Upstairs in the office of Bethel A.M.E. Church, located several blocks from recent rioting, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake waits for a Tuesday news conference to begin. She vents about the self-destructive nature of the violence — attacks on businesses that were hard to attract to low-income neighborhoods — and the sad irony that many of the places targeted were frequented by Freddie Gray. She rehearses for me the difficult choices involved in an appropriate but not overmilitarized police response. Pressures come from every side. The Maryland government, she says, denies needed education funding while watching over her shoulder on law and order. The schools were closed that day, in part because teachers were refusing to come to work.

Down in the sanctuary, to the accompaniment of helicopter noise and sirens, Christian and Jewish leaders announce an effort to help feed poor children who won’t be getting meals at school that day. Bethel’s pastor, the Rev. Dr. Frank Reid III, adds a mild corrective for the mayor, who is standing beside him. Early in the crisis, Rawlings-Blake (D) had referred to those involved in violence as “thugs.” “There are no thugs in Baltimore,” says Reid. “There are abused children” who “become abusers.”

After the news conference ends, I sit with Reid in the front pew. Now 63, he has seen or participated in almost every stage of the civil rights struggle, becoming one of the most respected religious figures in Baltimore and an important leader of the broader movement.

Reid is tired from the exertions of the late night before. After Gray’s funeral Monday at New Shiloh Baptist Church, hundreds of pastors marched in the midst of violence, in what Reid called “a demonstration of love and fearlessness.” Returning to the church, religious leaders held a two-hour dialogue with gang leaders.

“One young man said to me, ‘You Frank Reid. My grandma made me go to your church when I was little.’ I felt like a failure. How did I let this brother get away? But then it hit me. He remembered, and it was a positive memory.” Reid continues: “There is an opening in many young lives. There is an opportunity to touch a new generation — not to use them for church purposes but to empower them to fulfill their purpose in life. That’s exciting. Is it dangerous? What isn’t dangerous?”

This is one of the most distinctive contributions of faith-based institutions to discussions on poverty and crime. Their vision of social healing is required to include the victimizers as well, who will remain in communities, or return from prison, after the cameras leave. “Everyone should have a second chance, even a third chance,” says Reid.

He locates the Baltimore violence in a broader context, quoting sociologist Robert Putnam on a growing “opportunity gap” in American life. “When the opportunity gap gets as vast as it is,” Reid says, “it is filled with frustration, fear, powerlessness.” Reid is hoping for political leaders with the ambition of Lyndon Johnson “on the big issues of education, housing and the redistribution of wealth.” But he is not hopeful about the state of American politics. “Left and right have put on blinders and ear plugs. They are not listening to each other. Everything reaffirms a preexisting policy position.” Public discourse, he says, has become “violence without a gun.”

Reid, in obvious frustration, raises some uncomfortable questions. “If the marchers here had gone to the Inner Harbor, would we have seen that looting? The police would have prevented it.” The Inner Harbor is the tourist district. Some communities seem more expendable than others.

And Reid poses “a question for the black community.” “Do we now have a black political class,” he asks, “out of contact with the personal needs of the people they serve? In the white community, there is an attitude of ‘you people.’ Is there a ‘you people’ idea in the black political class? I don’t know.”

Our conversation loops back to hope. “We need to turn to each other, not on each other,” he says. “A moment can become a tipping point, and it doesn’t always tip to the negative. The funeral yesterday was a positive tipping point, a foundation for the future. Romans Chapter 8 says that creation is moaning, groaning, giving birth. What we are seeing in urban neighborhoods is groaning and pain. If we stay focused, we can give birth to something positive and powerful.”

Why Religion Matters: Making Selves Out of Others

This essay on faith and community is the second in a five-part series about the value of religion

SALT LAKE CITY — 

“Together is harder, but together is better.” — Rabbi David Wolpe[1]

Why do people belong to religions? Some inherit a religion at birth while others may convert to one. But at one point or another people make a conscious decision whether to participate in their religious communities. In fact, the root word for religion is the Latin “religare,” which means to reconnect or bind. In an age that magnifies personal freedom, what could sound less attractive than “binding” oneself to the quirks and idiosyncrasies of a large group of people?

