NEW HOPE, Miss. (AP) - Since January, Erin Stevens’ life has looked pretty standard by Southern Baptist pastor’s wife standards.
As the wife of Todd Stevens, who is about to reach the year mark as pastor of Mount Vernon Church in New Hope, Erin helps with a backpack ministry that sends meals home with food insecure students at New Hope Elementary. The church also ministers at laundromats — putting quarters in machines, playing with children there and helping families fold their clothes — and operates the occasional “gas buy-down” at a local convenience store where they give $5 to folks to help them at the pump.
All of these ministries feed the mission of turning the church outward, Erin said. They don’t take Bibles or gospel tracts, and they don’t ask the people they help for anything in return — not even to come to church.
“We want to show God’s love in practical ways with no strings attached,” Erin said. “We don’t believe anyone is ’the enemy.’ We believe (un-churched people) are the mission field. The only way to reach them is to offer something genuine and show them unconditional love.
“We want the kind of church that if we closed the doors tomorrow, the community would miss us,” she added.
One might say Erin earned her bona fides in that outreach philosophy long before she came to New Hope and in a very unconventional way. In her native Nashville, Tennessee, she fed and ministered to strippers in their workplace at least twice a month for five years.
“Not a lot of pastors’ wives like to hang out at strip clubs,” Erin said. “I love it.”
Todd surrendered to preach in 2002 and continued his job in electronic commerce at Adidas Global while he attended seminary. When he graduated in 2006, he went into ministry full-time, leaving his long-time job to pastor a church.
The initially-reluctant Erin ultimately accepted the transition and said she began praying for the way God wanted her to support it. Her answer became clear by 2012: “Go feed the strippers.” With her conservative upbringing — raised by churchgoing parents who didn’t even drink — Erin had no exposure to the arena she was about to enter. But that didn’t stop her.
“The way I see it, your past does not define you,” she said. “No matter who you are or what you’ve done, you are valuable to God and to me.”
She started by taking home-cooked meals every two weeks. Soon, she started including small gifts with the meals, mostly creature comforts like makeup. The church’s women’s ministry got involved, too, sewing the club workers quilts and blankets for Erin to take them.
Over time, it evolved to club workers calling her, sometimes in the early morning hours, to come help them.
Erin said she was unexpectedly welcomed into the environment — proof, she said, that God had sent her on the mission. The bouncers, whom she fed as often as the strippers, called her “the church lady.” They parked her car, carried in the food she brought and looked after her while she was in the club.
The general manager even welcomed her, becoming in some ways Erin’s friend. However, that friendship came with some sobering realizations.
“Almost every time I went, I spoke with the general manager,” she said. “He supported what I was doing, but one day in his office he showed me a stack of resumes on his desk. He told me, ’For every one you save, I’ve got 10 more to replace them.’”
And it wasn’t just saving them from the pole. Erin said drug use and prostitution were prevalent and she considered herself on the front lines of human trafficking in the area.
What’s more, anyone who left the lifestyle had to give up as much as $10,000 per month, often in exchange for jobs that paid $10 or $12 per hour. That’s a hard sell, she said, for single mothers or women trying to pay their way through school.
Still, seven dancers did leave their jobs. They became housekeepers, musicians, motivational speakers. One even works on airplanes, Erin said.
Some joined the church, but they all returned to the club with Erin’s ministry.
“My most powerful allies in that ministry, besides the Holy Spirit, were those girls who had changed their lives,” she said.
Todd and Erin wrote a book about their experiences, “How to Pick Up a Stripper,” which Thomas Nelson published in 2014. The idea, Erin said, is to get people to think about the church’s purpose in a different way.
“People get so caught up in tradition,” Erin said. “If we would just love like Jesus loved, instead of arguing about what He said, we could change the world.”
Erin said Mount Vernon has offered to help if she wants to start a strip club ministry in the Golden Triangle. Whether she does, she said, is up to God’s calling. In the meantime, she still keeps up with her friends in Nashville, some of whom still work in the club.
“I miss them, but I’m still in contact with a lot of them,” she said. “They’re my friends on Facebook.”
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