#23: Where the Gospel Meets Student Loan Debt

#23: Where the Gospel Meets Student Loan Debt

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Luke Womack was a junior in college when he decided to go on a mission trip to Delhi, India.

LUKE WOMACK: I remember walking into a temple in downtown Delhi, and if you haven’t been to, y’know, South Asia, this isn’t like a church.

JESSE EUBANKS: This temple is orange and shaped like a giant monkey — one of their gods — and inside there are dozens of smaller statues of this monkey. 

LUKE WOMACK: I remember watching a grown man bow down to and worship a small image of this god, what I knew was an orange stone that some man had painted.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Wait, wait, wait, Jesse. Time out for a second. You told me that we were talking about student loan debt. Why on earth are we talking about orange monkey gods in India?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, well, hold on. It’ll all make sense in a minute because it was on this mission trip that Luke decided that he wanted to dedicate his life to global missions.

LUKE WOMACK: And I knew for a fact that if I didn’t bring the good news to this man or someone else didn’t do it, that he would endure an eternity apart from God. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Now Luke was a business major. He’s good at thinking strategy. And he thought he could go overseas but it would be more strategic if he could get a lot of people to go.  And so, back home, he starts calling people on the phone, any friends he can think of. And there’s no, ‘Hey, how are you? How’s life?’ Luke just gets right to the point, and he asks everyone two simple questions.

LUKE WOMACK: Number one, have you ever considered a career in long-term missions to the unreached. And number two, why are you not there today?

LACHLAN COFFEY: What? I thought I’d never say this out loud, but I would actually prefer a robo-caller to call me. (laughter) Rather than that call. I’m guessing that a lot of people pretty much just hung up the phone. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Uh, y’know, surprisingly a lot of his friends, because they were friends, they actually stuck with him and had the conversation with him. And in answer to his first question, most people actually said yes, they had thought about a career in missions and that they were willing to go overseas. Which really only left question number two.

LUKE WOMACK: And the second question — y’know, ‘Why are you not there now?’ — almost every single person had the same answer to that question.

JESSE EUBANKS: Over and over again, he kept hearing the same response from his friends as to why they couldn’t go. And it wasn’t fundraising. It wasn’t learning a new language. The one thing standing in their way — was student loan debt.

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JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: And I’m Lachlan Coffey. Every episode we hear stories of social justice and Christian community.

JESSE EUBANKS: Today’s episode is where the gospel meets student loan debt. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Student loan debt is actually a topic that we could explore for a whole series. I mean, you think about how much it’s talked about, y’know, and how involved it is. You’ve got the government, college tuition, the job market. I mean, gracious sakes’, how expensive are college books? I mean we could go on and on and on about this.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I mean this is a complex topic for sure. But for this episode, we decided we’re going to narrow it down. We’re going to focus on one thing in particular, and that’s the relationship between student debt and our ability to live on mission. In our stories today, we’re gonna hear how student loan debt is actually impacting the global church — as well as churches in our own backyard. Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

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NEWS CLIPS: That is why this proposal completely eliminates student debt in this country… Student loan debt, I’m gonna work to fix it… Y’know, student loan debt and also the cost of four-year college is getting higher and higher… It has life-altering consequences, and we don’t even understand the true scope of those yet…

JESSE EUBANKS: If you’ve been following the news about the 2020 election at all, you know that student loan debt and what we should do about it is one of the big issues on the table. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: That’s because student debt is the absolutely highest it has ever been. It’s one of the highest consumer debt categories, second only to mortgage debt. I mean, Jesse, it’s higher than credit card debt. Currently, student loan debt stands at a whopping 1.5 trillion dollars. 1.5 trillion. That’s crazy, isn’t it?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and obviously 1.5 trillion dollars, that is having a huge impact on our economy. But it’s not only impacting our economy — it’s affecting us as Christians too, and in particular our relationship to living on mission. So back in 2012, Al Mohler — who’s the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary — he said this: ‘If your concern is to get young people into the churches or on the mission fields, the greatest enemy other than Satan himself is educational debt.’

LACHLAN COFFEY: Which is insane. I mean it’s pretty bold to compare student debt to Beelzebub. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. I mean he’s basically saying like ‘Oh, this student loan debt you have? It’s as bad as evil demonic forces.’ But the reality is is that it’s really having that big of an impact on our ability to make disciples. And from the time he made that statement only seven years ago, student debt totals have tripled. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: So what you’re getting at Jesse is — if that was a problem back in 2012, it’s triple the problem now. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Exactly.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Okay, but I don’t see the connection clearly here. I mean how is the Great Commission — our call to make disciples — being hindered by student loan debt?

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, let me, let me connect some dots for you. But before I do that, I think it’s important that we first take a look at what God thinks about debt.

