Houston Church Adopts "Hooters" Restaurant, Hurricane Victims

Rice Temple Baptist Church in Houston, TX enabled the congregation to partner with a group of Hooters waitresses to meet the needs of the people of Oak Island, a Galveston Bay coastal community almost completely wiped out in September by Hurricane Ike. Hooters Restaurants have long been known as much for their buxom, midriff-baring waitresses as for their food. Nine years earlier, Rice's pastor Clint Reiff met a Hooters waitress at a gas station; she shared she couldn't attend church because of her exhausting work schedule. The restaurant manager called Reiff two days later and asked him to dinner, saying, "We're just looking for answers like anyone else." After that dinner, Reiff kept going back to the restaurant for meals, bringing his Bible along, and the staff began asking more spiritual questions and requesting prayer. The pastor later accompanied one waitress to the hospital to wait while her father was in surgery, and a Rice Temple women's ministry held a baby shower for another of the employees. Their ministry together continued, culminating in their most recent cooperation for the benefit of Oak Island. The project marks one more reason why Reiff is glad his congregation has reached out in ministry to the Hooters staff. "I frankly feel that God would walk in there and sit down, maybe more quickly than he would in some of our churches," he said. "We are to take the gospel to the world, and that's the whole world —not just the part of the world that works they way we think it should work."

Source: Associated Baptist Press, 07-Jan-2009, as quoted by Church Leaders Intelligence Report e-newsletter, 14-Jan-2009