And yet a principle found in many religions is that there is little separation between you and the people around you. Jesus Christ put the charge quite simply: “love thy neighbor as thyself.”[2] In other words, your well-being is much more than aloof personal freedom; it is tied to your neighbor’s well-being also. And so, religious institutions can be helpful junctures where two cooperating impulses meet — the desire for individual purpose and the desire for communal belonging. Like all human goods, these impulses fit within a balance.

Institutional religions are certainly not the only source of all that is good in the world. Individuals can have fulfilling lives while quietly living out their own beliefs in private. But throughout history nothing has rivaled organized religion in its ability to foster commitment to concrete people who live in concrete places.[3] It is in this sustained engagement with neighbors that religion makes its lasting contribution.

Being part of a church is much more than just going to church. It fills people with identity, opportunity, aspiration, learning and many more personal blessings. But these come to individuals insofar as they look beyond themselves to others. Religion instills social responsibility and covenant-making in our lives, based not on self-interest but as a promise to God. This act of “binding” is one of the rare things in history that forges social obligations beyond family or tribe. Fellow believers are often in the best position to care for an ailing person, repair a neighbor’s house or fill in countless other gaps that we ourselves cannot fill. There are few, if any, organizations that can substitute for the community of a church.

Nevertheless, one of the defining features of our time is a waning trust in institutions, including religious institutions. As a result, many people are more isolated from families, communities and society at large. It is so easy to become atomized — breaking into islands of individuals untethered to larger associations. The writer David Brooks lamented the condition wherein “individuals don’t live embedded in tight social orders; they live in buffered worlds of private choices.”[4]

Societies that encourage materialism, individualism and moral relativism may promote what has been called the “sovereignty of self,”[5] but they weaken other values. The social thinker Michael Walzer urges caution: “This freedom, energizing and exciting as it is, is also profoundly disintegrative, making it very difficult for individuals to find any stable communal support, very difficult for any community to count on the responsible participation of its individual members.”[6]

Detached individualism contributes to the trend in society of being “spiritual but not religious.” What this often means is that faith is treated as a personal matter, not the business of other people. But there need not be a contradiction between the two. A person can be both spiritual and religious. In fact, the two are interdependent in vibrant religious lives.

As author Lillian Daniel says, "Anyone can find God alone in the sunset. It takes a certain maturity to find God in the person sitting next to you who has different political views, or when a baby who is crying while you're trying to listen to the sermon."[7] Yet these very inconveniences with other people give substance to our faith, enrich our human empathies and bolster our civic foundation.

In this age of falling trust and social disintegration, a return to the sacred commitments of congregations will make our communities more cohesive. When the fabric of society begins to fray, religion with its layered threads of social capital can help bind it together.


[1] Rabbi David Wolpe, “The Limitations of Being ‘Spiritual but Not Religious,’” Time Magazine, Mar. 21, 2013.

[2] Mark 12:31.

[3] See Jonathan Sacks, “The Moral Animal,” New York Times, Dec. 23, 2012.

[4] David Brooks, “The Secular Society,” New York Times, July 8, 2013.

[5] Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (New York City, New York: Basic Books, 2008).

[6] Michael Walzer, Citizenship and Civil Society (Rutgers, N.J.: New Jersey Committee for the Humanities Series on the Culture of Community, October 13, 1992), part 1, pp. 11-12.

[7] Lillian Daniel, “Spiritual but not religious? Path may still lead to Church,” Winnipeg Free Press, Oct. 5, 2013.

By Victoria St. Martin, Published: January 17

There’s no electricity or heat in the house.

But when the bags of groceries are delivered to her doorstep, Tomashawn Lewis-Johnson spreads out their contents on her kitchen counter like a child with her favorite toys. She daydreams about the beans and crushed tomatoes she’ll use to make a dish for her family.

“I’m so grateful,” said Lewis-Johnson, a wife and mother of four, as she received bags of donated groceries last week. “You don’t know what’s going to be in your bag. But knowing that I can create something different and new and stretch a meal, it’s just exciting.”

The Kensington mother is one of dozens of families in the lower Montgomery County town who, thanks to a new effort by St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, has received emergency supplies of groceries.

