I bet most pastors have a list of things they won't bring up on a Sunday.
The only thing that’s different about John Jackman is he'll actually tell you what's on his list. Immigration. Student loans. The whole familiar list. Raise one of those and you’d split the room right down the middle, and after forty years he knows exactly where the cracks run.
But four years ago he brought up something else, and the room didn’t split.
John has been the pastor at Trinity Moravian for forty years. There are about two hundred members that meet in a 114 year old red brick building near the old textile mills. He calls it a purple congregation. Conservative Republicans in the pew next to liberal Democrats. People who voted for Trump beside people who can’t say his name without their jaw going tight.
The idea was medical debt. When somebody can’t pay a hospital bill, that debt eventually gets sold off cheap to collectors, often for pennies on the dollar, because the companies selling it have given up on ever seeing the money. Well it turns out anybody can buy the debt on those same terms, so Jackman asked his congregation to chip in. Except Trinity Moravian just forgave the debt they bought instead of chasing it for repayment. And here’s the part I can’t get out of my head, the thing he says about asking:
“This is the easiest money I’ve ever raised. All I do is tell people what we’re doing, and they write me a check.”
The most recent campaign brought in a little over $17,000. At the crazy pennies-on-the-dollar price, that allowed the congregation to wipe out more than $2.2 million in medical debt for 1631 families. Most of them had no warning. One thousand six hundred and thirty-one people just got a letter one day telling them the thing they’d been dreading for years was gone.
But the number isn’t what stayed with me. It was who wrote the checks.
Catherine Coe does accounting for a hospital system. She calls herself a conservative and she voted for Trump. She’s also the one who said we’re all just one medical bill from ruin. Terri Mabe has been going to Trinity for decades and can’t stand the president. Says he never had any real concern for the people of this country. Paul Sluder spent his whole working life collecting debt for a credit union, doesn’t claim either party, and figures the whole system is out of whack.
Those people cancel each other out every November. Their votes go in and erase each other and the tally comes out looking like nobody there agrees on anything.
In that church basement, over a spaghetti lunch, they were on the same side. Nobody had to win an argument first. Nobody changed a vote or took back a yard sign. They had found a thing they already agreed on, and they took some action to improve the life of people they didn’t even know.
Here’s what I keep coming back to.
We are told, over and over, that we are divided all the way down. That the person across the aisle isn’t just wrong about taxes, they’re a complete stranger to you. And Jackman would be the first to tell you there’s a bit of truth in there. He keeps a whole list of subjects he won’t touch precisely because of it.
But it’s far from the whole story. In Winston-Salem there was a room full of people who will never agree about that president, agreeing about this. You don’t get that by accident. You get it because somebody was willing to ask the one question that didn’t split the room, instead of leading with the ones that do.
Jackman has a line for why the church does this at all. He says “we cannot fix everything, but we have to fix what we can in the place where we're planted.”
I think that’s beautiful and sensible at the same time. It isn’t “we solved healthcare.” Nobody at Trinity thinks they solved healthcare. It was just… Here is one broken thing, right in front of us, close enough to touch, that we can actually do something about together. So start there.
I don’t know what that thing is where you’re planted. But I’d put money on there being one. And I’d put more money on this: you already agree about that thing with somebody you’ve long since decided you couldn’t talk to.