(RNS) — What would it look like to take ancient Scripture seriously in a modern financial system? Tom and Amber sit down with Pastor John Jackman of Trinity Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to explore one of the most innovative financial ministries in the country.

Inspired by the biblical practice of Jubilee, Trinity Moravian has raised small amounts of money to purchase millions of dollars of medical debt on the secondary market — and then forgive it outright. What began with $5,000 wiping out $1.1 million in debt has now grown into a movement that has inspired over 100 churches and even influenced state-level conversations about medical debt relief.

Pastor John shares how theology, community organizing, and practical economics came together in this work — and why symbolic rituals like debt-burning ceremonies matter. It’s a hopeful reminder that generosity, when paired with imagination, can ripple far beyond a single congregation.

About Pastor John Jackman:

• Pastor John Jackman is the pastor of Trinity Moravian Church in Winston-Salem — the church behind the ⁠Debt Jubilee Project⁠, an innovative and impactful financial ministry that buys medical debt on the secondary market and abolishes it.

• Additional Resources: ⁠Undue Medical Debt⁠, a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose purpose is to strengthen communities by erasing financially burdensome medical debt.

For more episodes and info, visit ⁠Money, Meet Meaning⁠.

Transcript: Burning Debt, Living Jubilee
This transcript was generated using AI tools and may contain minor transcription errors.

Hosts: Tom Levinson and Amber Hacker
Guest: Reverend John Jackman, Trinity Moravian Church, Winston-Salem, NC

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[INTRO]

Amber Hacker: All right, friends, welcome to Season Two of Money Meet Meaning. We are so excited to have you back with us.

Tom Levinson: It’s been a little too long, so it feels great to be back with you, Amber, and with our wonderful guests and audience.

Amber Hacker: Agreed. Happy New Year. Happy 2026. Welcome to Season Two of Money Meet Meaning.

Tom Levinson: Our guest today leads a congregation that, on paper, looks small and traditional and modest, but don’t let that fool you, Amber, because this church has quietly built one of the most innovative financial ministries in the country, buying medical debt on the secondary market and abolishing it.

Amber Hacker: Trinity Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has wiped out millions of dollars in medical debt—millions—for their neighbors, not through lobbying, not through magical thinking, but through a totally legal, totally ingenious financial maneuver, grounded in an ancient practice from the Hebrew Bible, Jubilee.

Tom Levinson: Makes you jubilant, doesn’t it? It does. And the pastor behind this project, Reverend John Jackman, is part theologian, part filmmaker, part neighborhood chaplain and part accidental fintech disruptor.

Amber Hacker: He has taken Deuteronomy, a Boy Scout-approved fire ritual, and a deep love for his community, stirred them together and sparked a movement that other congregations, synagogues, mosques, temples are now copying.

Tom Levinson: He’s like a bearded avuncular Katniss—

Amber Hacker: Everdeen, Hunger Games reference, Tom.

Tom Levinson: Today on Money Meet Meaning, we are asking, what does solutions-oriented faith look like? How does a religious community take the money it has, the money it might not have, and the moral imagination it aspires to, and create real world financial liberation?

Amber Hacker: What an episode coming up next.

Tom Levinson: This is Money Meet Meaning. I’m Tom Levinson and I’m Amber Hacker. Money Meet Meaning is a podcast exploring the surprising practical relevance of the world’s spiritual traditions on our life with money. What do you get when you cross fintech with Deuteronomy?

Amber Hacker: How do you make pennies—pennies—into millions upon millions without being an alchemist or a preacher from Nazareth?

Tom Levinson: And in a world without pennies, no less. I know, it’s gone. RIP pennies, just saying. How about a story today about ritualistic burning of medical bills as a congregational rite—

Amber Hacker: Of devotion? How has a church accomplished what the US Congress hasn’t?

Tom Levinson: Sprinkle on top of that the surprising and practical way one church found its way into the profoundly purple politics of debt forgiveness.

Amber Hacker: I see what you did there, Tom. We’re all about the surprising and practical. Y’all, you’re gonna love this one. Stick around.