So the Bible actually gives several warnings about the ways in which we handle our finances. Proverbs 22:26 says this in the Message translation — ‘Don’t gamble on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The time will come when you have to pay up. You’ll be left with nothing but the shirt on your back.’

LACHLAN COFFEY: It’s a word of caution, right? Y’know, and there’s some people that will think that all loans are bad. But if you look at Scripture, it’s clear that it existed in Bible times and it wasn’t all looked at as bad.

JESSE EUBANKS: So in the book of Second Kings, we read about a woman whose husband dies, leaving her and her children to take care of some debt that he had acquired. The woman goes to the prophet Elisha and tells him ‘the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves.’

LACHLAN COFFEY: Which would’ve been a big deal because with her husband dead, her children were gonna be the ones to have to take care of her. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Right. And in fact, God is very much for us paying off our debts. Psalm 37 says it is the wicked who borrow and don’t pay back. The problem comes not when we take out a loan, but when we get ourselves into a situation that we really just can’t afford. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Well, but what about Love Thy Neighborhood?

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, what do you mean?

LACHLAN COFFEY: You guys have young adults that work at a nonprofit for free for the entire year. I’m guessing many of those young people have student loan debts. I mean wouldn’t Love Thy Neighborhood be a situation that pretty much most people cannot afford? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Well no, and I’ll explain why in a minute. However, we have had interns get completely blindsided by the realities of their student loan debt.

KARINE MCGARRITY: It became a factor. I wanna say it was like end of March, beginning of April…

JESSE EUBANKS: So this is Karine, and at the time she was serving with Love Thy Neighborhood, she had graduated college and wanted to go on to med school so she was serving in our healthcare track. Now when it came to her student loan debt, Karine didn’t think that that would be much of a problem. 

KARINE MCGARRITY: I know I at least have this summer because my student debt will be like deferred for so long. They like give you that little wiggle room area of like ‘You don’t have to worry about it.’ 

LACHLAN COFFEY: And just so we’re all on the same page here — because I learned a big word this week — deferment. Let’s just pause for a second. Deferment means you can temporarily hold off on paying your monthly loan payments.

JESSE EUBANKS: Right. And in fact, many folks who serve with Love Thy Neighborhood are able to put their loans in deferment and it works out just fine. Because our interns get real-world job experience, most of them end up getting better paying jobs after serving with us than they would have otherwise. So a short-term deferment to come serve with LTN can actually end up having a real long-term payoff. So, in Karine’s case, the year goes on, she’s loving her time serving, she’s learning to work in a clinic, she’s getting to pray with patients as they come in, she’s mentoring kids in her neighborhood. And truth be told, she felt like it was exactly what she was supposed to be doing.

KARINE MCGARRITY: I was just like, I don’t know, on fire for these things.

JESSE EUBANKS: Until one day, when she gets a phone call that would change everything.

KARINE MCGARRITY: I immediately have a flashback to our small little apartment on East Oak Street, and I’m in the front bedroom where all of us are crammed in our little bunk beds.

JESSE EUBANKS: So Karine is about halfway through her year-long term when the loan company calls, and they’re calling to remind her that she has no more deferment time. They are expecting their first payment. 

KARINE MCGARRITY: They’re explaining to me ‘No, you’re done now like with that. Um, if you want, you can take your one-time only —’ I think they said it was like a year they would allow it that you were in, um, forbearance, or some big, y’know, loan word. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So, when she gets off the phone with the loan company, she basically has two options — use her one-time only forbearance now or start paying. And understandably, the first option seemed really unwise. 

KARINE MCGARRITY: That was really intimidating to me because further down in my life I didn’t know — y’know, there’s so many different things that can happen in life where I was like ‘I can’t take that one-time only chance.’ 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Wait, so there’s a difference then between deferment and forbearance? Because I thought that those two were like basically the same thing.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I know. It can be kinda tricky. So to help clarify, I had a phone conversation with a debt specialist. 

RANDY WILLIAMS: Well a forbearance is what the student loan companies love to offer because it just basically builds interest. A deferment loan doesn’t start yet. It’s deferred to a specific time before the rates start. If you’ve got a forbearance, you’re paying interest.

JESSE EUBANKS: So this is Randy Williams. He’s known as The Debt Coach. Basically he helps coach people through different financial situations.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Okay, so if I’m understanding right, deferment, it’s like you can pretend your loan doesn’t exist for a certain amount of time. But forbearance, it’s very much existing and it’s adding interest even though you don’t have to pay on it right now.

