Johnny Dunbar, the 69-year-old pastor of a small congregation in Kentucky, was the only person in the church office when the phone rang on a Friday morning two weeks ago. He picked up, having no idea his next conversation would be replayed millions of times across the internet.
“I have a two-month-old baby,” said a young woman on the other end of the line. “And I ran out of formula last night. I was wanting to see if y’all could help with formula.”
Johnny Dunbar, the 69-year-old pastor of a small congregation in Kentucky, was the only person in the church office when the phone rang on a Friday morning two weeks ago. He picked up, having no idea his next conversation would be replayed millions of times across the internet.
“I have a two-month-old baby,” said a young woman on the other end of the line. “And I ran out of formula last night. I was wanting to see if y’all could help with formula.”
Dunbar had been wondering how families in his Appalachian community would fare as some lost their food assistance because of the federal government shutdown; he had seconds to decide how to respond. He grabbed a pen and paper, asked how much formula she needed and offered to deliver it himself if he couldn’t send someone else.
It was the first beat of a viral story that drew international attention to America’s churches and their response — or lack thereof — to neighbors in need. The caller, a content creator who goes by the name Nikalie Monroe, was recording Dunbar’s words, and the resulting video blew up on TikTok alongside many clips of churches refusing to help.
“I’m so lucky I got it right that day,” Dunbar said of the phone call. “Because so often I get it wrong.”
Monroe, who has since said she is the mother of an 8-year-old, wasn’t really trying to feed a hungry baby. She was recording a video series by reaching out to churches with a plea for food and posting their responses to social media. She presented the TikToks, titled “testing your church,” as a social experiment: With the government freezing SNAP benefits, would Christian organizations make good on their biblical mandate to feed the hungry?
The videos drew millions of viewers on TikTok and sparked conversations across social media about what it means to love thy neighbor in today’s America. Some people were angry, saying Monroe’s “test” was a setup and she deceived churchgoers for a social media stunt. Others condemned some of the churches for failing to take care of an apparent neighbor in need. Monroe didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Savannah Locke, a Nashville-based writer and podcaster who advises Christian influencers on social media, said the project went viral in part because of timing and context.
Monroe is based in the South, Locke noted, where there is a very strong conservative Christian culture that prefers help from churches rather than help from government. Through those eyes, she said, SNAP benefits being taken away raises questions.
“Conservatives say: ‘The government shouldn’t do this! Churches should!’ And in theory that’s one thing, in reality it’s not always lived out, and I wonder if that’s some of the motivation — testing religious folks. ‘Hey there’s a crying hungry baby, and are you going to put your money where your mouth is?’”
The first video in Monroe’s series featured her call with Dunbar, and its comment section flooded with viewers moved by the pastor’s offer. Many said they had donated to his church’s ministries. The church raised more than $95,000 after the video went viral, according to a church administrator.
“This lesbian atheist just donated $100,” one commenter quipped.
A second video, posted later that day, went differently. Monroe called Victory Christian Fellowship, another church in Somerset, and was put on hold while the dark and orchestral “In the Hall of the Mountain King” played in the background. Then the church representative comes back on the line and recommends Monroe reach out to a local nonprofit or government office.
Monroe’s posts steadily picked up steam, earning millions of views and jumping to other platforms including Instagram and X, where users dissected the phone calls. Justin McNair, a furniture store owner in Mississippi, was scrolling TikTok when Monroe’s videos caught his eye. He hunted through her series, and sure enough: There was A video mentioning Broadmoor Baptist Church, the congregation down the road from his house. In it, someone at Broadmoor tells Monroe that they can’t help her with the baby formula and suggests she call a different local church.
McNair was furious. He opened Facebook and wrote a post, tagging Broadmoor and expressing his disappointment not only in its response to Monroe, but in organized religion in general. The church responded in the comments.
“We are so sorry that you have had the experience you described with your church family,” the account wrote. “As for the video that you posted, we received that call a week ago and sure wish it had gone differently.”
As the videos spread, some people bristled at Monroe’s methods. Calling a church and then shaming it for screening what could be a scam call isn’t fair, said Ed Stetzer, an Evangelical speaker and writer. And recording calls to busy church offices isn’t the best gauge of how much churches are helping their communities, he said.
“Nowadays, I guess it is easier to assume the worst and go viral, rather than to understand that random church calls are complicated,” Stetzer said.
Some congregants piped up to defend their churches or attack Monroe herself.
“I understand that by posting all this on her TikTok that she has upped her ratings and gained followers,” Kathy McDonald-Choate, a congregant at East Somerset Baptist in Kentucky, told The Washington Post. “I would not want to be her on Judgment Day.”
The religious organizations that responded positively to Monroe’s call included a mosque in Charlotte, a Buddhist temple in Chapel Hill and a few Protestant churches across the South and Midwest. Lakewood Church, the Houston megachurch run by celebrity pastor Joel Osteen, said it would review her request in a process that could take weeks.
Some onlookers said Monroe’s series inspired them to “test” their own local churches, organizations or even individual neighbors. Sarah Brown, a mom in South Carolina, called her local Nazarene church, she said. Using Monroe’s exact script, she asked for helping finding formula for her fictional 2-month-old baby. “That isn’t something we do,” was the answer, according to Brown.
Monroe’s experiment inflamed onlookers — religious or not, Republican or Democrat — because it struck at the heart of tension over the church’s role in taking care of the needy, said Blake Chastain, who focuses on people who have left evangelicalism in his book “Exvangelical and Beyond.”
Many churches — including in areas where lots of attendees need benefits like SNAP — are likely to focus on scripture like 2 Thessalonians 3:10: “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat,” Chastain noted. Whereas in the Book of Matthew, Jesus commands followers to love God and “love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”
“People have spent years attending churches where using government programs has been vilified by their pastors and their broader conservative media systems” via certain scriptures, Chastain said. He also cited the widespread use of what’s called the prosperity gospel — a popular school of thought in many congregations that says poverty is the result of personal failure and sin, whereas wealth and success is a sign of God’s blessing.
“It’s statistically very likely these churches have members who need SNAP and have been sitting in the pews and being made to feel shame,” he said.
The viral success of the TikTok campaign, he said, reflects how for many, trying to reconcile different interpretations of Christianity — one more about managing behavior and the other more about service — hits at an emotional nerve.
The huge interest in Monroe’s videos can be a message for churches and their attendees, said Monica Schaap Pierce, executive director at Christian Churches Together, an ecumenical organization that includes Evangelical, Pentecostal, Historic Black, mainline Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox churches. Train your front office workers, she said, and treat the “scandal of poverty” like a “matter of faithfulness” rather than a partisan question.
Because next time a call for help comes in, the entire world could be listening.
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