[CREDITS]

Tom Levinson: Money Meet Meaning is a co-production between Interfaith America and Apella Wealth.

Amber Hacker: Interfaith America is a Chicago-based nonprofit dedicated to embracing the power of pluralism, where we cooperate across difference for the common good.

Tom Levinson: Apella Wealth is a fiduciary financial advisory firm empowering clients to pursue what’s possible through client-first, evidence-based, values-driven advice for life.

Amber Hacker: Money Meet Meaning is distributed by Religion News Service with partnering support from the Faith and Work Initiative at Princeton University.

Tom Levinson: If you like what you hear, please share this episode with a friend or friends. It helps us reach more people just like you. All right, everybody, as promised, we are thrilled to bring you the pastor behind one of the most creative financial justice projects in the country.

[INTERVIEW BEGINS]

Amber Hacker: Reverend John Jackman leads Trinity Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where a simple idea—buying and abolishing medical debt—has grown into a national model of faith-driven financial repair. Pastor John, I’m Amber Hacker, one of the co-hosts of Money Meet Meaning. I wanted to tell you of a personal connection that I have to the Moravian Church. So my mother and my grandmother, Jean Grogan, who is a longtime member of First Baptist First on Fifth in downtown Winston-Salem, her ancestor is Johan Jacob Lash, who was born in 1722, and he is Moravian. He’s one of the 12 settlers of Bethania. He was the businessman. He was the money man. And so she and my grandmother did this huge ancestry project on the Lash family.

Pastor John Jackman: Oh, boy, is right.

Amber Hacker: It was a whole thing, but it was really cool. They uncovered all these original historical documents. They actually self-published about six or seven books doing this ancestry project.

Tom Levinson: Six or seven books?

Amber Hacker: Six or seven books. One thing that’s nice about doing research on Moravians is they wrote everything down and they kept everything.

Pastor John Jackman: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

Amber Hacker: So anyway, I just wanted to tell you—and my parents both still are in the Winston area. They live in Walkertown.

Pastor John Jackman: All right.

Amber Hacker: They are especially thrilled I am talking to you today and wanted me to—my mother wanted me to make sure I mentioned my Moravian connection.

Pastor John Jackman: Very good. All right, thanks.

Amber Hacker: The Reverend John Jackman is a pastor, filmmaker and author who has led Trinity Moravian Church in Winston-Salem since 2004, a long time. Advocate for racial and cultural reconciliation, he blends decades of ministry with a background in digital film and television production, bringing faith and storytelling together in powerful ways. Welcome, Pastor John, to Money Meet Meaning.

Pastor John Jackman: Great to be here.

Amber Hacker: So Pastor John, I would love to hear what first opened your eyes to medical debt.

Pastor John Jackman: Well, that’s a good starting point. I’ve been here 21 years. This is a congregation that is very involved with helping the poor in the neighborhood. We have a very outward-facing attitude. It’s pretty common to deal with folks, neighbors who are struggling. Before COVID, for several years, I had noticed that the stories I heard from people about why they needed assistance increasingly had a medical component to them. More and more we were hearing somebody was in the hospital for a couple of days, they lost the work, then they got this huge medical bill, and now they couldn’t afford to buy a load of oil for the heater, or they couldn’t pay their electric bill. And that just started to become a real common thread. So as we then went into COVID and all of that, everything got worse. As we were coming out, I told my board that I had noticed this, and that I had come upon this organization that would let you buy medical debt on the debt market, which is something most people don’t even know exists. They said, “Hey, let’s try doing that.” So the origin really is in the stories that I heard and the people that I meet in our neighborhood that have need because of some medical issue.

Amber Hacker: What about that really struck you as being a spiritual issue, one that the church really ought to care about?

