From Roughnecks to Bosses, Ministry Seeks to Save Souls in the Oilfields

John Bird founded the Oilfield Christian Fellowship, which distributes a version of the Bible called “God's Word for the Oil Patch.”

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Published: November 4, 2011



JEWETT, Tex. — With a box of Bibles as cargo, John Bird steered his Chevy Suburban off a two-lane road in the oil patch of East Texas and pulled up to the isolated derrick of Energy Drilling Company Rig 9. He was delivering the holy books to a man named Robert Bailey, the site superintendent, known in industry jargon as a tool pusher.

The two men had never met, and Rig 9 was a modest destination, a cluster of turbines and trailers around a steel tower, all of it surrounded on three sides by a cattle ranch. On a brilliant autumn Saturday, the kind normally reserved for the Texan religion of football, Mr. Bird had driven there, 140 miles from his home outside Houston, on behalf of the Oilfield Christian Fellowship.

He had helped found the lay ministry 20 years earlier with the aim of evangelizing among the itinerants and tough guys and hard livers who populate the rigs. That effort took the textual form of a Bible interspersed with testimonies from oil workers, sized to fit in the back pocket of overalls and titled “God’s Word for the Oil Patch: Fuel for the Soul.”

Mr. Bailey, the middle man in this particular transaction, had endured 15 years of crystal meth addiction and repeated rounds of jail and drug rehab. Clean and sober for three years now, he still has the weathered face and scarred veins to show for his journey and a story of salvation he is eager to share.

“People always say the Lord looks out for fools and idiots,” Mr. Bailey, 38, joked with Mr. Bird as they sat in a trailer, its walls covered with specs for drill bits, occupational safety fliers and an 800 number for poison control. “And that’s the truth, because I was the biggest fool and idiot.”

So as Mr. Bird handed over 10 copies of the special Bible for Mr. Bailey to pass out to co-workers, and as he promised to ship a carton with 20 more, he was enacting the most foundational of Christianity’s commands, spreading the good news of the Lord. And in an era of high-tech proselytizing, by computer and satellite and smartphone app, he was doing it in a way as ancient as the faith itself.

“It’s 2,000 years old,” Mr. Bird said of the fellowship’s evangelism. “Jesus, when he was out witnessing, was rejected by plenty of people. So he said, ‘Shake the dust off your sandals and get on down the road.’ I’m 68. I don’t have time to waste.”

He certainly has wasted little in the last 20 years. Since its founding, the Oilfield Christian Fellowship has expanded from a single room in Houston to rigs off the coasts of Brazil and Gabon and to trailer chapels in the oil shale boomtowns of Wyoming and North Dakota. It has distributed 125,000 copies of “God’s Word for the Oil Patch” in English and Spanish and is now publishing a version in Mandarin as well.

The fellowship has accomplished all this in an industry fearsomely resistant to the niceties of religion. Rig work is measured in the extremes of boom-and-bust cycles; of weeks on the job with nowhere to go and weeks off the job with money to spend; of families waiting a state or a continent away; of drugs, alcohol, gambling and pornography all abundantly at hand.

“The oil and gas industry is the last vestige of cowboys and rough and tumble,” Mr. Bird said. “When someone died on the rig, you just mopped up the blood and everyone went back to work. Christianity was seen as a sissy thing.”

Back in 1991, when Mr. Bird was selling specialized chemicals for drilling, a friend and petroleum engineer named Jim Teague asked how many Christians he knew in the industry. After Mr. Bird struggled to come up with eight or nine names, Mr. Teague said, “That many?”

Even so, the two men persuaded the pastor of First Baptist, a Houston megachurch, to let them try to hold a prayer breakfast. By word of mouth alone, 46 people turned out for the 6 a.m. event. The next one, a Wednesday lunch, drew 250.

Many of these oil workers, it was true, attended more as a way of networking and job hunting during a recession than of worshipping the Almighty. Then again, they may have been the economic version of the foxhole that has no atheists. Mr. Bird and Mr. Teague realized they were onto something.

From the outset, the two leaders insisted that the fellowship be composed of lay volunteers, not paid professionals. Among the leathery skeptics of the oil patch, Mr. Bird believed, a minister preaching the born-again message would be dismissed as a mere salesman. An oil worker sharing his Christian witness would be far more credible.

Sure enough, from the roughnecks at the bottom of the industry hierarchy to the executives at the top, the fellowship attracted a growing number of members. One of them, a drilling engineer, Mike Chaffin, proposed that instead of just sending out Bibles, the fellowship should design its own, targeted at oil workers. So he elicited and edited 16 personal testimonies — from sales representatives, engineers, even a chief executive — to be incorporated amid the New International Version text. A first printing of 5,000 in 2006 has now gone well into six figures.

What the phenomenon comes down to is the same thing that worked for the original apostles: relationships. Several years ago, newly saved and newly sober, Mr. Bailey spotted a rig buddy reading “God’s Word for the Oil Patch.” He found out he could order his own from this fellow named Mike Chaffin, and so he did. Since then, Mr. Bailey has received and given away upward of 150 copies, along with his own tale of degradation and redemption.

“I just tell them God blesses them and loves them,” he said of his evangelism. “I minister to them about things that happened in my life, and I tell them the answers are all in this book.

“Some people just look at you like you’re stupid. Others say they lost the book, whatever the excuse is. But that’s all right. It’s about planting seeds. Once you plant the seeds and fertilize them, something’s going to grow.”


E-mail: sgf1@columbia.edu



A version of this article appeared in print on November 5, 2011, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: From Roughnecks to Bosses, Ministry Seeks to Save Souls in the Oilfields.


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