JESSE EUBANKS: Right. So you could almost think of it like this, like deferment — good, forbearance — not the worst but also not very great. So Karine scratches the option to take her forbearance, which leaves the second option — to start paying. And at the time, Karine had money in her savings. Maybe she could use that to pay on her loans until she finished LTN and could find a job. Unfortunately, she was gonna have to scratch that option too. 

KARINE MCGARRITY: I think I had enough to get me through a month before it was gonna end, like I would have been dried out completely, and I was like ‘Well, I don’t need to be dried out.’ That’s the whole time where I would need to like maybe move or I’ll be getting a job or I’ll be applying to jobs, so I’m gonna need that savings when I get done.

LACHLAN COFFEY: This is what we call in the podcast business a no-win situation.

JESSE EUBANKS: That’s what we call in life a no-win situation.

LACHLAN COFFEY: That’s a fair point.

JESSE EUBANKS: And here’s the deal. The reason Karine didn’t have that many options when it comes to repaying her loans is because her loans were made up of both federal loans — that’s loans issued by the government — as well as private loans. And according to Randy the debt coach, these two types of loans — they are very different.

RANDY WILLIAMS: Private loans — they don’t offer deferments, they go right into forbearance because they wanna make money on you. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And the sad reality is Karine is learning what all her student loan debt means when it’s kinda too late. Because when she was going to school and taking out all these loans, she didn’t know about deferment or forbearance or private loans. All she knew was that college was the next expected step and she needed money for it.

KARINE MCGARRITY: That’s a big part of my story is like how naive I was about my student debt.

JESSE EUBANKS: And like that’s really easy to understand, right? I mean —

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah. I mean I remember I made terrible financial decisions. This is literally what I would do when I was 18. I would take my girlfriend to the ATM machine to check my balance before I would take her on a date. So I would pull up, ‘Oh, there’s, y’know, $12.07, so that’s a dollar menu evening,’ and, y’know, you can’t afford much. And then it’d be like ‘Oh, if there’s $53 in there, y’know, papa got a hankering for some Applebee’s.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I remember like you roll up and if you have like 53 bucks in your account, that’s a pretty exciting experience, so the idea of like rolling onto a campus and then somebody is like ‘Hey, here’s $10,000.’ You’re like ‘Oh, well that’s a no-brainer. I’m gonna take that money.’ 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So, going back to Karine, she has these two options — use her forbearance or start paying, neither of which really seem doable. Which meant Karine was backed into a corner. And now she realizes that there’s really only one thing that she could do — she’s gonna have to drop out of Love Thy Neighborhood and get a job as soon as possible just so that she can pay on her loans.

KARINE MCGARRITY: And I just start ugly crying, like, y’know, snot rolling down your nose, like can’t catch your breath, like ‘I’m gonna have to quit. I’m not a quitter. Like this is so crazy, they want my money, like what am I even supposed to do if I do quit?’

JESSE EUBANKS: The book of Proverbs says that ‘the rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.’ Karine was at the mercy of her loans. They were calling the shots. Mission over. And what’s really sad in this situation is that it’s not just Karine that was the loser. Y’know, it was the fact that she was serving at this ministry doing medical care for people in her neighborhood. It was all the relationships that she had built with her neighbors where she had been sharing the gospel with them. It was the people at her church that she had grown into a community with.

LACHLAN COFFEY: So she’s doing all of this good work and then she gets pulled away for something so — what I think is so stupid. It’s not like a, y’know, life-altering decision. It’s not, y’know, ‘I have a big medical condition,’ y’know, or ‘I’ve gotta go home and help my family.’ It’s just dumb student loan debt.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and the crazy thing is this — is that when we go out and recruit for Love Thy Neighborhood, it is one of the first questions that everyone asks us is ‘But what about my student loan debt?’ So we have to think about like the way that Karine was making an impact on her community, and then you multiply that by hundreds. Student loan debt is coming and it’s robbing our communities of the presence of Christians because they all have to go out and hustle for cash. And so for Karine, the reality is like she had to pay her bills, and even getting a job — like it was gonna be easy for Karine because her monthly payments, y’know, they were sizable.

KARINE MCGARRITY: Yeah, I mean I’ll just tell you my total. My total was $100,000 in debt.  

LACHLAN COFFEY: What?! $100,000?

JESSE EUBANKS: Dude, we, we just didn’t realize that she —

LACHLAN COFFEY: Like how big it had become.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, that she just had such a burden on her shoulders. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Wow.

KARINE MCGARRITY: It’s embarrassing to have $100,000 in debt and say like ‘I didn’t know.’ It’s like ‘You knew,’ but at the same time again I was so naive.

LACHLAN COFFEY: So what I don’t get is how did we get here in the first place? Y’know, I mean whether Karine is naive or not, how did we get to the point where a young adult has to make that big of a decision and needs to borrow $100,000 for a college education? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, yeah, let’s talk about that for a minute. Uh, because believe it or not, part of it actually has to do with Russians and outer space.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Wait, really?