Three times, Lewis-Johnson has called a hotline to request a three-day emergency supply of groceries from the church, which in October began partnering with the nonprofit group Bethesda Help to increase the number of food deliveries within the 20895 Zip code that includes Kensington. Bethesda Help for decades has provided food delivery and financial assistance in the Zip code and county as a whole.

“When this started — it was like, ‘[There are] hungry people here in Kensington?’ But there are hidden pockets of poverty all over the Zip code,” said Brian Ruberry, a church volunteer. “And it really opens your eyes to the need there is within a mile of this church.”

Church volunteers said they want to create a “hunger-free zone” in their Zip code. Residents who calls the telephone hotline — (301) 365-2022 — receive a food delivery within 24 hours, no questions asked.

About 8 percent of Montgomery County’s roughly 1 million residents — or 77,970 people — are food insecure, according to the 2013 Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap report.

The number includes people who are enrolled in the Food Supplement Program as well as those who aren’t. Fifty-one percent of county residents earn too much to qualify for federal assistance programs, according to the report, and have nowhere to turn but local charities.

An estimated 6.2 percent of residents ages 18 to 64 live below the poverty level, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2012 American Community Survey.

“The thing about hunger is it’s not visible,” said Michael J. Wilson, director of Maryland Hunger Solutions. “You can live in a nice house with a nice car in the yard, and have nothing in your refrigerator.”

Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, said 71 percent of those living in poverty in the D.C. metro area live in the suburbs, not including Arlington and Alexandria. She said suburban communities and organizations in recent years are increasing efforts to meet the growing demand.

“Getting the word out about how the need has grown, and where it is today and who it affects, that’s the first step in effectively addressing it and making sure people are connected to the support they need,” Kneebone said.

The thought that people were hungry in their own back yards left members of the church’s hunger ministry unsettled. Two years ago, they had started a monthly food collection program, where families in need shopped for fresh vegetables and canned goods. But they soon realized it wasn’t enough.

“I was surprised how many people don’t have cars,” Ruberry said. “Just the fact that they can’t come to our church shouldn’t preclude them from having groceries.”

Ruberry and Kim Longsworth, a church volunteer who helps coordinate the effort, wanted to start a delivery service and then realized that Bethesda Help already provides one.

“We decided, why reinvent the wheel,” Longsworth said.

Bethesda Help has its own pantry, and the 45-year-old organization is funded by a grant from the county as well as by donations from local churches, synagogues and individual donors. The church has contributed $5,000 so far and continues to donate food to help defray costs.

Whenever a call comes in from the 20895 Zip code to Bethesda Help, Longsworth calls one of her seven volunteer drivers. Church members also posted lawn signs and handed out cards all over town in schools, local libraries and apartment buildings to get the word out.

“We don’t want any person to go to sleep and say, ‘I don’t know where I’m going to get my next meal,’ Longsworth said as she packed a delivery one rainy evening. “Our goal is to reach those people so that they know there’s this resource.”

Julie Black, a food pantry manager for Bethesda Help, said there’s no income requirement to get a delivery. “We just want to help people,” she said. “We don’t want any restrictions.”

The bags are filled with pasta, tomato sauce, bread, tuna, rice, beans, peanut butter and canned fruit, vegetables and soups. But for the families, there’s so much more inside.

“It means the difference between being hungry and having some food to cheer up my spirit,” said Micky, a single mother who asked to be identified by her nickname only.

Donya Paul, who is raising 10 children alone while going to school to pursue a second master’s degree and a doctorate in educational psychology, said she appreciates the six bags of food — and the gift card for more tucked inside — that she receives each month from the church program.

She said she uses the donations to teach her children a lesson.

“We do need people sometimes holding our hands and taking us along the way,” she said she told her son. “It’s not just the Zip code that you live in or the area, it’s about giving and making sure families are taken care of.”

And for Lewis-Johnson, whose home is in foreclosure, they are the extra leverage she needs to provide wholesome meals.

“It’s concealed blessings that people receive when the bags come through the door,” she said. “I believe we’re on the brink of a miracle.”