Pastor John Jackman: Well, we try to care about the whole person. There’s quite a few biblical passages, both in the Old and the New Testament, that command us to be caring for the poor and for those who are struggling. The Book of James in particular challenges us and says that if somebody comes in hungry, it’s not appropriate to just say, “Well, good to see you, sit down here.” You need to help them. And so that’s our attitude. The spiritual life is combined with daily life, and if you can’t afford to eat, you can’t afford to feed your children, that’s a really serious impact on your life. So it’s all kind of meshed together from my point of view, and I think it is from a biblical point of view too. If you go through the Book of Deuteronomy, which most people kind of dread because of all the begats and the begottens and so on, and the impression that it’s all “do not do this” and “do not that”—well, one of the things it says “do not do” is oppress the poor. And also there are commandments for leaving a certain amount of food in your field so that the poor can glean and eat. There’s a lot of rules about that in the Old Testament that people overlook today. And that’s actually where we got the idea of the Jubilee from, is from the Book of Deuteronomy.

Tom Levinson: Pastor John, I have to say, I talk about Deuteronomy all the time, somewhat ad nauseam on this podcast, all the time. So when I hear you talk about Deuteronomy and bringing it up, not as something as a sleep aid, but as a real galvanizing, inspirational force, you are preaching to the proverbial choir, so I appreciate that.

Pastor John Jackman: Well, I have to tell you, we have our neighborhood ministry here that’s associated with our church, Anthony’s Plot, started as a group of young adults who did a study of Deuteronomy. And they went through Deuteronomy and started to say, “Well, what if we actually did all this stuff? What if we actually help the neighbor? What if we actually help the stranger?” And so on. And so out of that group has grown a significant homeless ministry in our area. It has now blossomed into a housing justice project and so on. So all these kind of justice issues for the poor flowed out of that study of Deuteronomy.

Tom Levinson: Thank you. This is very helpful, not for an “I told you so,” but just so that people, when I start going on and on about Deuteronomy, people will realize at least I have some backing from the professionals. Pastor John, can you talk a little bit at some greater length about the trajectory of this project that got started around paying off people’s medical debt? You and your board and your congregation started it. Can you tell us about what that first experience was like, and how it grew into something more than a one-off and into a project?

Pastor John Jackman: Yeah, well, it’s been an amazing experience for me, and totally unexpected. I mean, I’ve been in ministry 45 years, and I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve also raised a lot of money over the years for either charitable causes or for movies. And so when we had that meeting with the board, and I said, “Well, what if we tried raising $5,000 and work with what was then called RIP Medical Debt—now it’s Undue Medical Debt—and see how much we can buy?” Because I really didn’t know. Had no experience with it at that time. RIP Medical Debt would tell you it’s about a penny on the dollar. So that sounds pretty fast. And so they voted unanimously to do it. One thing I love about my board is they’re willing to try new things, which isn’t true in every church. Now, I assumed that I was going to have to have lunch with a lot of people and twist their arms and beg for some money and so on, the way I’ve done many, many times. And in fact, I found it was exactly the opposite. We put the word out that we were doing this, and the money just flowed in. And what I found I had to do was, rather than giving my elevator speech to the donor, I had to listen to their story first. And then after they told me their story about medical billing issues or someone in their family who had crushing medical debt, then they write a check. So it’s the easiest money I’ve ever raised, to tell you the truth, because it’s such a universal issue.

Amber Hacker: Pastor John, I want to dig into this a little bit more, because what you said is just so important. You said you bought it for essentially a penny on the dollar. I just want to help our listeners understand, because this was new to me too, right? Can you give us actual numbers? So how much did you pay and then how much was forgiven?

Pastor John Jackman: Well, I can tell you how we started there. That first campaign, we raised $5,000 in a matter of a few weeks, most of it from small donations. And we sent that into RIP Medical Debt, and the report came back that we had been able to purchase $1.1 million in medical debt.

Amber Hacker: Wow.