JESSE EUBANKS: We’ll be right back.

COMMERCIAL 

JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

LACHLAN COFFEY: And I’m Lachlan Coffey. Today’s episode is where the gospel meets student loan debt. 

JESSE EUBANKS: We’re looking at the impact student loans are having on our ability to follow God’s commands to love our neighbors and make disciples. We just heard from Karine, a young lady who wanted to spend a year serving with Love Thy Neighborhood, but now has to quit halfway through because of her student loan debt. But before we go any farther, I think it’s important that we get an understanding of how student loans started in the first place and just how in the world they got to be so expensive.

Okay, Lachlan, quiz time.

LACHLAN COFFEY: I hate it when you ask me here for quizzes. 

JESSE EUBANKS: I know. I feel like every time you come, I’m asking you some kind of quiz.

LACHLAN COFFEY: It’s terrible.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, do you know what historical event happened in October 1957? 

LACHLAN COFFEY: I do not know.  

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, here’s what happened. In October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into space. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Alright, what do Russians in space have anything to do with student loan debt?

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay well, after hearing about Sputnik, America actually got worried that we were falling behind in the space race. It was showing our nation to be inferior when it came to technology and science, and the conclusion was that our lack of intelligence would eventually become a threat to national security. We needed to boost our education and intelligence. So in September 1958, President Eisenhower signed a new law. Any guess what that new law was?

LACHLAN COFFEY: The law of gravity? (laughter)

JESSE EUBANKS: No, it was the National Defense Education Act. So this act provided funding to American schools and gave incentives to go on to college to study things like math and science and technology, and the hope was that we would create the next generation of geniuses for NASA. And what were those incentives for getting people to go to college? They came in the form of a new concept called federal aid. The government would loan money to help educate people for the safety of our nation, and that is how we created the federal student loan system.

LACHLAN COFFEY: But it doesn’t explain the inflation rates. Y’know, I mean Karine had to borrow $100,000 for a — what did she even major in?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Chemistry. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: $100,000 for a chemistry degree. I mean that’s crazy. You think, I mean look at how much chemistry we have and we didn’t even borrow anything for this. Am I right? Why aren’t you high-fiving me? No high-five?

JESSE EUBANKS: You make this so difficult. (laughter)

LACHLAN COFFEY: I don’t know about you, but a $100,000 seems a bit steep.

JESSE EUBANKS: Well there are a lot of factors that go into that, but part of it has to do with federal aid and colleges actually taking advantage of that aid. So the National Defense Education Act worked to help provide higher education for math and science, but it was limited. So several years later, the government passed the Higher Education Act. This act expanded federal aid to even more people and for more subjects than just math and science. The goal was to now provide higher education across the board, regardless of a person’s background, which was great, except that college tuition is determined by the consumer’s ability to pay and now, using federal aid, everybody could pay for it. So colleges raised their tuition, which meant people needed to take out more loan money, which meant colleges could raise tuition. And on and on this cycle continues, even to this day. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: So what was intended to be helpful for getting more people into higher education has essentially — it’s gone out of control. It’s backfired.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I think that’s a fair thing to say. Let’s break this down for a second. So, for example — housing inflation over the last 10 years — let’s talk about that. So housing inflation has increased 21%. That’s according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Okay, let’s talk about Christian college tuition inflation. So we took the top 25 Christian colleges from collegeconsensus.com, and we ran the average increase for the past 10 years. So the housing market’s gone up by 21%. Any guesses on what Christian colleges have increased?

LACHLAN COFFEY: Well, I feel like the setup is that it’s gonna be higher.

JESSE EUBANKS: It is higher than 21%.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Really? Tell me. Pray tell.

JESSE EUBANKS: So 41.5% is the average increase.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Wow. That’s like more than — that’s double. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, that’s double. That’s double the housing inflation. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Wow.

JESSE EUBANKS: And the thing is this, Christian colleges, their inflation rate is about the exact same as just all universities. So universities across the board, their inflation rates have just gone up. Tuition has skyrocketed in the last decade. So William J. Bennett — he’s the former Secretary of Education — he said this: ‘Higher education isn’t under funded. It’s under accountable.’ And let’s talk about what that means on just like a very practical level and a theological level. Why would somebody go to a Christian college? 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Because they wanna go into full-time ministry.

JESSE EUBANKS: Right. They wanna be equipped to go do ministry. However, many Christian institutions have simply followed the same model as all of these other schools — raise tuition and stay competitive — which means it’s difficult to pay for a Christian education without what?

