The little chapel sits in the middle of a truck-stop parking lot, surrounded by the rumble of engines. The noise, a constant hum punctuated by the occasional groan of an air brake, is a reminder that the congregation here is on both a spiritual journey and a long, relentless trip on the interstate.
On a recent Sunday morning, the husband-wife trucking team of Loretta and LeRoy McEwin stopped by the chapel at the Sapp Bros. truck stop off I-215 in Salt Lake City. The McEwins transport explosives for the federal government and spend most of their time on the road, often driving round the clock seven days a week, only occasionally returning home to Odessa, Texas.
"I need the Lord every day, really," says Loretta, who is grateful for truck-stop chapels such as this one.
There are about 200 trucker chapels nationwide, 150 of them affiliated with Truckers Christian Chapel Ministries. The chapel near I-215 is a TCCM church and is the only truck stop chapel currently operating in Utah.
Before its conversion, the chapel was a refrigerated semitrailer that hauled produce and frozen food. Skinny and utilitarian even after being refurbished, the chapel can accommodate rows only three seats wide, and an aisle up one side. The layout, plus the constant sound of the motors outside, makes a church service there feel oddly like an airplane ride.
On a typical Sunday morning Pastor Charles Clarke will get a handful of truckers in his folding-chair pews. The day the McEwins attended there was one other couple — Patty and Zoy Hann from California, who haul oversize loads — and a trucker named Wayne.
Wayne, who has been living permanently in his truck for the past two years since his divorce, once planned to become a minister himself but got sidetracked after a stint in Vietnam and marriage to a nonbeliever. "My heart turned hard," he says. This trip to the truck stop chapel represented his first time in church in more than 25 years.
"He never lets go of you," Patty Hann told him after the service, referring to Jesus.
"Maybe that's why I'm still alive," Wayne replied.
The average truck driver is home only three or four days a month, and that might not be on a Sunday, notes Randy Fontaine, western regional director of another truck ministry, Transport for Christ. So the driver tends to get lonely, he says, and "the loneliness causes discouragement, depression and low self-esteem." Because he's not home much, his relationships there sometimes suffer.
"Where does he turn to when he's hurting? What will help ease the pain? The bar around the corner, the adult bookstore, the prostitute — or the chapel he can walk into because there's somebody there 24 hours a day?" Fontaine asks.
Transport for Christ has chapels in 17 states. Another group, Truckers for Christ out of North Carolina, has chapels in 26 states. "We'd love to be in Utah because it's at the junction of several interstates," Fontaine says, but so far Utah hasn't met all four of his organization's requirements: an invitation from a truck stop; $16,000 to convert a trailer into a chapel; a group of eight to 15 local lay volunteers to staff the chapel 24 hours a day; and a lead chaplain willing to go though training and donate his time.
The round-the-clock volunteers are crucial, he says. "We find the majority of our ministry is outside of Sundays. . . . Where does a driver go on a Tuesday afternoon when he finds out his wife is leaving him?"
It is the anonymity of the truck stop chapels that can sometimes make the counseling more effective. "They say, 'My name is Bob,' but it's not really Bob," Fontaine says. "So they're more willing to share what's going on. It helps you get to the root of things a lot quicker."
Bible counseling isn't like psychological counseling, says pastor Clarke of the trucker chapel in Salt Lake City. "Psychology and sociology are man-made sciences. Theology is a God-made science. We give them the spiritual answer from the Bible."
Like other trucker chapels, Clarke's has a born-again bent with a literal interpretation of the Bible. "You can trust your Bible," Clarke told his flock one Sunday recently. "It's perfect, from Genesis 1 to Revelations 22. . . . I personally believe that when we get to heaven, we'll be responsible for everything in the Bible."
Clarke, who is also pastor of Bible Church of Salt Lake, graduated from Baylor University in Texas and received a doctorate in the philosophy of religion from Bethany Seminary in Alabama. In his sermons he is fond of quoting from Greek and Hebrew, sometimes writing Greek words on the white board behind the lectern at the front of the trailer.
A call to the headquarters of Truckers Christian Chapel Ministries, in Enon, Ohio, connects you to the mother of founder Glenn Cope. Glenn is 71 and Lorene Cope is 90. "Before he was ever born, I gave him to the Lord. And the Lord took it from there," says Lorene, who is proud of her son's work with TCCM.
A lot of neighborhood churches, she says, won't accept a trucker who isn't dressed in his Sunday best. And, too, there's usually nowhere for him to park his rig in the church lot. Some people, she says, don't understand how hard a trucker's life is or how hard it is to attend church. "Some like to sit on their padded seats and not think about the trucker out there, dirty and hungry, and how really hungry they are for the gospel."
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com