Crossroads Church senior pastor Brian Tome mentioned the campaign nearly in passing.

He spent about three minutes describing the burden of medical debt during his Nov. 23 sermon, entitled “The Marks of Multiplication.” Tome said members of the congregation could text “MULTIPLY” to 313131 to help “free others from medical debt,” but insisted the campaign was not a challenge.

Just an awareness.

It was also a great metaphor for his lesson on multiplicity.

“When we are in debt, a sin debt to God, we can’t get our way out of the sin debt to God,” he said during the sermon. “Jesus comes and gives himself so we can pay off our sin debt, so we never have to worry about God hurting us for our sin.”

Crossroads could give to free others' debt, too, he said. And for every dollar they raised, Crossroad's partner RIP Medical Debt would leverage that dollar to abolish $100 in medical debt, therefore multiplying the church's impact.

Within a week and a half, members of the Crossroads community donated enough to abolish over $46.5 million in medical debt nationwide.

Over $42 million of those funds came back to Ohio families.

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“Most of it probably that weekend,” said Crossroads director of marketing Brennan Hill. “'Cause I think most people, if I had to guess, were doing it in real time. You know, if they were literally getting their phones out and texting in.”

Church officials announced the impact of their campaign Sunday morning.

Most of the funds came back to Ohio families since the church is based out of the Cincinnati region. But the sermons are streamed online, which means anyone in the nation can tune in and participate.

RIP Medical Debt is able to track the donations back to their original ZIP codes to give back. So, if you donated from Indiana, your donation was multiplied and given back to your community in Indiana.

In Ohio, church officials say, they have abolished $42.8 million in debts across 41,233 households in 103 ZIP codes.

They also abolished $1.9 million in debt across 2,974 Kentucky households, $1.5 million across 503 Tennessee households and $200,000 across 136 Indiana households.

What is RIP Medical Debt?

An article posted by USA Today last year explains that RIP Medical Debt is a nonprofit organization based out of Rye, New York, that arranges debt payoffs.

The article said medical debt contributes to two-thirds of bankruptcies, according to the American Journal of Public Health. And a 2018 Kaiser Family Foundation/New York Times poll showed that of the 26 percent of people who reported problems paying medical bills, 59 percent reported a major life impact, such as taking an extra job, cutting other household spending or using up savings.

“How sad that probably the only debt that you don’t choose to get – 'cause you don’t choose to get sick – and it’s the one that’s affecting most people," said Victor Martinez, spiritual growth site leader for the Oakley location.

When a person can’t pay a bill, that debt is often packaged with other people’s debt and sold to bill collectors for some fraction of the total amount of the bill. RIP Medical Debt buys debt portfolios on this secondary market for pennies on the dollar with money from its donors.

But instead of collecting the debt, RIP forgives it.

To be eligible for repayment from RIP, the debtor must be earning less than twice the federal poverty level (about $25,000 a year for an individual and $52,000 for a family of four), have debts that are 5 percent or more of their annual income and have more debt than assets.

Because hospitals and doctors are eager to get those hard-to-collect debts off their books, they sell them cheap.

Working this way puts a high-dollar project within reach of even small churches. Revolution Annapolis, a nondenominational Maryland church with Sunday attendance of around 200 and without a permanent building, wiped out $1.9 million in debt for 900 families in March. Total amount raised: $15,000.

A debt that never goes away... even if you don't know about it

According to the Federal Trade Commission, debt collectors have a certain number of years they can sue you and win to collect a debt. This rule is called the statute of limitations, and is six years in Ohio.

This means that for any type of debt, a creditor cannot sue a debtor for debt collection purposes after six years, according to America's Debt Help Organization. That timeframe begins when someone fails to make a payment on a debt. The clock will start again if you make a payment or provide written acknowledgment of your debt after the first six years are up.

Martinez says that because of this law, many people who got a letter explaining that their debt had been abolished thanks to Crossroads didn't even know they had medical debt. If it was after those six years, hospitals and debt collectors had stopped calling.

“If those six years pass, then nobody can give you a call asking for that money," Martinez said. "But you still owe that money, technically. And the only way that you can really get rid of it is if you file bankruptcy, or if you pay for it.”

Medical debt never goes away. It will stay on your record if you don't pay it. The law just states that if you don't pay it within that six year window, people will stop asking you to pay – not that you are off the hook.

Martinez said that now that he understands how the law works, he's afraid to call and ask if he owes anything. Because, what if he owes a lot of money? He'll be accountable to pay it, he said.

“That is very scary," he said. "Because what if I have medical debt that I don’t know about?”

'A great analogy to what Jesus did for us.'

Crossroads officials did not want this story to be about them.

“We kept it off social media," Hill said. "We really want it to be about people in our community, like I said, who are currently giving.”

Crossroads members don't know who specifically they have impacted. They could not choose whose debt to pay off. In a letter to each debtor, Crossroads explained the campaign and said that they hope to provide more resources for those in need, whether that is through prayer or connecting them with healthcare professionals in their community.

“We don’t want this to be the last interaction that we have with them, but there are no strings attached," Hill said."We just hope that they understand who Crossroads is, what our heart is for the community, maybe set foot in one of our sites.”

This whole experience has been a great analogy to what Jesus did for us, Martinez said.

"Jesus, before we knew who he was, he died for us, to forgive our debt," Martinez said. "And here, we don’t know who these people are, and we are putting this money for their debt to be forgiven."

According to RIP Medical Debt, Crossroads' campaign is its largest amount of medical debt that's ever been retired. The nonprofit's site claims that its partnerships have erased almost $1.4 billion in medical debt to date.

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