LACHLAN COFFEY: Student loan.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, you’ve gotta take on all these student loans. But here’s what that means. Christian higher education is touting that they’ll equip you for ministry while straddling you with so much debt — that guess what? You probably won’t be able to go into ministry. We’ve done what the broader culture has told us — ‘You need to attract students with rock walls and video game arenas and state-of-the-art amenities and raising tuition.’ Y’know, it’s not like their staff is being paid a million bucks. These folks are struggling, these institutions are struggling, but they’re also trying to keep up with the general secular model of how education should work. While the ability for folks to do actual boots-on-the-ground ministry — it suffers. So you’ve got this scenario where Christian colleges are losing as an institution and students who attend Christian colleges are losing. It’s a lose-lose situation right now. As Christians, like this really trouble us and alarm us. And it isn’t just affecting folks like Karine who wanna love their neighbors here in Louisville. It’s having a much bigger, global impact..

EMILY RIMESTAD: Student debt, it wasn’t just a hurdle. We say it was a mountain.

JESSE EUBANKS: So this is Emily Rimestad. Like Karine, she and her husband David also had significant debt upon graduation, which was a problem because they wanted to follow God’s call for them to live overseas as missionaries. So here’s David.

DAVID RIMESTAD: Our student loan total was like $75,000 for the both of us. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So, in case you were wondering, the average college graduate walks the stage with about $30,000 in debt.

DAVID RIMESTAD: And uh, so we knew early on mission agencies just in general are only accepting people with like 15 to 20 thousand dollars.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so what he’s talking about there is this. Foreign missions sending agencies, organizations like the IMB or Pioneers, they typically have a limit on the amount of personal debt that you can have and still receive approval to go overseas long term. And generally those organizations set their cap on debt around $20,000. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Why did they have such a low limit if most people are graduating with $30,000 in debt?

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, that’s a good question. Okay, so remember Luke Womack, all the way from the beginning of the episode?

LACHLAN COFFEY: Oh yeah, the orange monkey boy. India. I got it.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, that’s definitely not his name, but yes. And remember he made all those phone calls to his friends asking them about overseas missions? So one of those phone calls was actually to David and Emily. And after talking to them, Luke did some research on student loans. And here’s what he found out about missions agencies and why they need debt limits.

LUKE WOMACK: People who are on the field already saying ‘Hey, I found a way around the $20,000 student debt limit. I got to the field. I kinda snuck on the field. But I’m stuck now because I lost a supporter back home or we had a, y’know, family crisis come up and we simply can’t afford our student debt. We were hoping to be here for, y’know, two decades, but we’ve been here for six months and we’re coming home because our student debt is just crushing us.

JESSE EUBANKS: So the point is, having a debt limit, like that’s a healthy thing for an organization. But it is still a limit. And since David and Emily have $75,000 in debt, no agency is going to approve them to go where they think God is leading them, which was Papua New Guinea.

EMILY RIMESTAD: It is some of the most densest jungle in the world, and it has over 850 distinct languages. 

DAVID RIMESTAD: This is where we wanna give our lives, but obviously student debt, that’s a mountain and we don’t know how to climb it. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And of course one option would be to do what Karine was going to have to do — put everything on hold, chip away at their debt until they qualified. Which, according to David, is what many people end up doing.

DAVID RIMESTAD: I even have like personal stories of friends that they’re now in their forties, they’re still paying off their student loans, but in their twenties when they graduated they wanted to go overseas but they couldn’t.

EMILY RIMESTAD: We could have easily have said, ‘Okay, $75,000. There is no way. Let’s calculate that up. If we give this much money to our student debt, y’know, if we continue paying, then in 15 years, 15.7 years, we’ll be able to go overseas. Like ‘Oh, it doesn’t add up. We can’t go.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Ah man. Lachlan, I wish I could remember where I read this but I don’t. But I read somewhere that the two traditional times that people go into missions are right after graduating from college and when they retire early.

LACHLAN COFFEY: That makes sense.

JESSE EUBANKS: And guess what? Because of student loan debt, people can’t go into it right after college because they have to pay their student loan debt and parents — they retire later because they’re paying on their kids’ student loan debt.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So student loan debt is eroding the two major on-ramps into missions. Again, here’s Luke Womack.

LUKE WOMACK: Let’s say the average college grad is 21 years old and it takes them 21 years to pay off their student debt, so by the time they’re 42 years old with three kids, a mortgage, two cars. By the time they’re coaching their kids’ tee ball, there’s about a zero percent chance that they’re gonna make it to the Middle East, to South Asia, uproot their family, uproot their lives from everything they’ve built for the last two decades to go step into something that they were once zealous about as a 21-year-old.

LACHLAN COFFEY: So ultimately, what do we do?

