"Gangs and churches," said Pastor Dennis Jacobsen of Incarnation Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Those are the only organizations left in neighborhoods that suffer from poverty, violence, and segregation: gangs and churches.

In areas of the city where government healthcare proves deficient, churches, free clinics, and other charity groups are picking up the slack. The Free Clinic Collaborative, for instance, consists of ten free clinics in Milwaukee and provides care to an estimated 14,000 patients each year. "The clinics function as patches over the gaping holes in our system," said Barbara Horner-Ibler, a doctor who runs the Bread of Healing Clinic in the basement of Cross Lutheran Church.

Incarnation Lutheran Church sits at the corner of 15th and Keefe in the central city of Milwaukee. It, too, has taken a role in the health of its neighborhood. Incarnation isn't simply a building whose doors open each Sunday for worship. Incarnation offers a food ministry, a task force to create a safer neighborhood, an after-school program, a parish nurse, and a Wednesday evening youth program, MICAH, through which people in the neighborhood can organize on social justice issues.

Milwaukee is the second most segregated city in the United States, and this particular neighborhood reflects that fact; according to a 2000 Demographic Report, 98 percent of the population within a mile of the church is minority, 95 percent being African-American. Overall, the city is 37 percent African- American. Also startling, the median household income of $12,411 is almost $20,000 less than that of all of Milwaukee.