Truckstop evangelists reach out to weary US truckers

ROCHELLE, Illinois, Apr 28 (Reuters) Will Slober, a long-haul truck driver from Livermore, California, got the call on a Sunday morning as he was sitting in a truckstop on the edge of this windy prairie town.

His wife Rose was hospitalized with chest pains. Not for the first time in a 40-year career, Slober wanted nothing more than to be home. But home was 3,200 km away.

And he had work to do. The paint he was hauling couldn't be dropped off before midnight. The load of frozen food he was hauling back to California couldn't be picked up until 4 a.m. All he could do, he said, was ''calm down and pray.'' So he walked over to the 24-hour chapel that Transport for Christ, a US faith-based group, operates out of a converted truck trailer at the truckstop and introduced himself to Chaplain Jay LeRette. Together, the men talked and prayed.

Afterward, Slober reflected on the profession that once again had him so far from home at a critical hour. ''It's a different life,'' he said. ''But it's all I know.'' Transport for Christ, a trucker-focused ministry, knows how different -- and how hard -- a life it is. For more than half a century it has reached out to truckers looking to worship in a strange town or wrestling with more serious crises.

But officials with the group, and with others it has inspired, say fewer drivers are visiting the 150 chapels they collectively operate in the United States and Canada.

The drop-off in part reflects recent changes by an industry desperate to keep its drivers, including for example routing drivers so they get home more often. But the missionaries say their groups still address a need and are scrambling to adapt.

INDUSTRY SEES THE LIGHT? Founded in 1951 by a Canadian trucker who knew first-hand the loneliness, long hours and pressures, Transport for Christ operates 30 truckstops on both sides of the border.

The group's motto -- ''Preaching a dynamic gospel to a dynamic industry'' -- makes its proselytising mission clear. But much of the work involves listening, not evangelising. Still, the group felt it was making progress, bringing some fraternity and faith to a milieu where predators -- drug dealers, prostitutes, bookies, smugglers and worse -- often lurked.

''Driving the truck isn't the hard part,'' said driver Randy Spence of Van Buren, Arkansas. ''It's living the life that's hard.'' But in recent years, Transport for Christ and the other ministries have seen their ranks of truckers thinned out.

When the groups hosted a National Day of Prayer for Truckers in March at the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky -- an event that drew over 80,000 attendees -- fewer than two dozen people showed up.

''We're just not getting the drivers in like we used to,'' said Charles Hopkins, chaplain at God's Trucking Ministry Inc., which runs a chapel at a truckstop near Jessup, Maryland.

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