By Michael Laris, Published: December 26

A few years after Gertrude Troyer’s family gave up its horse and buggy, she hopped in her brother’s 1960 Pontiac Bonneville headed for Kenilworth. They didn’t know how to get there, so they just drove to the White House and eventually found a pay phone.

She was a 21-year-old country girl from Plain City, Ohio, on her way to a short stint volunteering for her Mennonite church in an impoverished Washington neighborhood.

Forty-six years later, she’s still here, standing on her tippytoes at 5:20 a.m., using a butter knife to help slide a plastic bucket of sugar from the shelf above her counter to begin work on a rush of cake orders for Christmas.

Gertie, as everyone calls her, has made it here as a missionary, a summer camp organizer and a construction office custodian. She has taken abuse from surly teens, has prayed with relatives of the murdered and now helps support herself running a makeshift cake-baking business in the brick home she shares with one of the girls she first mentored decades ago.

Wearing a black veil over pulled-back gray hair, a red cotton cape dress that covers her from neck to ankles, and Asics running shoes, Troyer tackles her morning’s baking agenda — one strawberry supreme, three red velvet, a poundcake — with the same buoyant relentlessness she has brought to the rest of her life in the city.

“Most people know that’s not the norm. Most people don’t just leave their home towns and go someplace else almost completely opposite, and stay,” said her housemate, Cynthia Sharpe, 58, who was just 11 and living in the Kenilworth Courts housing project when Troyer arrived.

At first, Sharpe said she didn’t see Troyer “as an individual,” just as one of the friendly missionaries who came to help out. Another quizzical neighborhood kid was Vincent Wright Jr., now an officer with the D.C. police.

“I was like, ‘These are some homely-looking folks,’ ” Wright recalls. “That dress makes them look like, what’s that the girl on ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ Melissa Gilbert or something?”

But that faceless distance didn’t last.

“Some people kind of take to you,” Wright said. “I just got to know her.”

Thrifty roots

In the kitchen, Gertie is a machine.

She grabs eggs in her right hand and cracks them with a sharp knock against the egg in her left. Like some just-in-time manufacturing guru, she moves fast: batter in, rotate pan, cakes out, repeat. Flour gets measured to the hundredth of a pound on her digital scale.

“It’s the way I’ve been doing it for years, and it comes out right,” said Troyer, 68.

She grew up Amish and learned to bake without electricity in her mother’s kitchen. By age 15, her father reluctantly followed local church leaders as they shifted toward a less conservative religious tradition as Mennonites. Although they still aspired to live as Jesus would, they did so with cars and electric lights.

Troyer’s frugal roots remain. She uses an empty 25-pound Domino sugar sack as a trash bag, and scrapes the paddle of her stand mixer with her fingers to get off every bit of batter, then scrapes her fingers with the spatula to get the last few drops.

She’s still smarting over the time, years ago, when a pair of red velvets went bad. She used cake flour, not self-rising.

They were dry and flat, and went to the birds.

“I was so beat out I did that,” she said, before translating the German-influenced holdover phrase for the uninitiated. “I was disgusted with myself. That’s exactly what it means.”

Then she burst out in the playful, wholehearted laugh that has melted tough kids, skeptical adults and longtime customers alike.

“Who likes to mess up a cake?” she said.



Winning them over

A year after she arrived, Washington descended into riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Troyer and the others in the small Fellowship Haven church told visiting Mennonites to leave.

“The city was in an uproar,” she said. “We didn’t want to have more people of our color than we needed.”

A grocery store down the road was looted, and some in the predominantly black neighborhood offered her protection. But she didn’t fear.

Race has been a presence over the years, but not a defining one. One uncle worried Troyer might marry a black man. And some in Kenilworth recoiled at the white outsider.

Patricia Roy grew up in the Kenilworth projects, and Troyer soon began to win her over. Troyer took her and Sharpe to Ohio. The dark nights terrified Roy, but she found peace in the hayloft. “We would be sitting on it with our feet hanging, just up there in the barn,” Roy said.

But years later in the District, Roy slid into a state of deep insecurity and negativity, she said, and she lashed out at Troyer, the closest authority figure around. “I could be mean when I wanted to be,” she said. “I wished she would go back home to Ohio.”

