For the next three years Lutheran Seminary Professor Katie Day and University of Pennsylvania ethnographer Tim Nelson will study what motivates terrorists who firebomb African American churches and what prompts volunteers who spearhead the rebuilding

Page after page, the horror unfolds. Churches on fire. All over the south.

Professor Katie Day of The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia is thumbing through a National Council of Churches scrapbook of the blazing terror. Six-hundred and seventy churches have been set on fire in the United States since 1995 she reports. One-half of them are African American congregations, most in the south. One quarter of them are integrated racially. And the horror is creeping north. Two in Pennsylvania this spring. One in Canada.

Since 1995 some 10,000-12,000 volunteers, many of them whites from churches and houses of worship in the north, have volunteered to rebuild what others have destroyed.

Now Day, who teaches about Church and Society issues, and Dr. Tim Nelson, Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and an ethnographer on issues relating to congregations and urban poverty, will spend several years studying the impact of the church arson terror. What factors "give permission" to perpetrators to inflict the terror? What motivates the volunteers, many of whom have never volunteered in similar fashion before? And what is the result of the interaction between members of the burned churches and the volunteers?

The study is being made possible by the Lilly Foundation, which awarded $312,000 to the Seminary to conduct the study over a three-year period. The end result will be a conference and a report of findings.

"We really want to discover what is behind this volunteer effort and what impact it might be having on racial healing in our country," Day says. She said the volunteer rebuilding effort has been a "quiet, widespread movement" which hasn't been well-documented by the media or studied by social scientists. "Our preliminary research indicates that most of the volunteers are new to this kind of outreach," Day says. "Some seem motivated by a concern for racism in the society. Some seem to consider the volunteering is a way of atoning for racism, either in themselves or others. For others, the volunteering seems to be a political statement, or an expression of their faith commitment or of community solidarity."

A portion of the study will go into analyzing the progress made by church members in their own healing process.

Day said the first step of the study is to process a survey to 2,000 volunteers in the rebuilding process to better understand beliefs and commitments which are motivating this extraordinary action. The survey will also establish a demographic profile of the volunteers. The groups will be selected from all regions of the country. Day engaged in a pilot effort with a group of Catholic and Jewish volunteers from Philadelphia and has begun studying groups in Burlington, VT, and White Plains, NY.

Five key sites will receive primary focus in the study. The sites will vary in terms of congregation size, location and denominational affiliation. But all five will be in the south, Day said. Nelson will conduct intensive visits to each site during the rebuilding process. Day will relate to two volunteer groups visiting each of the sites. In each case one group will be comprised primarily of white volunteers and one made up mostly of African Americans. Each of the ten groups will be interviewed three times over the three years -- just prior to their volunteer effort, just after their effort, and a year later.

Relating to the project will be an Advisory Group consisting of representatives from organizations which are placing volunteers, such as the National Council of Churches' Burned Church Project and the Congress of National Black Churches' Church Rebuilding Office, other researchers and a theologian.

"We think the study will help us determine much about the linkage between charity and advocacy, volunteerism and activism," Day says.

Professor Katie Day earned her M.Div. degree from Gordon-Conwell Seminary; her Masters in Sacred Theology from Union Seminary, New York City, and her Ph.D. from Temple University. She's served as a parish pastor in Pennsylvania and in Massachusetts and has been on the Seminary's faculty since 1985.

Tim Nelson has a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago. He's a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and has an appointment at Swarthmore.