The Little Church With A Big Idea

A North Carolina congregation has wiped out millions in medical debt for neighbors they'll never meet.

Hey everyone, happy Sunday. Are you ready for some good news?

We all know the American health care system has major, major flaws. Getting sick is hard on your body. Paying for care is hard on your wallet. And the number of Americans carrying outstanding medical debt is sobering: more than 100 million of us.

And the policy arguments in Washington around healthcare are ugly, and popular solutions are few and far between in our divided country.

So today, we are going to take a look outside of Washington at a little church in North Carolina who decided to tackle health care in their own way in their own community.

About 200 people make up the congregation of Winston-Salem’s Trinity Moravian Church, of all different ideologies. Their pastor, Rev. John Jackman, calls it a “purple congregation,” with liberals, conservatives, and everyone in between. There are many arguments the church knows better than to start.

As a pastor, Jackman meets with people regularly. During the pandemic, he kept hearing the same thing: families just couldn’t cover their medical bills. So he brought his politically divided congregation an idea.

He suggested raising money for a nonprofit called Undue Medical Debt, which buys unpaid hospital bills the way collection agencies do: in bulk, for less than they’re worth. But instead of collecting on the debt, it forgives. And the math is incredibly impactful. One donated dollar wipes out about a hundred dollars of a stranger’s medical debt.

Trinity Church set out to raise $5,000, a goal modest enough to achieve but large enough to erase half a million dollars of medical debt in the community. And the checks started coming from everywhere.

Paul Sluder spent his career collecting debts for a credit union, but he contributed because “the system’s out of whack.” Catherine Coe is a conservative who works in the accounting department of a hospital, but she gave too, because “we’re all just one medical bill from financial ruin.”

They hit that goal in six weeks, and Jackman called it “the easiest money I’ve ever raised.”

That was back in 2022, and they have not stopped since. And every fundraising campaign ends the same way. Once the letters go out and the debts are dead, the church prints a list of the forgiven and holds a service to burn it.

The latest campaign was this past February. Their eighth, a Christmas drive, had just turned $17,648 into more than $2.2 million of forgiven debt for 1,631 households in the county. Strangers, nearly all of them, but it didn’t matter. Jackman still stood up front and proudly declared that “we act to forgive the debts of many of our neighbors as God has forgiven our debts.”

Nobody at Trinity thinks they’ve fixed American healthcare. Two million dollars is a drop in a $220 billion ocean, and they know it. But campaign after campaign, they managed to buy up all the medical debt for sale in their county. Jackman’s philosophy is that a church cannot mend the whole world, only the corner where it stands. Still, Trinity’s corner is expanding.

At one point, they ran out of debt to buy entirely and took their checkbooks to counties miles away. And now, more than a hundred congregations around the country have launched debt projects of their own. The state of North Carolina took the idea a step further, leveraging billions in Medicaid funding to get the state’s hospitals to erase roughly $4 billion in medical debt for nearly two million people.

Look, we spend a lot of energy in this country trying to argue our way to common ground, especially when it comes to handling healthcare. But at Trinity, two hundred people with wildly different political views all reach for their checkbooks at the same time. And somewhere in North Carolina, a family that will never know their names opened an envelope and felt a little more peace. To these people, it isn’t a political issue. It’s a human one.

That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.

— Adam