The Kenilworth area, tucked between the Anacostia Freeway to the east and the Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens to the west, has a rough history. Poverty rates have soared, the number of teenage pregnancies is high and birth weights remain low.

Troyer witnessed terrible choices and tragic circumstances. One boy who often came around the church killed himself, apparently after a bad drug trip. A young woman who studied the Bible with them was killed by “her supposed boyfriend,” Troyer said. Yet another was missing for days before she was found dead on a staircase.

When it came to Roy, Troyer wouldn’t budge.

“Nope, she’s got some spunk to her,” Roy said. She kept reaching out, trying to connect. “She didn’t retaliate back. She just kept loving me until I couldn’t resist it anymore.”

‘Don’t want to go big’

Troyer wants her neighbors to be able to afford her creations, just like her mother, who sewed and sold Amish men’s suits for $4 apiece.

She charges $22 for the chocolate butter and $24 for the coconut pineapple. A two-pound fruitcake, sort of a cross between walnut bread and pecan pie, goes for $21. White potato pie sells for $12. More than 90 cakes were stacked up in the basement for Christmas.

“This is an operation and a half, believe you me, and the cakes are the bomb,” said Patricia Ferguson, who stopped in to pick up a poundcake for her son’s 36th birthday. “This is a blessing.”

Also sort of a mixed blessing. Troyer loves communing with customers. But she doesn’t want an employee, and she can do only so much.

“I don’t want to go big,” she said. “I don’t want to become a millionaire. I like living.”

Over the decades, missionaries wed and left, and the Mennonite elders eventually decided to pull out. Troyer had suitors within the church, but she never married. “Gertie, she’s the last of the Mohicans,” said Wright, the D.C. police officer.

There are only a handful of members now, including the three now-grown children — Sharpe, Wright and Roy — who became Troyer’s friends.

They talked with a Pennsylvania bishop about bringing in new blood, maybe a pastor and more missionaries, but there were too many strings. The church preaches pacifism and wanted Wright to leave the police force. The bishop also wanted Sharpe, a fervent Redskins fan, to lose her television, which some view as an intrusion into God’s kingdom.

Troyer agrees with the bishop’s stance on church teachings. But when there’s a disconnect between purity and the people who have become her family, she’s chosen to live by example rather than being doctrinaire.

“I’ve watched her over the years just give it her all,” said Sharpe, who does the same.

She and Roy became public school teachers. Wright mentors kids and counsels offenders on the difference between jailhouse conversions and lasting ones. And they all run a Mennonite summer camp in Pennsylvania where needy Washington area youths can taste old-school values.

Troyer moved in with Sharpe in the 1990s to help her care for her dying mother, who suffered from diabetes. She stayed on, and rented out her own home at low rates to families who needed a break. Troyer would quietly save some of each month’s rent to return to departing families as down payments on homes of their own.

“God, Mom, and then Gertie — that’s where a lot of my strength came from,” Sharpe said.

Concerned for children

Troyer’s family, including 12 brothers and sisters, was touched with tragedy before she left Ohio. Her 8-year-old brother, Joseph, was driving a tractor out to water the calves when he was thrown off and killed.

Years later, a church newsletter describing terrible living conditions for some District children brought Troyer to tears.

“I said to the Lord: ‘What then? What do you want from me?’ ” Troyer recalled. “Just like that, it wasn’t audible, but it was very, very clear to me — D.C. This place where the children were came into my thinking and my mind and my spirit.”

Just before 7 a.m., before the sun is up, Troyer taps red velvet layers out of their pans and places them on cooling racks, then gets in her beat-up Toyota Camry and heads for a neighborhood track for her daily three-mile walk.

She’s always busy, with another lap, another cake, another person to help along his or her path.

As she walked, a glorious, magenta-saturated sunrise rose over her waking city.

“That’s what people miss when they get up late. They miss the beautiful morning,” she said. “You’ve got to capture it when it’s pretty. They don’t last long.”

Yesterday was Sunday, and I have been thinking why a person of faith might be a better American this week than he or she otherwise would be, because of it....

Americans are having an extremely difficult time getting married and staying married right now. One of the effects of divorce is extreme emotional trauma, for the adults involved but most especially for the children. The distress can be large enough in magnitude and duration that it begins to inhibit the development of the child into a happy and contributing member of society. 