Pastor John Jackman: And I got up and announced this in church. I had to spend an hour after church re-explaining to people how that could possibly happen, right? It’s just crazy. Yes, monopoly money. But in fact, what we didn’t know at that point, and now I understand a lot better, is that debt is something that gets bought and sold, like a lot of other stuff in our country. And after the first round of collection, very often medical systems will sell off the debt in that third-party market. And that’s when the sharks kind of buy it up and hound you to death. As a business proposition, they would buy it at a very cheap rate, and then, knowing it was risky, if they could collect on it and they could take you to court, for instance, they could get a judgment for the entire amount against the individual. And so the great idea behind RIP Medical Debt, Undue Medical Debt now, was that instead of buying it for collection, we would buy it and forgive it. It’s funny money, it’s crazy. It doesn’t make any sense, but that also tells you how broken our medical system is.

Amber Hacker: That’s right.

Pastor John Jackman: Now, the thing to bear in mind is we occasionally get kind of inured to these huge numbers, because our last go-round, we bought $2.7 million in debt. And it’s almost becoming like we expect that anymore, but you have to remember that the individuals who owed that debt, if it was collected on, would have to pay every dime—the full amount. They can’t buy it at a discount. We can, but they’re going to do it.

Amber Hacker: That’s beautiful. When you bought and forgave the 1.1 million, the 2.7 million—I mean, these numbers are just astounding, and I appreciate you explaining the background—did you or members of your congregation actually reach out to those folks who owed that debt, either call them or send them something in the mail? I’m just so curious about that. Did you do that? And what did that look like?

Pastor John Jackman: Undue Medical Debt has set up a really good system. And that first go-around, we did consider doing it ourselves, but I’m very glad we didn’t, because there are legal and tax issues that I didn’t understand at the time, and these campaigns do involve an awful lot of paperwork and record keeping. The way Undue Medical Debt now works is they go into an area, they work with the hospital systems. They pre-qualify debts. We’re not buying rich people’s debt. The income has to be below a certain level, or the debt is five times their income. If they fit into that category, we pre-qualify the debt, and there’s a Chinese wall between those of us who raise the money and the individuals that receive the end result. So we don’t actually know who we’re helping. We don’t have their names, addresses. Part of the idea behind that is that we don’t want them to feel obligated to us. That system has been very good in a lot of ways. So we don’t know whose debt we’re buying. The sad thing is that I can’t go in and buy a specific person’s debt. I wish we could. I get requests for that all the time. We’re buying basically a portfolio of debt. We don’t know the details. Undue Medical Debt then sends each one of the recipients a letter certifying that their debt has been forgiven, that it has been removed from their credit report and that they do not have to pay it, and also relieving any judgments that may have existed, for instance, against their house or whatever. Every recipient does get documentation that their debt is forgiven, but it’s not directly from us. It’s from Undue Medical Debt.

Tom Levinson: So I can only imagine the sense of really emancipation that is felt by the people whose debt has been forgiven. And I can only also imagine—though I’m really having a very powerful response listening to you talk about this, it’s incredibly inspiring, I have to say—I’m also struck by the sense of agency that your community, your congregation, must feel that this issue, this topic, that is so wrenching and gutting for people, there’s actually something we can do about it. So one question I have is, how do you as a community, as a congregation, mark this occasion when you’ve bought off medical debt, if in any way? Like, is there a kind of ceremony that you have worked on, enacted, practiced, so that you can celebrate it and commemorate it?

Pastor John Jackman: Yes, we went back to the old idea of burning your mortgage when your home’s paid off, then you got the papers back and you would burn them. So we have a debt burning ceremony as part of our worship service. Once, we did a cooperative effort with a whole bunch of other churches, and we thought it would be a bright idea to do that outdoors. It was a terrible idea. Could not even keep it lit, and we finally ended up huddling around it. So we do it indoors now, and I always hope we don’t set off the smoke alarms. But we have a brief liturgy that we pray and then we burn the debt. What we do is we have a printout with Debtor Number 1, Debtor Number 2. We don’t know the names, but with the right number. This last one was 1,801 debtors.

Tom Levinson: Wow.

Pastor John Jackman: So we have a list. We burn the list and we declare the debt to be abolished. Recently, our Boy Scouts have helped me with the burning. They love to burn things and get to clean up the mess afterwards. So it’s a spiritual exercise. I love that for so many reasons.