JESSE EUBANKS: So David and Emily thought, ‘Okay, we know in the end that God wants evangelism to go forward and we know that he’s calling us to do it and that means there has got to be another way to solve this problem. And their friend Luke Womack? He actually presented them with an alternative. 

Okay so David and Emily, they can only afford to go for a week, but they take a week and they go to Papua New Guinea. And when they get back, Luke and some other friends, they ask to meet up with them.

DAVID RIMESTAD: And we kind of all sit down at the table and they have these, y’know, smiles on their faces and we’re like, y’know, ‘What’s going on?’ and they ask us, y’know, ‘How did everything go in Papua New Guinea? What was that like?’ and we just kind of explain this is what we at least want to do but our student loan debt is gonna keep us out. And so Luke just said, ‘Well, we have an idea.’

JESSE EUBANKS: And if it worked, Luke’s idea would send David and Emily to Papua New Guinea permanently. So, what was the idea? Stay with us.

COMMERCIAL 

JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

LACHLAN COFFEY: And I’m Lachlan Coffey. Today’s episode is where the gospel meets student loan debt.

JESSE EUBANKS: So we’ve got David and Emily Rimestad. They wanna live overseas and spread the gospel in Papua New Guinea. But, like so many of their peers, their student loan debt disqualifies them. And now, their friend Luke Womack sits down with them and says he has an idea.

DAVID RIMESTAD: ‘We have an idea and we want you guys to kind of be the, y’know, the guinea pigs of this.’

LACHLAN COFFEY: You, Jesse, you heard what he just said there, right? He just said guinea pigs for the Papua New Guinea. Like can’t script that. It’s too — he says guinea pigs. (laughter) You can’t say guinea pigs for the Papua New Guinea plan and not speak about it.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh, what is wrong with your brain?

LACHLAN COFFEY: Okay.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so remember, Luke was a business major. So he comes up with this plan to start a nonprofit that would completely take care of paying any student loan debt while a missionary was on the field. And he had it all worked out on paper, but now he wanted David and Emily to test run it, to see if it could actually work. 

DAVID RIMESTAD: And then we just kind of looked at them, looked at them like ‘Yeah, that sounds awesome.’ But we were like ‘Do you guys have any money for that?’ And they said, ‘No, not yet.’

LACHLAN COFFEY: Wait. This is Luke’s grand idea for fixing the problem of student loan debt? ‘Hey, we’ll, y’know, we’ll pay your student loans while you go live in the bush with the tribes in Papua New Guinea, but we don’t actually have any money to do this.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, it doesn’t seem like a great plan to start with.  

LACHLAN COFFEY: Sign here.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and the reality is like he had a really ambitious vision. And needless to say, like David and Emily were hesitant.

DAVID RIMESTAD: Yeah, there was like, there was obvious like worry and anxiety in the sense of, ‘Man, is this actually gonna, is this gonna happen?’

JESSE EUBANKS: But David and Emily knew that God wanted them to be overseas, so they decided to go out on a limb and they actually told Luke yes, they were on board. So they apply with a sending organization. And when it comes to explaining about their debt, they essentially say: we know we have over the limit of student debt, but there is a new nonprofit that’s going to pay the debt for us. They just don’t have the money right now, but they will.

DAVID RIMESTAD: Yeah, we were all kind of flying by the seat of our pants and even our organization — this was the first that our organization has ever heard of something like this happening and so they were skeptical to say the least.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah, I would be skeptical. I mean this is like, it’s not how it works. You’ve gotta like — what’s the plan? Have you done this before?

JESSE EUBANKS: Skepticism seems like the appropriate response here.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yes. Haha. This feels so risky.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yes, but also this sending agency knows, y’know, if this really does work, this will mean the opportunity for a lot more people to be sent overseas. And so even though they’re skeptical, the agency actually approves David and Emily. They get sent to training that lasts about a year and a half, and then now they’re just six months out from permanently moving to Papua New Guinea. But — there’s actually still no money to cover their student loan debt.

LACHLAN COFFEY: What? It’s been like a year and a half at this point. I mean what has this Luke guy been doing?  

JESSE EUBANKS: Well remember this, the guy’s starting a new nonprofit. It’s like super demanding. He’s starting it from the ground up. As someone who’s started a nonprofit before, it is so consuming. Y’know, you’re building out your bylaws, your board of directors, you’re meeting with donors and volunteers, you’re working on your messaging, your communication, your social media presence. It’s just so much work to do. And guess what? All of that takes money. So any money that is coming in is actually going towards keeping the organization afloat and getting them launched. There’s nothing extra that can actually go toward David and Emily’s debt. And so needless to say, David and Emily, like they are starting to get very anxious.

DAVID RIMESTAD: We kept telling them like —

EMILY RIMESTAD: Telling our organization.

