Truckstop Preacher Takes His Message on the Road

Every Sunday morning, Robert Richard begins his call to worship. He moves through the restaurant at the Truckstops of America, where the tired drivers are hunched over their plates of grits and eggs--still for just a moment after maneuvering 80,000 pounds of vehicle through the dark, lonesome night.

Some of the truckers pointedly ignore Richard--they do not want his message of Jesus and patience and love. They are the same ones who slam shut their truck doors in his face when he makes the rounds of the parking lot out back.

But others follow him out to his 18-wheeler chapel behind the restaurant, where they will sing “Amazing Grace” and try to summon a worshipful feeling amid the stench of diesel fumes and the roar of grinding motors.

“I hope y’all are hungry for some preaching,” said Richard, 45, a Louisiana native whose surname is pronounced in the Cajun manner, ri-CHARD, “because I’m hungry to preach. I want to give you the opportunity to pray in your heart.”

Even though his ragtag congregation may include just four men instead of many, Richard preaches as if to a stadium of sinners, his truck-chapel rocking on its shocks as he stamps his foot for emphasis.

“Are you saved, brother?” he asked one worshiper.

“Amen,” came the reply.

Trucking is a hard, lonely life. Richard, a former trucker, has been at this post on Interstate 30 since May. It is one of three truck-stop chapels in the Dallas area.

Living in his 18-wheeler with “my little friend,” his cat Buddy, Richard seeks to reach the Christian trucker whose odd hours make it impossible to worship in a regular church, or the troubled trucker who has surrendered too many times to temptation and wants something more in his or her life. With nightly devotional services, as well as a drop-in-anytime policy, he is nearly always available.

“I’m alone, but I’m not lonely,” said Richard, a former head of security for Jimmy Swaggert Ministries. Richard’s nondenominational, unpaid ministry depends strictly on “love offerings.”

In terms of popular culture and public attention, trucking seemed to slip out of the limelight with the fading of the CB radio craze in the 1970s. But more truckers than ever are out there, hauling all manner of cargo over the nation’s interstate highways.

For 20 years, the Assn. of Christian Truckers, which sponsors Richard’s ministry, has offered comfort to these truckers, sending out 45,000 copies of their publication, “Wheels Alive,” and offering advice on being a Christian on the road.

Into Richard’s nicely outfitted 18-wheeler comes the occasional prostitute just wanting to talk to somebody; down-and-out truckers between jobs with tattooed arms and Holy Bibles and clean-cut Christian drivers.

The chapel resembles a narrow church sanctuary with its stained-glass windows, rarely used polished wood pulpit and a wanted poster that offers “Reward--Eternal Life.”

Richard is not sure how long he will continue to live here with Buddy in the busy truck-stop parking lot. That will be “up to the Lord,” he said.

In the meantime, he will continue to count souls. Among truckers, he said, his record is “seven full-time conversions and 10 who rededicated their lives to Jesus.” Surely there are others, he believes, who “need to be brought back into the light of God’s word.”