During the summer of 2019, Northpointe Community Church partnered with the nonprofit organization RIP Medical Debt to pay off $3.8 million in medical debt.
“We’re a church that cares about people and their needs,” Lead Pastor Rich Ruble said, “We want to be the hands and feet of Jesus and to give back to the community.”
Ruble said that the church located in DeWitt has a vision to impact 50,000 people in five years with the grace of Jesus. When they found out about RIP Medical, they understood that it was a great fit for their vision. It’s who they are and what they want to do.
“Because we understand what it feels and means to be forgiven,” Ruble said. “We want to give that gift to people for them to experience as well.”
Northpointe’s Director of Community Impact and Missions Aimee Beltran was in charge of coordinating with RIP Medical.
“We recognize that there was a huge need for the church to impact the community we live in,” Beltran said.
The nonprofit gave the church the amount of medical debt for most of Mid-Michigan. This includes Clinton County, Laingsburg, Grand Ledge and the 48906 zip code; North Lansing. It then took a look at what it can do and how it can help.
To pay off the medical debts, the church used the Benevolence Fund. This is a quarterly offering that Northpointe Community Church takes up. It’s a special offering that gives people the opportunity to help and donate.
“The fund is intended to help people in the community who need help,” Beltran said. “We want to help them holistically anyway we can.”
The Benevolence team is a confidential group that organizes the list of families that need help with medical debt.
In early December, the families will get a letter that says their medical debt has been paid in full by the Northpointe Community Church.
“We want to impact people with the grace of Jesus,” Ruble said.
In addition to paying off medical debts, Northpointe reaches to help people all around the Mid-Michigan area in anyway it can. It isn’t aren’t exclusive to just helping church attenders. The Benevolence Fund is what enables them to do so.
Ruble said there will be many large and small scale projects in the future. He believes that the church will be more important in the future than it is now due to the rise of technology.
He envisions the church to be the place that people find relationships that are more “authentic, real, encouraging, challenging, and that are in the context of the church.”