Amber Hacker: My 12-year-old son is a Boy Scout, so he would also love to be part of the burning.

Pastor John Jackman: Yeah, they love to set things on fire.

Amber Hacker: Oh yeah, yes they do. This is just really beautiful. And I would love to dig into this a little bit more. What’s powerful about doing this and having this religious component? Does it shape it differently? So, for example, I remember many folks may be familiar with John Oliver, who is the host of Last Week Tonight. This was now almost 10 years ago. He did a segment on the debt collection industry, right?

Pastor John Jackman: That’s actually where I heard about Undue Medical—

Amber Hacker: Oh, really? Okay.

Pastor John Jackman: Okay.

Amber Hacker: Okay, well, so for our listeners that aren’t familiar, to demonstrate this, he created a fake debt collecting company and bought $15 million worth of medical debt for $60,000. This was for 9,000 people. And then on air, they forgave all of it, forgave all of this debt, which was really, really powerful. So that was obviously bringing attention to this issue and doing it in a secular way on this television show. What about this is powerful to have a religious component to it?

Pastor John Jackman: To me, it’s just full of symbolism. In our liturgy, we mentioned that Christ has forgiven us our debts, and so how can we hold debts against other people? And in Deuteronomy, every 50th year was supposed to be a Jubilee year, and the slaves would be freed, all debts forgiven, land would return to its original owner. We don’t know if they ever really did that, but it was really radical. And so that idea of Jubilee, that all is kind of reset, really is very biblical, and I think it’s a symbol for us of the forgiveness that we’ve received. Jesus has several parables where he tells about people who were debtors and then turned around and collected with others. And there’s deep spiritual meaning in this.

Amber Hacker: How has participating in these debt burning ceremonies changed your community’s understanding of money and of mercy?

Pastor John Jackman: That is also an important question. I’m sort of blessed that this, as I mentioned before, has always been a congregation that is built around helping people. When we look back in the records, we see a lot of people would not have made it through the Depression, except for the assistance they got here from Trinity Moravian Church. So there’s always been an outward-facing aspect to it, and those things are tied together. The largest emergency assistance ministry in our area started in the basement here—it’s Sunnyside Ministry—and it now helps folks throughout the entire county. It grew way beyond our basement, and they’re now an independent agency. So we’ve got this history of this. So that connection has always been there for our people. But there’s a level at which we do have to understand, in the aspect of stewardship, that everything we have is not our own. It’s God’s, and it’s on loan to us. Our handling of it is a demonstration of our faith or lack of it. I think there’s a lot of parables in the Bible that bear that out. I don’t remember who said this first, but someone said that a budget is a moral document, and it reveals your outlook. It reveals your priorities, and it shows what you really believe in. If your budget has nothing in it for the poor, nothing in it to help other people, then you’re just taking care of yourself. And I’m not sure what the difference is between a club and a church if you’re in that category.

Tom Levinson: We think that at least one person who said that was Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that budgets are, in fact, moral documents. So it’s a powerful and transformative way of looking at the budgeting process, which feels to many of us like a very cut-and-dry, granular administrative process. But when you layer on, no, there’s some really profound impact that can flow from it, I think we can absolutely see how it metamorphosizes into something much bigger, much deeper and much more powerful.

Pastor John Jackman: Yeah, well, one of the things that I look at in our society, there’s a segment of our society that’s money hoarders. I can’t call it anything else. And I’m going to ask the question, if you have a billion dollars, what have you done with it? It’s good to see some of those folks really seriously helping those who need help, but it’s a little disturbing to see some of the others that aren’t doing that at all. You can fill in the names.

Amber Hacker: Just to circle back, Pastor John, to the Debt Jubilee Project. What’s incredible to see is how this has inspired over 100 other churches, maybe even more.

Pastor John Jackman: Yeah, we don’t know how many at this point.

Amber Hacker: Okay.

