returning home Peters, rector of St. Luke's, Fairport, N.Y., set about creating a public policy task force in his congregation, as well as one on the diocesan level.

"I decided that, for me, my most significant community of empowerment was the church and, in particular, the congregation I serve," he says. "It seemed that if I was going to try to integrate my faith life with my civic life, that would be the arena in which I needed to test this out. So I called some people together and said, I want to form a public policy group."

The group -- which adopted the name PPICS (Public Policy Issues and Christian Stewardship) -- pledged themselves "to rediscover the Church's traditional role in supporting/assisting the poor and the needy, and to discover how this is to be expressed in the present political climate."

They decided to begin by focusing on one issue and chose welfare reform.

"What we discovered in practice was that it takes a long time for us to study issues and become well-versed enough that we feel we have something to offer others," Peters says. "It takes a lot of psychic energy to start with, to get beyond all of the name-calling and shibboleths that all of us carry around with us, to asking, where can we see God inviting us to act in ways that express God's justice and mercy?"

Since the group included members who spanned the political spectrum, there was a need "to find a common discourse," Peters says. "There was a real effort to say, how do we as Christians relate to the poor, and to recognize that not all of us trust government agencies as being the best equipped to meet the needs of the poor. We didn't solve the problem of who should do the delivery, but we did recognize that we ought to be involved in getting something done."

By Lent of 1997, PPICS was able to organize a teach-in on welfare.

"We had over 60 people on Sunday evenings coming to talk about welfare reform," Peters says. "And then, something really remarkable happened -- a city church came out to the suburbs to join us. It was a Baptist church, and they wanted to join us in conversation. It enriched us enormously. Then we had welfare people come out and talk to us, and that blew my mind. Here were these young women talking to us about their experiences with a dignity and an invitation to recognize their dignity that was compelling."

As a result, St. Luke's established an ongoing relationship with Lake Avenue Baptist Church.

"One of our most conservative members became involved in the Lake Avenue Baptist Church Outreach Program," Peters reports. "He was particularly concerned that they get some support for a youth initiative they were trying to do, and he and another member of the group leveraged money for the program. We found that one of the skills we brought to the table is skill in knowing how to leverage things -- and that was a way that we could become empowering of others."

Peters feels it is important, however, to maintain a focus on advocacy.

"It's easy to get tempted to become simply a traditional outreach committee, getting connected with hands-on experiences," he says. "We've tried to say no, we have the role of advocacy. We want to advocate in areas of public policy on behalf of those who are disempowered, and we want to educate the community about the impact of public policy on the disenfranchised or the marginalized. We also are willing to leverage ways to assist existing programs, but we're not going to become an outreach program of the church."

Peters also meets every other month with the diocesan public policy task force "to consider ways in which we can best serve the diocese to give it a more public voice.

"We've not done anything incredible yet -- the most we've done so far is to get on board with the rural farmworkers bill. Farmworkers were not subject to New York State labor laws, and we became part of an advocacy group to try and get that changed. That has been somewhat successful; they are now treated under minimum wage law, they have the right to a day off a week and to have bathroom and handwashing facilities in the fields.

"The other thing we're trying to do is give people in parishes a theological rationale for being involved in public policy. The essential theological part of that is to say, look, public policy is really an aspect of Christian stewardship. One thing that's been given to us is power, and how we use our power -- political and civic -- is an aspect of stewardship."

The diocesan task force has held a workshop and created a study guide on "The Church and Public Policy." Peters is aware of at least two congregations, in addition to St. Luke's, which have begun their own task forces.

Peters does not regard himself as an activist.

"I haven't been the kind of person who has been out banging the drums," he says. "I'm a member of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship, but have not been an aggressive member. But I am a person with a thorough commitment to what church is: Church is not a retreat, church is an engagement with the living God and a community through which one joins the living God in working for justice."

Peters traces the beginning of his vocation to a priest who befriended him in Sydney, Australia, where he landed after running away from his home in England at age 16.

"It was this very conservative evangelical setting, and the priest led me to a personal relationship with Christ. And for me as an adolescent, a young man who had run away from an unhappy home, it was an incredible sense of belonging. I wanted to be part of that, and the best way I saw of being part of that was being a priest. Wherever I have lived, the church has always given me that sense of belonging. What's become more important to me is belonging to a community that has a real sense of place and context for ministry, and belonging to a community that is seeking to deepen its relationship with the mystery we call God."

After ordination, Peters worked in a parish in a university town in Australia before coming to the U.S. to study at Yale and then Vanderbilt.

"I had begun to drift from this evangelical, personal-salvation sort of focus before leaving Australia, and I was beginning to ask myself, what is it about my relationship with Christ that has to do with how I behave in the world around me? And as I encountered people at Yale and later at Vanderbilt, and read people like H. Richard Niebuhr and Reinhold Niebuhr, I began to understand that I was now in a relationship with God who was seeking to make God's rule manifest among us.

"What I've done since then is continue to read and reflect on how theology and context relate. I've become much more aware of the fact that my context shapes how I hear and read theology.

"Also, my wife, Gayle Harris, has been to me an enormous source of having my consciousness raised about my assumptions. I grew up poor and a school drop-out, and now I have a PhD. How did that happen? Well, a lot of it happened because I decided that I needed to make a better job of my life. But a lot of the doors that opened for me seemed to open with some degree of ease, and as I listen to Gayle tell her story, it's a different story. There's the sense that being white and male, it's easier to knock on doors than it is when you're black and female. She faces challenges that I would never be faced with, and she's questioned in ways that I'm not questioned."

Peters regards Anglican tradition as supportive of the church's voice in the public square.

"Anglicans are really able to raise up this passion for the common good. Incorporated in our liturgy is an awareness that we live together as a political society. We pray for our political leadership. We pray for our institutions of government and civic concern. They are central to our sense of who we are as a people."

Peters believes that when people want the church to "stay out of politics," it is most often out of fear of "the animosity, the divisiveness, the shrillness of the voices in the public square. They want a safe place where they will not be treated with the same kind of rhetoric.

"I'm trying to encourage them that, yes, the church can be a safe place, but we need to take the risk of dealing with differences and conflict, and putting them on the table in such a way that we maintain respect for each other. If the church does not encourage conversation around public policy issues, it really is conducting a kind of museum exercise -- you know, let's do the ancient crafts and pretend that we're ostriches for a couple of hours. This is a place where we need to reflect, but also leave here ready to engage the wider world."

Marianne Arbogast is associate editor of The Witness.