The above picture captures one reason this young man of faith might be a better American because he attends church than he otherwise would be - if his father (or mother, or both) have fled his life, a sweet duo of love and assistance is shown: his loving grandmother and God, both found in the chapel of this church.

The healing power of our churches, temples, synagogues and mosques helps America better endure the tidal wave of failed marriages until we can figure out how to free ourselves from this plague on our nation.

Yesterday was Sunday, and I have been thinking why a person of faith might be a better American this week than he or she otherwise would be, because of it....

Magen Morse, Purcellville, VA
April 14, 2013


One hot July, when I was nearly fourteen, I volunteered to pay my way to work for a few weeks for the U.S. Forest Service.  Along with the other high school students, we would work in northern Utah clearing brush from trails, picking up trash along the highway, and doing various other projects.  I had answered an ad in the local newspaper, but I soon found out that those of us who volunteered for an adventure were in the minority to those whose parents or parole officers were sending them off as a way to build character and citizenship.  The cheap “Outward Bound” version.  What did I know about character and citizenship at almost 14?  What might have made me want to work hard for no pay during my summer vacation?

Looking back, I think, I had been trained in equal parts idealism and service.  I was an active member of my religious faith, and I had very clear ideas of my moral obligations to myself and others around me.  In my religion community, I had energetic youth leaders who found opportunities for us to serve in a variety of ways:  we cleaned, babysat, did yard work, prepared food, and visited nursing homes.  These leaders found opportunities for us to do lots of other things besides serving  others – we were signed up for contests in 4-H, sent to outdoor, sleep-away girl’s camps, asked to be leaders of the other girls, to speak in front of the congregation during worship services, and to sing (off-key) in small groups for those same gatherings.  

What had already happened for me before I even turned 14 can be boiled down to two ideas:  confidence and opportunity.  All this experience in an accepting environment led to confidence in my abilities.  All this experience and opportunity in a variety of activities showed me that it was possible to participate in the wider world.  Additionally, there was the imperative of serving God through serving our fellow men – and with God nothing was impossible, we were taught.  Therefore, I could volunteer to go with a bunch of strangers hundreds of miles away from home, with autonomy, and trust, and faith.

On the radio last month, I heard a man talking about how hard it was for an atheist to organize humanitarian work with other atheists.  He explained that he wasn’t dispassionate or uncaring about the needs of others in the world; but the simple fact was that their organization was necessarily lacking.  I see this as a daunting problem:  how do you teach confidence and opportunity without an organized group?  It is important to me that a vital offshoot of religious faith is in constructing a place to teach the nitty gritty of community organization in addition to teaching the moral imperative of building a strong community. Today one of the most effective tools I have is my faith community because it helps me teach my children those increasingly hard concepts of character and citizenship.

Last Saturday, I stood beside my 12 year old son, in front of a bright yellow funnel and big boxes of rice, soy, and dried vegetables.  We were assembling into plastic bags, meals for 150,000 people to be sent to another country.   He had, of his own volition, signed up to help and I was his enthusiastic ride to the elementary school where the assembly was taking place.  He is a part of a faith community with leaders interested in assisting him in finding opportunities to serve and ways to build his confidence; it was those leaders who had passed around the sign-up sheet during their meeting.  I asked him why he signed up, he said, “I thought it would be good to help people.”  Building confidence by providing opportunities to help others also means that we all look more often outside ourselves to the greater needs around us.  We want to help because we know it is good and makes our world a better world.

When I was a kid, my organized religious community saw to it that I was given the opportunity and confidence to be a self-sufficient and contributing member of my community.   Today, my moral imperative as a Christian demands that I serve others; but, my effectiveness in doing so comes from my training in my faith community.

Yesterday was Sunday, and I have been thinking why a person of faith might be a better American this week because of it....

Something simple - I saw in my church bulletin an invitation to join others of my faith and travel by bus to New York this coming Saturday to help with the Superstorm Sandy cleanup. I am supposed to bring my own food, boots, and gloves and help an organization continue to serve those whose lives were turned upside down by this disaster, for four months and counting. My children 16 and older may also participate. 

