CHAPEL HILL -- Calling the current $5.15/hour "immoral" and a $1 increase coming Jan. 1 not enough, a lawmaker urged churchgoers to continue fighting for a higher minimum wage.

About 139,000 North Carolinians will get an automatic raise next year when the minimum wage in the state rises from $5.15 to $6.15 an hour.

But state Rep. Alma Adams of Greensboro says the increase is the first of many needed to bring the minimum wage closer to a living wage.

Adams spoke to about 110 people Sunday at The Community Church of Chapel Hill Unitarian Universalist. The annual Labor Day service was held in the community building while renovation work continues on the sanctuary off Purefoy Road, just south of UNC Hospitals.

"When issues are basic to people's lives, they are moral issues," said Adams, a state House member since 1994.

So besides role models, workers need "soul models," people who are willing to fight on their behalf, she said.

"Sometimes we don't get things done because we sit around thinking about what we should be doing," Adams said, speaking like the minister's daughter she is. "But you can do something. And that something you can do, you ought to do."

Gov. Mike Easley signed the new minimum wage into law in July, saying the state could not wait for the federal government to act.

Even at $6.15 an hour, however, the new wage won't be enough to lift some workers out of poverty.

The current minimum wage provides $10,712 annually, or about $2,500 below the federal poverty level for a family of two. Another $1 per hour will give workers $173 more per month but still won't exceed the poverty threshhold.

In keeping with the day's theme, interim minister Morris Hudgins praised the work of the church custodian and the electricians, dry wallers and other construction workers toiling on the sanctuary.

The choir sang "Solidarity Forever," and later member Spence Foscue played the drums and sang Bob Dylan's "Maggie's Farm," in which a man who scrubs the floors vows, "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more./No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more."

True freedom cannot exist without economic security, Adams told the crowd in the nearly full, warm room.

She encouraged the congregation to work for others, quoting the Bible, Martin Luther King Jr. and Johnetta Cole, the president of Bennett College, where Adams in an art professor.

"Being on this earth is not by accident but by design," she said. "Martin Luther King talked about it when he said, 'Everybody can be great, because anybody can serve. ... You don't have to make your subjects and verbs agree to serve.'

"Service is the rent you pay for living on this earth."

Lynn Harmon suggested Adams as the Labor Day speaker.

"People in this church have been working to get the minimum wage raised for years," she said. "She seems to be the person really on the line doing it."