Pastor John Jackman: We started this, and I just thought that we would have a couple of these campaigns a year. It would be like some of the other things that we did. And the second year out, it went viral on the internet, which was something I had never experienced before, and you don’t have any control over either. I got a call one morning from one of our pastors in the northern province and said, “Did you know you’re on the front page of Reddit?” And I said, “What’s Reddit?” I asked my daughter, and she told me, “Don’t read the comments. They’re all going to be very negative.”

Amber Hacker: Your daughter is very wise. Never read the comments.

Pastor John Jackman: Then it was top on TikTok for a couple of days. And so it just made it around. And that’s still floating around. It re-emerges. That same post re-emerges sometimes. And the folks at Undue Medical Debt in New York just told me last week that it’s getting pretty common for new accounts—the churches or organizations that come to them and want to do a campaign—to mention that they learned about it from hearing about our ministry. We have no idea how far it’s reached. It did definitely reach statewide, because Governor Roy Cooper and the folks who were heading the DHHS at that point saw what we were doing. And the story that I heard, and I don’t know if it’s true, was that they had a meeting about medical debt, and several things that they brought up didn’t seem like they were going to work. And somebody brought an article about us to the meeting and said, “This little church in Winston-Salem is doing this. How come we can’t?” And that kicked it into high gear, particularly a man named Cody Kinsley, brilliant administrator, put together a plan that would convince the hospitals to sign on and help forgive medical debt. And all 99 hospital systems ended up signing on to that. So the ripple effect has been phenomenal. And you know, we know about it because it was kind of public and it was viral, but in the same way, you don’t know how something that you do affects other people and flows out. You may never hear of how it impacted somebody else’s life, but trust me, it does. People pay attention to what’s going on. When this was floating around on the internet big time, it was exciting at one level, but it was also very depressing for me at another level, because the typical comment was, “It’s good to finally see a church doing something that Jesus would do.” I saw that, variations on that, hundreds of times. And I know a lot of churches that are doing good stuff like this, but the horn doesn’t get tooted, and you don’t hear about it. It’s not on the evening news. So to me, that was kind of depressing to see that that’s how people perceive the Christian church. So we’re doing what we can to change that.

Amber Hacker: Well, it’s such a beautiful and inspiring story, Pastor John. I just can’t help think of the boy who had the five loaves of bread and the two fish, and then the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000, just how that multiplied, multiplied, multiplied, that ripple effect. And so you started out with a few loaves and fishes, and boy, I mean, like you said, you don’t even know how much that’s made an impact. So that’s really exciting.

Tom Levinson: That’s from the Gospel.

Amber Hacker: Yes, yes.

Pastor John Jackman: I’m pretty sure that Jesus did not ask for their documentation before giving them something to eat.

Amber Hacker: I think that’s right. And I think, Pastor, that story is mentioned in all four Gospels. Is that right?

Pastor John Jackman: Okay, excellent.

Amber Hacker: To check with the pastor on that one. So I’m curious, what advice, Pastor John, would you give folks out here, maybe listening, thinking, “Oh, I could do that at my church, or do it at my synagogue or mosque, or any other community.” What advice would you give to them?

Pastor John Jackman: I’ve been putting a lot of thought into this, because I end up talking to a lot of other churches at this point about what can they do. What I’ve thought back to is, once again, I can’t tell you where this quote comes from, because I heard it years ago, and I’m not sure who originally said it, but I heard an older pastor say, “What would happen if every church in America took responsibility for the square mile around their building? What would happen to this nation?” And take care of the folks in the neighborhood, meet the needs, lift up those who are depressed, those who are in struggle. And that has stuck with me over the years. And the thing that flows out from that is, wherever you are, you need to go outside your walls and look at your community and figure out what needs to be done. Every community is different. If you’re in a suburban church where the neighborhood’s pretty well off, the need is going to be a little different from the place where we’re planted, where we’ve got a third Black, a third white and a third Latino, and a real spread of income. So the need is going to be different, but you need to look around and see what needs to be done. Along another line like that, we’ve had a funding crisis in our local school system and our board said, “Okay, what can we do?” We can’t come up with $50 million to cover the shortfall that they had, but what we can do is we can help out our nearby school. So we adopted the nearest school, Cone Oak Middle School, and have been supporting the teachers through this kind of crisis and the administration through this crisis. We couldn’t do all of them, but we could do one. And your church or synagogue or organization can do one of something, to start off with.