I would hope there are always numerous and healthy faith communities available to help those in need of support after force majeure such as last October's Sandy.

With shelters full, homeless families have nowhere to goBy Annie Gowen, Published: October 7When Janice Coe, a homeless advocate in Loudoun County, learned through her prayer group that a young woman was sleeping in the New Carrollton Metro station with a toddler and a 2-month-old, she sprang into action.

Coe contacted the young woman and arranged for her to take the train to Virginia, where she put the little family up in a Comfort Suites hotel. Then Coe began calling shelters to see who could take them.

Despite several phone calls, she came up empty. Coe was shocked to learn that many of the local shelters that cater to families were full, including Good Shepherd Alliance, where Coe was once director of social services.

“I don’t know why nobody will take this girl in,” Coe said. “The baby still had a hospital bracelet on her wrist.”

In a region with seven of the 10 most affluent counties in the country, family homelessness is on the rise — straining services, filling shelters and forcing parents and their children to sleep in cars, parks, and bus and train stations. One mother recently bought $14 bus tickets to and from New York so she and her 2-year-old son would have a safe place to sleep — on the bus.

As cold weather descends on the region, the need will become increasingly acute, advocates say. That will be especially true in the District, where continued fallout from the recession and lack of affordable housing has contributed to an 18 percent increase in family homelessness this year over last.

The city has recently come under fire for turning away families seeking help as 118 overflow beds that were added last winter at D.C. General — the city’s main family homeless shelter — sit empty. A few places have recently opened up, but 500 families — some of whom are living with relatives or friends — are on a waiting list for housing.

“We’re hoping we can keep pace with those in the more dire situations,” said David A. Berns, director of the city’s Department of Human Services.

Berns said the city is trying to keep the overflow beds open for hypothermia season, which begins Nov. 1. The city is mandated by law to shelter its residents if the temperature falls below freezing. The agency does not have the money to operate the extra beds, Berns said.

D.C. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), who has been critical of the agency’s handling of the crisis, wonders why families are being denied help when the District has a $140 million budget surplus.

“Never did I imagine that beds would be kept vacant,” Graham said. “It’s very upsetting.”

Family homelessness around the Washington region has increased 23 percent since the recession began — though the total number of homeless people stayed fairly steady at around 11,800, according to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, which did its annual “point-in-time” survey of the homeless in January. This included some 3,388 homeless children, the study showed.

“These families are the most desperate because they have young children and have nowhere to go,” said Nassim Moshiree, a lawyer for the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.

Moshiree spent a good part of the day Friday trying to help a homeless mother of three who Thursday night slept with her children on the steps of a church in Northeast after unsuccessfully asking the city for help. After Moshiree intervened, the city found space for them late Friday.

“It’s a complete abomination,” said Antonia Fasanelli, executive director for the Homeless Persons Representation Project, a Maryland legal services and advocacy group based in Baltimore. She noted that in Baltimore — where homeless families from D.C. sometimes end up — three family shelters have been closed in the past five years, for a loss of about 100 shelter beds. “There is just not enough space.”

Throughout Maryland, Fasanelli said, 38 percent of homeless families are living on the streets. That’s the seventh-highest rate of unsheltered families in the country, according to a Department of Housing and Urban Development study on the homeless released in December.

At the Comfort Suites off Route 7 on Thursday, Helen Newsome, 25, fed her 2-year-old son, Cameron, an orange from the breakfast buffet as her infant daughter Isabella slept on the bed beside her.

Newsome said she became homeless this summer after she was evicted from her apartment in Prince George’s County. Since then, she and her children have slept most nights on a bench or the hard tile floor at the New Carrollton Metro, she said. Although she called several area shelters before she was evicted, she said she could never find one with room.

“I’m not asking for a whole room for myself, as long as I have someplace to sleep, somewhere soft,” Newsome said.

On Thursday, Coe took Newsome to the Loudoun County Department of Family Services, where a social worker helped her sign up for food stamps and other aid and said she would try and help her find a subsidized apartment. Finally, Newsome said she could see an end to her ordeal.

“They’re leaning on me,” she said, gesturing to her kids. “I’m their only hope. It’s okay. Everybody goes through something, some people worse than others.”