That was so obvious that the least informed among us could see President Clinton's ploy. But there was a deeper flaw in the summit that only the very well-informed would be likely to detect.

This week Jim Wallis, editor and founder of Sojourners magazine and founder of the Call to Renewal, says the problem with the summit was that it only asked for volunteers. The summit didn't call for a certain kind of volunteer, that is, people with moral principles. It just asked for volunteers.

The summit almost entirely bypassed the religious community. In fact, the planners discovered about a month before the summit that no religious leaders had been invited. So they threw together a list of names and waved the invitations in their faces. But most of the leaders were booked solid and decided to snub the whole thing.

Not only were church leaders absent but also the religious professionals who work with children in the poorest neighborhoods in the nation. Wallis says those voices must be heard if poor children are going to have a chance.

The problem, Wallis insists, is not that children have refused to accept our moral principles. Rather, the problem is that they have picked up our values.

Wallis quotes Mahatma Gandhi, who said the seven deadly sins were "politics without principle, wealth without work, commerce without morality, pleasure without conscience, education without character, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice."

Those seven deadly sins simply blew me away. I read them a second and a third time. They constitute an indictment of the kind of people we have become.

I'm not qualified to comment on six of those sins, but the last one, worship without sacrifice, got my attention very quickly. I've been saying for years that religion in this country is changing dramatically. Many people resent any religion that asks them to serve and sacrifice. We want our religion but without toil.

I once watched a skilled preacher ask his congregation to volunteer for a new project he wanted to accomplish in an inner-city neighborhood. The people surged forward after the service, signing their names on the dotted line. But that was 15 years ago. I wonder what would happen today.

There is a proliferation these days of congregations that ask nothing of parishioners. Members come to worship, drink a cup of coffee, chat with friends and then head out to a local restaurant for brunch. Worship is more tied up with brunch than it is with sacrifice.

There are some congregations that never ask their people to serve, even if the service is only to dig dandelions out of the church lawn. All of that is done by hired help. The work the people do, some pastors will tell you, is the worship on Sunday morning.

Even more serious is the squishy worship of groups in the so-called New Age movement, many of which were created as entirely selfish religions. The devotees indulge themselves in a bit of meditation designed to make them feel better and then they go off on their personal agenda for the rest of the week.

That's not worship, that's self-indulgence.

Children pick up on those things. If Mom and Dad live only for themselves, so will their children. They also pick up on the actions of corrupt politicians, immoral industrialists and teachers who never set an example for them.

Wallis is absolutely correct: We don't need volunteers as much as we need principled people willing to become role models for children. Maybe that's what the president had in mind. But somehow the message got lost in the ballyhoo.

Wallis wonders where we will go from the Philadelphia Summit. I say we should go back and do it right this time, including the voices of religious people who make a commitment to poor children every day.

Clark D. Morphew
May 24, 1997