NO MATTER WHAT your religion or where you live, invite the PBS documentary “God and the Inner City” into your living room on Sunday night, June 22. “God and the Inner City” tells the story of three faith-based social service groups: Boston’s Ella J. Baker House, which works to prevent street violence and provides counseling and job training under the direction of charismatic Pentecostal minister Eugene Rivers; a Maryland branch of Teen Challenge, whose nationwide programs help substance abusers go drug-free and embrace Christianity in the process; and Philadelphia’s Amachi program, a mentor program based in local churches but run by Big Brothers/Big Sisters, a national secular organization that takes children of incarcerated parents under its wing.

Directed by Michael Pack, the film opens with Reverend Rivers walking the streets of the notoriously tough Dorchester section of Boston. He confronts idle teens on doorsteps, throwing them off-guard and getting them to talk. But it is Rivers’s promise to get these kids jobs (which he does) that earns him unwavering respect. Rivers never preaches to the kids he meets, nor does he invoke Jesus as a means to get troublemakers to mend their ways. Instead, he exhorts a human accountability: “At the end of the day, this all comes down to the failure of the fathers. In the black community the fathers fail the kids, and now we see the sins of the fathers being visited upon the second or third generation.”