Trinity Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, N.C., has erased nearly $11 million in medical debt through a series of campaigns carried out in partnership with RIP Medical Debt, with its most recent winter drive — announced in February 2025 — converting more than $25,000 in donations into payoff of more than $2 million in outstanding balances.

The leverage is structural. RIP Medical Debt acquires portfolios of distressed medical accounts on the secondary market for fractions of face value, then forgives the balances outright. The church's donations, bought at that steep discount, reach debtors as unconditional debt cancellation — no tax liability, no strings attached. RIP restricts eligibility to individuals earning less than four times the federal poverty level or carrying medical debt equal to 5 percent or more of their annual income, targeting relief at households least able to negotiate or litigate their way out.

Trinity Moravian is located at 220 East Sprague Street in Winston-Salem (phone: 336-724-5541), and its pastor, Rev. John Jackman, has led the initiative across multiple campaigns under the banner of the Debt Jubilee Project. The first campaign retired more than $1.3 million in debt for over 1,000 area households. The second — covered by CNN in April 2023 — cleared $3.3 million for 3,355 local families. RIP Medical Debt's own accounting for that second round put the forgiven figure at $3,296,863.64.

The broader Moravian Church extended the model nationally through the Debt Jubilee Project for the Healing of the World, which has raised more than $100,000 across its affiliated congregations. The denomination's cumulative tally across all initiatives now stands at nearly $11 million in forgiven debt.

The mechanics matter for anyone watching health-policy adjacent organizing. The secondary market for medical debt prices portfolios at pennies on the dollar precisely because collection rates on low-income, high-balance accounts are dismal. Charitable buyers exploit that same discount spread that debt collectors do — but redirect the outcome. A $25,000 church offering that unlocks $2 million in relief reflects a roughly 80-to-1 leverage ratio on donated dollars, a figure that substantially outperforms most conventional charitable giving in direct financial impact per dollar spent.

For the households receiving letters from RIP, the cancellation is immediate and credit-reportable. Medical debt's treatment under consumer credit rules has shifted at the federal regulatory level in recent years, but even under older frameworks, a forgiven account removes a derogatory mark that constrains borrowing for cars, housing, and small business formation. The downstream effects on household balance sheets are real, even if they are harder to aggregate than the face-value headline number.

What Trinity Moravian has built is replicable. The RIP Medical Debt partnership model requires no proprietary infrastructure — any congregation or civic organization with fundraising capacity can execute the same transaction. The Moravian Church's national expansion through the Healing of the World project is the clearest evidence that the playbook travels. The constraint is not structural; it is the supply of donated dollars relative to the volume of distressed debt still circulating in the secondary market.