DAVID RIMESTAD: Yeah, telling our organization, like this is gonna work, like this is gonna work. They were in — like we were having email conversations. Uh, Luke was a part of those email conversations. ‘Let’s just wait, let’s pray, let’s see, like we still have six months.’

EMILY RIMESTAD: I remember so many times just praying, just getting on the floor and praying and crying and saying, ‘Lord, please just remove this mountain. I don’t know how you’re gonna do it…’

DAVID RIMESTAD: It was kinda like all of our chips were in at this point. We were like this is gonna work or this is not gonna work.

JESSE EUBANKS: So one month goes by. Two months go by. No money. Four months go by. Still no money. And then one day, Luke calls them with a promising opportunity. 

DAVID RIMESTAD: And we were still stateside. It was a couple months before we were going to officially leave for Papua New Guinea, and he’s like ‘Hey, we’re going to have our first fundraising event and we want you guys to be there and talk.’

JESSE EUBANKS: So they go and they talk. They share their story about Papua New Guinea, about the people there, about why they think God wants them to live there. And it was a room full of people, and everyone listened. And — that’s it. It was like your typical fundraising event. And they were hopeful this would at least bring in some money. The question was just how much. Could they get their loans covered long enough to live in Papua New Guinea for maybe a month? Six months? Maybe a year? They would just have to wait and see. But it turns out — they didn’t have to wait very long.

DAVID RIMESTAD: And we got a phone call — I think it was that next day — that was like ‘You guys are 100% supported for the remaining time that you will have in Papua New Guinea.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Everything for their loans was covered — for up to ten years. 

DAVID RIMESTAD: That was a tremendous morning receiving that news because we knew it was — yeah, it was done and we were super grateful for it.

JESSE EUBANKS: So for the foreseeable future, David and Emily could live with a tribe, learn the language, and one day be able to tell this tribe about Jesus in their own language, which sounds like this. 

DAVID AND EMILY RIMESTAD SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE

DAVID RIMESTAD: I said, ‘I’m happy. Are you happy?’ And Emily says, ‘Yes, I’m happy.’ And I said, ‘The reason why we’re happy is because men and women will be able to hear God’s talk, and that makes me happy.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Luke Womack’s crazy idea — it paid off. So Luke gave his nonprofit a name, and he called it the GO Fund.

LUKE WOMACK: How it works is that the GO Fund secures the power of attorney paperwork for, y’know, these young people going out, um, so that we have the legal right to pay toward their student debt as they’re on the field. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And to date, the GO Fund has sent more than 40 missionaries just like David and Emily, who otherwise wouldn’t be able to go because of their student loan debt. 

LUKE WOMACK: I think about a gal who recently applied, and she is a single gal, and, y’know, wanting to go to the Middle East. And there’s one question on our application where we ask about the barrier of student debt. And, y’know, usually it’s a lengthy, y’know, essay or a couple paragraphs. Her answer to that question was one sentence. ‘It is the only barrier I have right now.’ Period. If we are to reach the world for Christ, then we have to address the issue of student debt.

LACHLAN COFFEY: So what do you think this is like driving at for us, or our listeners here?

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, I think there’s a couple of groups of people to address here. And the first would be those who are thinking of going to college and getting a degree. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah, there’s different options here, right? I mean one is college might not even be the right fit for everyone. Times, they’re changing.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I mean I read recently, y’know, that blue-collar trades are so in demand that now like they pay crazy good money. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: And so I think there’s some in there where you have to go, ‘Is right now the right time for me to go to college? Should I go to college at all? If I do go to college, am I going to get a degree that is worth the financial debt that I might have to take on in order to do it?’ I think there’s a lot of options that people can explore.

LACHLAN COFFEY: I wasn’t even thinking about, y’know, blue-collar trades. I was thinking about like the YouTubers that my kids watch, y’know, those people on YouTube that are like ‘Let’s see how much pudding I can fit into my pants! Hit like or subscribe.’ (laughter)

JESSE EUBANKS: My kids watch that stuff all the time.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Jesse, those guys are millionaires. We’re literally in the wrong business. I’m telling you.

JESSE EUBANKS: Well I asked Randy Williams, the debt coach, what advice he had.

RANDY WILLIAMS: A lot of this is preventive and it’s just, it’s just taking time to do it right and I push that more than anything on earth — study, learn. You’re going to school. You might want to take a few minutes and learn about it before you do it, and that way you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into.

