Upstairs from the pizza counter, where the roar of the highway gives way to a din of video games, chaplain Mike Borsh trolls for lost souls from behind a portable pulpit.
As he has done nearly every weekend for nine years, Borsh left his regular congregation at the First Baptist Church in Hammond on a recent Sunday afternoon and drove to the nearby TA TravelCenter, parking his van in a sea of 18-wheelers.
There, he set out to fashion a one-night parish from an unusual but fast-growing flock–the hardscrabble ranks of America’s long-haul truckers.
Chalk it up to pre-millennium conversions, or the added stresses of trucking in the late ’90s, but America’s truckers are turning to religion in large numbers these days, proving to be a willing crop of worshipers who may have slipped through the cracks of traditional churches.
“What we’re seeing is a full-fledged trucker revival,” said former long-hauler Willie Miller, now general manager of the Association of Christian Truckers, a Brownstown, Ill.-based group devoted to over-the-road religion.
Over the past decade, hundreds of evangelists like Borsh have zeroed in on the country’s 3.5 million truckers, setting up in travel plazas and parking lots to harvest new worshipers from one of America’s most mobile communities.
And as truck-stop chaplains across the country attest, their makeshift pews are fuller than ever these days, far fuller than even a few years ago.
After several years of trucker jamborees with attendance around 300, the Association of Christian Truckers’ most recent gathering in September drew more than 1,000 drivers, Miller said.
Another group, Transport for Christ International, whose trailers offer 24-hour chapel service at 22 truck stops nationwide, has seen the number of visits to its chapels climb by more than a third since 1995, to more than 44,000 last year. Officials of that group are so encouraged, they say, that this month they are completing plans to more than double their chapel fleet.
Same goes for Georgia-based Truckstop Ministries Inc.
“We are building trailers as fast as we can,” said Ministries president Rev. Joe Hunter, who now operates 17 chapel-trailers nationwide.
Part of the growth, ministers say, can be traced to a current drive by many fundamentalist Christian missionaries in anticipation of the new millennium. At the same time, truckers today say they face more stress than ever, thanks to the growth of a “just-in-time” culture of speedy delivery and overnight service. That comes on top of strains over long separations from family, in a world fraught with temptation.
Moreover, industry observers point out, while technology has sanded the rough edges of many blue-collar jobs, a trucker’s life remains largely unchanged: long, lonely hours on the road with little solace at day’s end.
“For starters, you’ve got the financial stresses: If you own your own rig, you’re paying $100,000, then you’ve got licensing fees, spiking diesel prices, bad roads, road rage and bad shippers,” said Mike Russell of the American Trucking Associations Inc. “Trucks today are pretty high-tech, but it still takes a man or woman holding a steering wheel driving down a strip of concrete to get it done.”
“For a lot of guys, sitting in that truck all day is the loneliest thing in the world,” said coast-to-coaster Henry Roberts, 47, making his 30th visit to the Hammond service. “For me, this is my home away from home.”
The growth, say ministers and trucking industry watchers, reflects in part the rising number of truckers on the road–a figure that has climbed by 25 percent in the past five years, trucking associations said. At the same time, many truck-stop owners have encouraged the trend, because, they say, a chapel in a parking lot serves as both advertising and security, attracting truckers while deterring drug dealers, prostitutes and other “lot lizards.”
The National Association of Truck Stop Operators estimates that 20 percent of the 1,100 truck stops they represent nationwide now offer some sort of chapel service.
“Most ministries assume that people live somewhere,” said Chicago theologian Martin Marty, one of the country’s leading interpreters of religion in society. “But I think that this is an effort to say, `We’re going to find people wherever they may be.’ . . . And it seems to be working.”‘
Some offer free audio tapes for drivers to while away road hours with sermons. Others offer toll-free prayer lines. By all accounts, though, their greatest assets are their unusual cadre of chaplains.
Many are former drivers. Many others have checkered pasts, which they hang like diplomas in a doctor’s office.
“Jesus saved me out of prison,” chaplain Jay LaRette recently announced from behind the pulpit in his chapel trailer at the Travel Plaza Petro in Rochelle, Ill. With the air conditioner humming beneath his words one recent Sunday, LaRette let loose a furious sermon to a congregation of six, from Orlando, Fla.; Victoria, Texas; and Sardis, British Columbia.
“I believe God leads you to different dispatchers and to different truck stops,” he bellowed. “God ordains this.”
Fifteen minutes later, his congregation was gone, back to their rigs, bound for places like New London, Wis., and Bethlehem, Pa.
These intense–if fleeting–interactions are something LaRette has come to accept in the seven years he has been preaching to truckers.
“I come in contact here with more people in one week than many regular chaplains in cities,” he said. “And they’ll say things to me that they won’t say to other people. Here they say, `You don’t know me, I don’t know you.’ So I can get right to the root issues.”
Indeed, LaRette said, while he has officiated over one marriage, and tried to salvage a few more, most of those who pass through his wood-paneled chapel are looking for little more than a person to talk to.
In the nine years since he found God, trucker Mike Phillips, 41, has gotten used to reciting his woes to a different face each week.
“I know when I walk in the door (that) these guys understand one thing,” said Phillips, a self-described former outlaw, who paused on his way to Duluth, Minn., for a Sunday service at a truck stop in Marengo. “They know about forgiveness. Nobody’s perfect, and they know that.”
On that Sunday, Phillips’ chaplain of the day was Dick Burnside, a Dean’s Milk truck driver and weekend soul-saver. Like Borsh–and the 19th Century Methodist circuit riders who leapfrogged between towns in search of converts–Burnside comes to the Marengo plaza each week to minister to anyone who shows up.
He had never met Phillips before, and, he conceded, he probably never will again. But for the better part of an hour, he and his congregation exchanged stories of personal and road-related trials, punctuated with snippets of the Gospel.
Wrapping up his service, Burnside replaced the folding chair that was his pulpit for the hour, and headed off, leaving his business card for anyone who would take it. Across from his address, it read: “Have Bible–Will Travel.”
