Editor’s Note: As we gear up to celebrate 60 years of this tradition with you, let’s take a moment to remember some of the best of our previous alumni award winners with Hall of Fame: Rewind. We hope you’ll enjoy reading about our outstanding alumni honorees from the past who shape the ranks of honorees of the future. In this Fall 2001 Classic article, take in the sights, sounds, smells, and personalities that make up Jimmy Dorrell’s–2000 Abner V. McCall Humanitarian Awardee and 2017 Distinguished Alumnus–unique ministry, Church Under the Bridge. Click here to watch interviews and speeches from previous Hall of Fame events, or click here to learn more about his year’s event and honorees.
Originally published in The Baylor Line’s Fall 2001 issue. Part of the 2025 Hall of Fame: Rewind series.
It’s a Sunday morning. Rows of folding chairs stretch across the gravel-covered concrete divide beneath the Interstate 35 overpass between Fourth and Fifth Streets, just off Baylor’s campus. Welcome to Church Under the Bridge, where dirt-smudged hands link with manicured ones and a band competes with the muffled roar of semis overhead and traffic on nearby access roads.
“As we look at each face,” they sing, “we see the face of the Lord. In all our different ways, we see the body of Christ. As we lay down our lives, as we humbly come before you, have mercy as we praise your holy name.”
Joined hand in hand, men and women without homes are suddenly tied to those who have them. The racial divides obvious in many congregations are set aside for this moment as worshippers from varied backgrounds celebrate God’s power in this most unlikely of sanctuaries.
The Bible study that the Rev. Jimmy Dorrell ’72 started in 1992 for a few homeless men seems far in the past on this particular Sunday. Volunteers have put out hundreds of chairs. And a stage and sound system now help speakers and singers be heard over the constant hum of an increasingly busy interstate.
Yet some things haven’t changed. Dorrell is still proclaiming an upside-down kingdom in which he is no more important than the guy sitting in the back row. “I happen to have the microphone, but my gifts are no more important than his gifts,” Dorrell tells the crowd, referring to the man in the back. He urges his audience to live out this philosophy, starting by showing respect to those who have the least. “Shake their hands,” he said. “Hug them–even if they don’t smell very good.”
Dorrell remembers aloud a concert under the bridge where an old alcoholic seated next to a female Baylor student slumped onto her shoulder. “The irony is that years later, he and she are friends,” he tells the group. “There’s no reason for them to be friends. But in the kingdom, they are.”
Sunday after Sunday, the congregation of Church Under the Bridge struggles to live out the principles of this kingdom—sometimes successful, sometimes stumbling. In recently taped interviews on the church made for Baylor’s Institute for Oral History, participants talked about how acceptance is a cornerstone of the ministry, particularly for those rejected by society and intimidated by other churches.
“At Church Under the Bridge, ain’t nobody going to look at you strange. You’re going to fit in because they all are as one,” said Virgil Bell in the East Waco home that provided his temporary refuge from the streets. “Some people, they’re poor. They might not have too much clean clothing or too many nice [clothes]. And if they go off to some of these plain churches, they’re going to look at them strange and treat ’em like they don’t belong here and going to tell ’em they don’t belong here. Well see, at Church Under the Bridge, they accept anybody—as you are.”
Struck by the spectacle of Baylor students coming “around homeless folks like us,” Bell jumped into the life of the congregation, frequently playing his washboard at services. “I look at any ministry that [tries] to reach the poor—the low-down, the nasty, the homeless, the folks sleeping where flies are, stinky—and I say, ‘You know, they have to have the love of God or something because they’re trying to reach folks like us.'”
Second home
On stage, the band energetically leads the service. The voices rising from the gravel of the expanse beneath the bridge are by turns exhausted, off-key, or breathtakingly beautiful. “Every tribe and nation, every tongue and color, every knee will bow before your holy throne. Every tribe and nation, every tongue and color, all your people sing your praise in one accord,” they sing, moving through a song written by Jimmy’s wife, Janet Svejkovsky Dorrell ’80.
The format for each Sunday’s activities is simple. After a free meal at 10:30 A.M., members of Waco’s homeless population, Baylor students and alumni, Waco professionals, and the working poor are welcome to sit and worship. Some socialize in the back or even huddle under the furthest reaches of the bridge where they can smoke, drink, or wait out the intoxicating effects of drugs or alcohol.
Dorrell, who received the Abner V. McCall Humanitarianism Award from the Baylor Alumni Association in 2000, warns visiting speakers that in the course of a sermon, a good portion of the audience may wander off–stopping at a nearby convenience store for a soft drink, a restroom break, or even a whirl at the video machines before returning.