JESSE EUBANKS: But the other group that I think that we should address are Christian higher-education institutions. A lot of Christian universities and Christian colleges, they follow the traditional model. And the reality is that the traditional model is driving entire generations, multiple generations of people, into crippling debt. There has got to be a better and wiser way for us to approach Christian education. Y’know, there’s a recent article from The Gospel Coalition that actually talked about student loan debt and Christian colleges, and there was actually a really helpful quote from Barry Corey. He’s the president of Biola University. And he said, y’know, “Some of us are thinking, ‘Well, we’ve turned up the dials as much as we can on traditional models. We can’t keep increasing our discount rate or eliminate any more fat or excess. We have to think outside the box and be innovative.’ And I have to agree with him. Christian colleges, you’ve tried everything from the traditional models. Maybe it’s time for a little innovation. And I don’t know what exactly that solution is, except to say that this can’t be it. There’s got to be a better solution than what we are currently doing. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: So I’m just realizing that you have distracted me as you often do, you sly devil you, with this story of David and Emily, and I’m realizing that we still haven’t heard about Karine and what happened to her and her story. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s talk about Karine for a second.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah. Did she end up leaving Love Thy Neighborhood?

JESSE EUBANKS: Well no. Actually she was able to finish her term.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Really? How’d that happened?

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so eventually she came to me and she told me and the other staff about the situation that she was in. She had actually not told us that she had that much student loan debt, nor had she told us that the deadlines were, when the deadlines were. So once we found out the whole picture, I actually started making some phone calls and some other folks started making some phone calls. And the healthcare center where she had been serving as a volunteer intern, they actually agreed to make a special arrangement just so that she could stay.

KARINE MCGARRITY: The healthcare center agreed to hire me on while I was in LTN. That I wouldn’t be pocketing that paycheck. That paycheck would go into its entirety into paying for my loans.

JESSE EUBANKS: So the time spent at her service site would no longer be volunteer hours but as a paid employee. And Karine could still partake in the rest of the Love Thy Neighborhood lifestyle and continue to live out the mission God had called her to.

KARINE MCGARRITY: Granted this debt, I would never wish it upon anybody. I don’t want anybody to get in the situation that I’m in, but there are other financial situations that people do get in in life. And just instead of taking it on as like this huge burden and thing that can just like collapse you, rather look at it as a way that you can rely on the Lord. And so yeah, that’s been really cool for me to see in my life. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So in Second Kings, when the woman comes to Elisha buried under a mountain of debt, she comes because she knows she needs God’s help. She’s in an impossible financial situation. But notice how Elisha instructs her. He doesn’t tell her to simply sit back and do nothing. He tells her to take what she has — one jar of oil — and use it to make money for her debt. And then God does something miraculous — he multiplies her amount of oil until she has just what she needs to be able to pay her debt. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Well and like these stories are awesome about hearing how God’s provided for these people in all sorts of amazing ways, but also God’s given us brains and he’s also called us to be wise. And so here we are, we’re trying to tell our listeners here how this works and that this is worthy of consideration. And so there needs to be wisdom applied to some decision-making here. And just to be crystal clear here — Jesse and I are not financial advisors here, okay? That’s why we have people like Randy Williams here to say very smart, intelligent things. I mean we’re no Dave Ramsey, okay? That’s another podcast. At the same time, the Lord is good, the Lord does provide, and so we can, y’know, rejoice in that. But there’s a balance there — wisdom but trust.

JESSE EUBANKS: So be faithful. Y’know, step into whatever the Lord’s called you to, be faithful, and be trusting in the midst of that. And at the same time, if you can avoid somehow shouldering this level of burden and debt, we can’t encourage you enough. For the sake of missions, for the sake of your neighbors, do what you can to avoid taking on this amount of debt. And if you already have student loans, when you look at your mountain of debt or the burdens that you carry financially, how can you look at them and know God still wants you to trust him and to move forward anyway?

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JESSE EUBANKS: If you have questions about your student loans, you can contact Randy Williams by going to adebtcoach.com. If you would like to learn more about the GO Fund, you can visit their website at thegofund.com. For more resources on this topic, like our guide to student loan debt, or to hear past episodes of this podcast, visit our website at lovethyneighborhood.org/podcast.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Special thanks to our interviewees for this episode — Luke Womack, Karine McGarrity, Randy Williams, David Rimestad, and Emily Rimestad.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Our senior producer and host is Jesse Eubanks.

JESSE EUBANKS: Our co-host today is Lachlan Coffey.

LACHLAN COFFEY: And our producer, technical director, editor, and the best impressionist of Mr. Burns is Rachel Szabo.

JESSE EUBANKS: Music for today’s episode comes from Lee Rosevere, Podington Bear, and Blue Dot Sessions. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Apply for your social justice internship supported by Christian community by visiting lovethyneighborhood.org. Serve for a summer or a year. Grow in your faith and life skills. Learn more at lovethyneighborhood.org.

JESSE EUBANKS: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, ‘Go, and do likewise.’