Amber Hacker: I just think that’s really beautiful, Pastor John. It reminds me of a parable. Have you heard the story of all these starfishes that were sort of left on the shore, and there’s hundreds and hundreds of them? And these two friends are walking, and the guy keeps picking them up and throwing them into the ocean. And his friend says, “Well, what are you doing? You’re never going to be able to save all of these starfish.” And his friend looks at him, picks up one, throws it in the ocean, and says, “I made a difference to that one.”

Pastor John Jackman: Yeah, yeah. And so it just reminds me of that story. There’s a wonderful Jewish concept called tikkun olam—repair the world.

Amber Hacker: Repair the world, yes.

Pastor John Jackman: The Talmud says that we shouldn’t be overwhelmed by all the need. We should do what we can, and I think that’s really important. When you look at particularly right now, the chaos that’s out there and the confusion, and very often that’s looking around in your neighborhood, in your life, and finding what there is that you can do and just doing it. And like that square mile idea for churches, if all of us did that, how different this would be.

Tom Levinson: Yeah, your reference to this quote from the Talmud resonates a lot, both because it’s something that is extremely near and dear to my heart, as well as to many hearts, but actually, my Hebrew name, Pastor John, is Tarfon, and it was Rabbi Tarfon in the section called Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of Our Fathers, who has this quote. And I just want to read it so that we have it in full. He says, “It’s not your job. It’s not your duty to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from that work.” Pastor John, as you think back to the many contributions and donations of money, of time, of effort that you’ve gotten throughout this project, both from wealthy donors as well as from people of more modest means, what have you learned about generosity and the spiritual wellsprings of generosity through this work?

Pastor John Jackman: One thing I have learned is that most people are very generous. Most people, when confronted with a need, will do something, and that gives me hope, because I think sometimes the naysayers are very loud, but my experience of most people is that they have a really strong streak of generosity. Sometimes they’re separated from the problem so much that they don’t know about it. So one of our tasks is to help them understand the need that’s out there in a way that will touch their hearts. And I’ve seen just so many people step up. Most of our donations have come from small donors. The majority are $5, $50, and I think sometimes that $25 is like the widow’s mite. It’s all they had that they could donate. So that’s a terrific example, right there.

Amber Hacker: You know, I think about this idea of this beautiful project you all are doing around debt forgiveness, medical debt forgiveness. But I can’t help think about what are the root causes behind this, right? And so beyond debt forgiveness campaigns, what deeper changes do you hope to see in our country as it relates to debt, healthcare, economic justice? And then, how does that connect to your Christian beliefs?

Pastor John Jackman: Well, that’s a big question. I’ve always said that what we’re doing is nothing but a band-aid on a hemorrhage, not going to fix the underlying problem. And the underlying problem is we have probably the worst way of paying for medical care in the world. For a long time, people kept saying, “Yes, but we got the best medical care available,” and what’s showing up now is, no, that’s not true. We are falling down in the list of industrialized countries in terms of lifespan, of health, of infant mortality and so on. So we do not have the best in some ways. But the problem is our whole society is now built around this particular way of doing it badly. When you try to reform this, you’ll find that many pension funds are invested in medical insurance. So it’s going to have a huge ripple effect, and somebody is going to have to stand up and come up with a clearly articulated idea to move it forward. I will say one thing. I’m over 65, so I’m now on Medicare, and let me tell you, it is a lot better than what I had, the very expensive policy that the church used to buy me. So I’m actually sitting here as a witness to that. It’s going to require major changes in our country. I hope that there is a groundswell building up that will demand that, but it is going to be painful. The doctors and the nurses and all the frontline workers, it’s not their fault. They’re doing the best they can with the system they’ve been given. Even the insurance people will tell you, nobody would design a system like this. We’re just doing what we can with it. But it ends up being multi-level marketing, because inside of the big nonprofit, you find level after level of for-profit, and the amount of money is staggering. And anytime you involve that much money, people are generous, but they’re also greedy, and so the sin of greed infects everything. The medical system in this area now has a larger cash flow than the largest regional bank in our area. So that’s kind of staggering. So I don’t have an answer for that, but I think we are going to have to figure out a way to do this so that everyone receives equitable healthcare, and the doctors and nurses make a decent living and so on, but we haven’t figured that out yet.

