Chicago, USA - Mary Conley Eggert, a sales and public relations executive in Oak Park, Ill., meets regularly with friends from church or from previous jobs to discuss career strategies and business opportunities. Usually their meetings start with prayer.
In March, Ms. Eggert's position with a high-tech company ended. Over prayer with her networking friends, she determined that God wanted her to do some soul-searching rather than job-searching. "I felt God didn't want me to rush," she said.
She spent the next six weeks at home on a kind of personal retreat. In June, feeling "quieted down enough" to job-hunt, she applied for - and landed - a public relations position at another high-tech company.
Ms. Eggert acknowledged that her decision to postpone her job search might strike people of a secular bent as irrational.
"God has been responsible for the last four jobs I've had," she said. "God is the best executive recruiter in the universe."
As the traditional divide blurs between religious and civic life in America, the workplace has become less secular. Nearly a decade ago, welfare reform legislation softened rules that prevented social service agencies backed by religious organizations from receiving government contracts.
And in 2001, the Bush administration stepped up federal support for religious involvement in workplace issues by establishing a Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the White House and in five major federal agencies, including the Labor Department. The center there describes its mission as helping religious and community organizations work with government agencies and as eliminating "barriers to fair treatment."
According to James E. Post, a management professor at Boston College, a small but growing number of private companies are finding that churches can recruit, screen and even help manage large numbers of new employees, especially at the entry level.
Formal government support for such activities has raised concerns in some quarters about church-state separation. "The two most important issues facing freedom of religion in the United States today are intelligent design and the faith-based initiative at the Department of Labor," said Richard B. Katskee, assistant legal director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, based in Washington.
"When you have government giving a preference to particular religious beliefs, that is an encroachment on individuals making decisions for themselves on matters of faith," he said.
But to Professor Post, the involvement of religious organizations in hiring for secular work sites is not an issue. "The macro question is, Is this discriminatory?" he said. "I don't think so. I think it is in the tradition of opening up opportunities to segments of our population that in the past haven't been able to get through some of those barriers."
Some religious leaders cite the potentially devastating effect of unemployment on a worker and, ultimately, on religious institutions.
"Tuition costs $7,000 to $10,000 a year" per student at private religious schools, said Rabbi Moshe D. Krupka, executive director for programming at the Orthodox Union, an organization that provides religious and social services to nearly a thousand North American synagogues.
"Orthodox Jews tend to have large families," he said. "Anyone who is out of work or in need of an upgrade is under financial strain. That strain impacts the community and has a ripple effect."
Last year the Orthodox Union began ParnossahWorks to offer career coaching and job-finding advice. The program, named for a Hebrew term that translates as "financial sustenance," is open to all, not just synagogue members, Rabbi Krupka said, and so far has found jobs for more than 160 people, mostly in metropolitan New York.
Avrohom Leichtling, a computer programmer who lives in Monsey, N.Y., said that after his last job ended in April, ParnossahWorks helped him get a programming job 15 minutes from his home.
"My job-searching skills were a little rusty, and when a person is unemployed a great deal of emotional baggage comes into the equation," Mr. Leichtling said. "You need to deal with people who can provide you with practical information and who can help you work through the emotional aspects as well. For me as an Orthodox Jew, it is more comfortable dealing with people who understand" issues like Sabbath and holiday observance, which restrict work hours.
Since the introduction of the Labor Department's faith-based initiative, a number of employers have built relationships with spiritual leaders.
Stephen M. Wing, director of government programs at the CVS Corporation, said the company started teaming up with ministers at inner-city churches after a $40,000 newspaper help-wanted campaign in 2001 drew no responses.
Mr. Wing approached the Rev. H. Lionel Edmonds, senior minister at Mount Lebanon Baptist Church in Washington, and asked for his church's help.
Mr. Edmonds said he was skeptical at first, but decided that the company genuinely wanted to hire local residents and that the jobs were worth pursuing. The church put on a job fair after services on Palm Sunday, and attracted more than 100 applicants. CVS hired 45 on the spot.
Mr. Wing said half the applicants hired through the church's efforts stayed in their jobs for a least a year, compared with fewer than a sixth of recruits in general.
"The minister is going to screen people for us and make sure they meet the qualifications we're looking for," Mr. Wing said.
He described the relationship between CVS and inner-city churches as being based on shared beliefs. "I think that CVS's core values are very similar to the values that the church has," Mr. Wing said.
Encouraged by the faith-based initiatives, some entrepreneurs in the career-counseling industry have introduced or expanded programs by creating relationships with religious organizations.
Bill Broderick, a management consultant specializing in human resource concerns, is a co-founder of Work Ministry in Chicago, which started four years ago with a mission of assisting religious groups in helping their congregants and community members find jobs.
Citing the Labor Department's endorsement of such efforts, he said Work Ministry had grown to more than 132 programs in 25 states. Local group leaders trained by Mr. Broderick run the programs, using guidelines and resources posted on the company's Web site.
"We are giving church and synagogue groups all the tools they need to be effective in helping people get jobs," he said. "And we are getting to employers and producing job lists." He said he could not specify how many people had found jobs through the programs, because they were run by local group leaders.
Churches "are very good at what they do, like spiritual counseling, but they don't have a lot of expertise with career issues, like writing better résumés," Mr. Broderick said. "We do."