June 3, 2002
Truckers' chapel is where faith's rubber hits the road
___By Ken Camp
___Texas Baptist Communications
___DALLAS--Wedding guests, customers and clerks working the front counter at the chrome shop put out their cigarettes, set down their Styrofoam coffee cups and took their seats when the minister announced it was time for the wedding to begin.
___The bride stepped out of a storage room wearing a crisp white smock over her floral print dress. The groom, in his best blue jeans and a neatly pressed western shirt, waited for her at the front of the makeshift chapel.
Craig Zoller, pastor of the Blue Jean Truckers' Chapel in South Dallas, performs the wedding for a trucking team, Malcolm Clements and Gini Rohwer. Ken Camp/BGCT
___They recited their vows before God, standing between shiny Peterbilt truck bumpers and an assortment of rear-view mirrors, reflectors and hood ornaments.
___Malcolm Clements and Virginia "Gini" Rohwer had been "running team"--driving a truck together--for Consolidated Freightways International for about eight months.
___When they decided to become a different kind of team, they contacted Pastor Craig Zoller at the Blue Jean Truckers' Chapel in South Dallas and asked him to perform their wedding.
___"Neither one of us has a home church where we could have a marriage service," the bride said.
___After their initial contact with Zoller, the couple started worshipping at the Blue Jean Truckers' Chapel whenever their travels allowed them to be in Dallas on a Sunday. Trucker chapels, they said, meet the unique needs of drivers.
___"There's not too many churches that will let you park a big rig in their parking lot," Mrs. Clements said. "Having the chapel out there in our area makes us feel like we're part of the whole network (of believers), even though we're kind of on the fringe of society, never in one place long enough to get involved."
___Zoller understands those feelings. He worked as a mechanic and truck driver after six and a half years in the military. During his last year with a truck line, he felt God's calling into ministry. When the truck line closed and the opportunity developed to start the trucker chapel, Zoller saw it as a perfect fit.
___"I really loved driving out there on the road. I can relate," he said.
___Zoller, a Mission Service Corps volunteer, started the Blue Jean Truckers Chapel in October 1997 with Tommy Richardson and Lindsay Cofield, director of lay ministry development with the Baptist General Convention of Texas. The chapel received a small start-up grant from the BGCT, made possible by gifts to the Mary Hill Davis Offering for Texas Missions.
___When Zoller and the others started holding chapel services in the little building just off I-20, strategically located near a major truck stop and several terminals, it was a bar.
___"That was kind of a hard time, a struggle for us. We didn't know if we would feel comfortable having worship services in a bar until after that first Sunday," Zoller recalled. "Then we found out we weren't ministering just to truckers. We were ministering to the work crew. Their break time was right around the chapel time."
___Eventually, when the bar closed, the owner of a small chrome shop in the same building bought the facility to expand his business. He pledged to Zoller that the chapel always would have a home in his shop, as long as they wanted it.
___"The drivers really appreciate it," said Jim Wallace, owner and operator of Chrome Plus USA. "They'll call over and ask if we're going to do church services."
___Wallace said it's not unusual for business to continue throughout the service, but shoppers typically stop, remove their hats and bow their heads whenever there is a prayer.
___Each Sunday, in addition to holding a worship service at the chrome shop, volunteers from Blue Jean Truckers Chapel deliver about 130 "goody bags" filled with snacks, candy and gospel tracts to five trucking terminals near I-20 in south Dallas County. Zoller estimates workers have distributed 9,000 bags in the last three years.
___"That has opened doors for us," he said. Now representatives of the Blue Jean Truckers Chapel hold brief Sunday afternoon worship services at two of the terminals. In the last four years, at least 10 truckers have made professions of faith in Christ through the varied ministries of the chapel.
___Volunteers from several area churches participate in the "goody bag" distribution. On at least one occasion, a Mission Friends preschool group colored pictures that volunteers included in the bags.
___"It was months later that a woman driver mentioned how much that meant to her," Zoller said. "She said, 'I still have that picture on my dashboard.'"
___
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