In fact, it is this freedom that often attracts people—a visual lesson that Christian worship doesn’t require fancy clothes or other formalities. Take Charmaine Beers, who was also interviewed in the oral history project. “I think I always felt like I wasn’t good enough when I went into the regular church, let’s say, that had walls and stained glass windows and women in dresses,” she said. “I didn’t have to dress up. I didn’t have to act like I was anybody else except who I was, and they loved me anyway.”
“At Church Under the Bridge, ain’t nobody going to look at you strange.”
Death brought Beers to Church Under the Bridge. She came one winter Sunday to ask Dorrell to help bury her former sister-in-law, a drug addict and prostitute found dead of an overdose in an East Waco field in December 1995. The sister-in-law had told Beers about Church Under the Bridge—how they gave out meals and sometimes a couple of dollars. Beers knew that Jimmy and Janet Dorrell had taken her sister-in-law swimming and to get her hair done.
And she saw they were hurt by her relative’s death. “It wasn’t like just another prostitute was gone,” Beers said. Dorrell preached at the funeral, and Beers came back to the bridge that spring, sitting in the back row. Church became a habit even as she struggled to kick her addiction to drugs, the women of the congregation beside her each step of the way.
“They were just a phone call away. And I cried and I bawled, and they explained to me about this God that loved me no matter what I had done,” she said. “It was really hard to believe. Eventually I felt that I was forgiven. They just love everybody down there, no matter where you’ve been or what you’ve done. They’re not there to judge. They’re just there to let you know it’s okay and we can repent and change our ways and that there is hope.”
As Beers described the people helping her, what she didn’t say was how quickly she moved into a helping role–whether by working at the thrift store associated with the church or by listening to someone’s struggles. That’s the progression the Dorrells strive for.
All churchgoers are encouraged to give back in one way or another. Each Sunday morning, an offering is collected. Even homeless members of the congregation talk with excitement about the emphasis on missions in countries such as India, Mexico, and Haiti, and Dorrell urges them to give what they can.
“One of the sicknesses of the way some people deal with poverty is we treat people like they re at the bottom,” Dorrell said. “If they’re Christians, they’re called to serve.”
Bridging the gap
Baylor students are a vital part of the life of the congregation—whether onstage playing in the band, helping to set up or take down chairs and equipment after Sunday services, or simply building relationships. The church has never catered to students, but Dorrell delights in their presence.
Over the ycars, many have found both a church home without walls and a place to serve and learn—some later heading into foreign missions or even positions with Mission Waco, a Christian-based, non-profit organization Dorrell founded.
There are Baylor students who come happy with their former churches but eager to learn about poverty. Others are jaded about the Christianity they’ve seen in middle-class congregations.
Some first encountered the church as seminary students and traded their journey in traditional church ministry for work with the urban poor.
“You really learn how to give your life away,” said Laura McCawley Himstedt, interviewed with her husband, Jared. Both are 1999 Baylor graduates, and both now serve as staff members at Mission Waco. “There are so many people that need so many different things. You have to make choices if you’re going to do that or if you’re going to ignore people’s problems. You start to see yourself for who you are because of the choices you make.”
For instance, what if someone needs a ride? “You don’t feel like giving them a ride. So you can lie and say you have something to do, or you can be honest, or you can give them a ride,” Laura Himstedt said. “So you learn a lot about how you manipulate other people or how other people manipulate you. You just learn a lot about yourself.”
“I do believe in the poor teaching me something.”
Being at the bride is not always easy or comfortable. And that’s not entirely because it’s blisteringly hot in the summer or freezing on cloudy, wintry Sundays. Church Under the Bridge asks its worshippers to grapple with the issues facing society’s have-nots rather than merely dismissing them or condemning a person who asks for something. That person may be a sinner, Dorrell says, but then aren’t we all? He urges his flock to be firm and to set boundaries–but also to see encounters with those less fortunate than themselves as opportunities to be humbles, not chances to condemn.
People in the midst of economic struggles bring to a Bible study something seminary training can’t. “The know hardship. When we talk about Jesus’ suffering and his persecution or loneliness, they understand those things like some or us who’ve had so much never will,” Jared Himstedt said.
Then they turn their caring on him. “I do believe in the poor teaching me something,” he said. “When someone who’s extremely bipolar or schizophrenic is praying for me and blessing me, that’s when I see there is an upside-down kingdom that doesn’t look like the world.”
In today’s secular world, those who are intelligent, attractive, and have good social skills are expected to give to others. But a person who is bipolar or a paranoid schizophrenic typically “doesn’t fix your needs and meet your needs and take care of you,” Jared Himstedt said. “But it does happen. And it’s not just rhetoric anymore or some liberal theology. It’s real.”
