Jobless say amen to quick prayer

Los Angeles Times

WARREN, Mich. — Standing in city hall’s marble lobby, unemployed autoworker Rick Litwin and his wife, Maria, waited beneath the maroon-hued vinyl banner of the public prayer station.

Rick Litwin, Bible in hand, greeted everyone passing by with the same question: “Do you need a prayer today?”

There weren’t a lot of takers, but Litwin figured that in a city with a nearly 17 percent unemployment rate, there can be no shortage of need.

“It’s sad to realize that people have to get so low before they find their faith,” said Litwin, 47. “And it’s sad to see how far we’ve fallen.”

The city of Warren, which sprawls across the industrial landscape of southeast Michigan, just north of Detroit, has had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. At least one-third of the city’s 138,000 residents rely on the automotive industry for their livelihood, and they’ve been hit hard by the recession.

And so since February, the Tabernacle Church, a small Pentecostal parish of 200, including the Litwins, has been running the prayer station at city hall.

“We figured out pretty fast that people had lost faith in the auto industry and lost faith in the state. But they still were reaching for something to believe in,” said Pastor Darius Walden.

With many of the city’s factories furloughed and its shopping areas emptying out, city hall seemed a perfect spot.

Warren’s main library branch sits on the ground floor, behind a four-story wall of glass and an atrium crisscrossed with gunmetal-gray beams. Its computer lab is routinely full, with residents applying for unemployment online or filling out job applications. Parents and children crowd the stacks, searching for books and DVDs.

Three days a week, volunteers from Tabernacle Church and several other parishes sit behind a white plastic folding table and offer to pray with strangers.

In the hubbub of city hall, passers- by have mistaken the prayer volunteers for protesters. Time and again, people ask if they are breaking the law. (The American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan has no complaints: City policy allows any group, religious or not, to reserve space on the lobby floor.)

Word of the prayer station has spread as the city hall crowds have grown. This month, the Tabernacle Church fielded requests for more prayer stations.

The manager of a 7-Eleven wants one set up next to his soda machines. So does the owner of a Conoco Phillips gas station.