WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Members of Trinity Moravian Church, a 114-year-old congregation near the city’s old textile mills, have raised more than $17,000 in their latest campaign to buy up and retire medical debt, eliminating $2.2 million in unpaid bills for residents of surrounding Forsyth County.
The effort, which the church calls its Debt Jubilee Project, works through Undue Medical Debt, a nonprofit that purchases unpaid medical bills from hospitals and debt collectors at steeply discounted rates — often pennies on the dollar — so the debts can be forgiven. The church’s eighth campaign, completed earlier this year, brought the total amount of debt retired by the congregation to millions of dollars since it began the project in 2022.
The Rev. John Jackman, who leads the congregation, said the idea for the project emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, when growing numbers of people turned to the church for assistance. “I was hearing about the reason they couldn’t pay their electric bill was because they’d had a few days in the hospital and then they got hit with this huge bill and it snowballed,” he recalled. “And I started hearing this again and again and again.”
The first campaign, in 2022, set a goal of raising $5,000 to retire about $500,000 in unpaid medical bills for Forsyth County residents. It reached that target in six weeks, fueled mostly by donations of less than $50.
Jackman attributed the project’s success to the church’s ethos. “One of our ideas is that we cannot fix everything, but we have to fix what we can in the place where we’re planted,” he said.
The project has drawn support from both sides of the political divide. Jackman described Trinity Moravian, which has about 200 members, as a “purple congregation” where supporters of President Trump sit alongside his critics.
Catherine Coe, a conservative who voted for Trump, said she sees the burden of medical debt in her work in the accounting department of a hospital system. “I see people going into debt every minute of every day,” she said. “We’re all just one medical bill from financial ruin.”
Terri Mabe, a 70-year-old longtime member who said she cannot stand the president, has seen the effects of medical debt from her time in the construction industry. “In between projects you are a lot of times without a job,” she said. “Then you get sick. Next thing you know, you owe $5,000, $10,000 that you cannot pay.”
Coe said she does not see a political divide on the issue. “There isn’t a political divide when it comes to medical debt,” she said. “It all brings us together.”
Polls suggest the sentiment is widespread. A 2025 survey for Undue Medical Debt found that about 75% of Republicans and about 90% of Democrats said collection agencies should not be allowed to garnish patients’ wages to pay medical debt. In recent years, bipartisan measures to expand protections from medical debt have passed in both blue and red states.
At a ceremony marking the completion of the most recent campaign, Jackman held up a list of 1,631 names — residents whose debts had been bought and retired by the church. “On this day of Jubilee,” he announced, “we act to forgive the debts of many of our neighbors as God has forgiven our debts.”
Paul Sluder, 78, a former debt collector who does not identify with a political party, said most people he collected from wanted to pay what they owed but had no choice but to go into debt when they got sick. “You have kind of no control. You have to take care of yourself or your loved ones,” he said. “It’s incredibly unfair, and I think the system’s out of whack.”