Tom Levinson: Pastor John, one question in closing, why do you think efforts like the Debt Jubilee Project that you’ve taken on, that your community has taken on, are so important to your congregation and to communities around the country at this moment in time?

Pastor John Jackman: Well, I think it offers a sense of hope that something can be done. I think we are in a time when many people feel very hopeless and don’t feel like there’s any solution out there. They’re seeing politics is such a mess, we’re so divided. It’s wonderful to see something that we can come together about. One thing I’ll say is this is definitely a purple issue. We’ve had donors from far right, donors from far left. The coverage about this has ranged all over the place. It’s been mentioned on some very conservative talk radio programs, all the way over to the other end of the spectrum. So I think it does offer an example of something that’s working and making the broken system work. And I think there are other ways we can do that. I’m not a genius enough to come up with them, but I bet there are people out there that are smart enough to do that. So I’d encourage them to look at other instances and say, “Okay, how can we use a crazy idea like this to do what’s right in this other area as well?”

Amber Hacker: It’s such a beautiful example of cooperation across difference for the common good. So it seems that members of our Money Meet Meaning production team have telepathy with Tom and I, because I think we all wrote down the same question, which is, we would like to make a donation to Debt Jubilee to contribute to another debt purchase. Do you have a campaign coming up, and is that something that we can do in honor of you and the folks at Trinity Moravian Church?

Pastor John Jackman: Yes, absolutely. We do two campaigns a year, one in the summer and one for Christmas. So our Christmas campaign is just right around the corner, and you can go to our website, debtjubileeproject.org, and there will be an active link for making a donation. Donations that come in prior to the start of the campaign are kind of placed in the bank and held. When the campaign goes live, that link will go directly to the Undue Medical Debt system. So we just got in several donations that we’re going to hold for the next campaign, and I’d love to get one from you guys, too.

Tom Levinson: Amazing.

Amber Hacker: You will. We’re excited to do so. For our listeners who want to contribute to this growing movement, are there organizations, perhaps more national in scope, that you might direct their attention to?

Pastor John Jackman: Well, if they are interested in this specific topic, medical debt, then Undue Medical Debt is the organization to work with, and their website is unduemedical.org. They have set up a really remarkable system, and I’m very grateful to them, because they’ve continued to refine their system so that it works very smoothly and we don’t have to do all the record keeping, which would have been overwhelming. And so in that area, that’s the best place to go. And I’m not really expert enough on other areas to make a suggestion, but that’s the one we’ve worked with.

Amber Hacker: No, that’s a great one, perfect.

Tom Levinson: That’s a great, great next step. Excellent. Thank you so much, Pastor John.

Pastor John Jackman: Thank you.

[OUTRO]

Amber Hacker: This is Money Meet Meaning. Thanks for listening. I’m Amber Hacker—

Tom Levinson: And I’m Tom Levinson. Big thanks to our very special guest, Pastor John Jackman. Money Meet Meaning is a podcast by Interfaith America and Apella Wealth and distributed by Religion News Service and the Faith and Work Initiative at Princeton University. Elizabeth Windham is the supervising producer. Elizabeth Villa is our story producer. Julia Windham is the editor. Correnna Roozeboom and Hannah Snoeyink are the associate producers. Senior producer is Jay Woodward. Our theme music is by Martin Fowler Skyler. Roozeboom designed our look.

Amber Hacker: If you’ve got anything to tell us about your own views on money and wisdom and faith traditions, you can email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and please share us with a friend.

Tom Levinson: Money Meet Meaning is produced by Wind Haven Productions, Special Thanks, and Bluejay Atlantic.

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