By DAVID GONZALEZ

MIAMI, March 7 — The United States Agency for International Development has told an American evangelical group building emergency shelters in
earthquake-ravaged El Salvador that it has to avoid the appearance that it is mixing religious and relief activities.

Representatives of the group, Samaritan's Purse, which has an agreement with the aid agency to build $202,000 of metal and plastic shelters, with a similar
amount pending, held prayer sessions in several villages before showing residents how to build the housing. The help was not contingent on accepting the
group's message nor its call to accept Jesus. But the timing worried aid officials and other relief workers in the region.

In a statement issued today in Washington, the agency said that Samaritan's Purse had not violated federal guidelines and had a good track record, but it
emphasized that the group had to "maintain adequate and sufficient separation between its prayer sessions and its U.S.A.I.D.- funded activities," to avoid the
appearance that federal money was being used to finance proselytizing.

"We're not comfortable with them having a half-hour prayer session right before instructing people how to build shelters," an agency official said. "We'd like
them to separate their activities from our activities."

The international director of projects at the group, Ken Isaacs, said that "a few overenthusiastic people" had conducted the prayer sessions, which he said
was against the group's policy. The group has been working with a local evangelical denomination in El Salvador that provided volunteers.

"We do not hold people captive while they hear a message before they receive aid," Mr. Isaacs said. "As soon as we identified it, we clarified it."

Clarifying the extent of religious activity under federal guidelines may prove difficult. The Agency for International Development statement said that it could not
finance programs with "significant religious/proselytizing purpose or content" and "will only finance programs that have a secular purpose and which do not
have the primary effect of advancing religion."

The aid agency official said that determining a suitable separation of activities would be considered case by case but that having simultaneous religious and
relief work might not be acceptable, even if no federal money was used for evangelization.

A spokesman for Samaritan's Purse, Mark DeMoss, said that the relief work was motivated by faith and that the evangelical work was privately financed and
exceeded federal assistance.

"There are some fine lines here that are difficult to draw," Mr. DeMoss said. "In any place Samaritan's Purse is working, given the relative size of U.S.A.I.D.
money and private funding, anywhere Samaritan's Purse works there is going to be on that site religious activity taking place."

He added that the group's president and chairman, Franklin Graham, would rather do without federal funds than abandon religious principles. "The
fundamental question is," Mr. Graham asked, "is it practical, is it appropriate, to expect an organization who does what they do because of their belief system
— which then becomes their ethos — is it fair to ask them to do that but not to share their belief system or ethos that motivates them?

"Our position on it is that it is not fair. Nor is it correct to ask us to do what we do, but lock our faith in the closet."