The late afternoon sun lit the stained glass on the church sanctuary’s western wall. The pews were empty, but it was early. The Way, the regular Friday evening recovery service at St. John’s United Methodist Church in Midtown, wouldn’t begin for nearly two hours. That gave Nancy Hearn plenty of time to prepare her welcome station.
“Each pot makes about 100 cups of coffee, and we’ll need all three pots,” said Hearn, age 86. She talked as she covered two folding tables in the vestibule with flowery tablecloths and unpacked stacks of paper coffee cups, plastic lids, napkins, and cream and sugar packets. “As you can tell, I’m a kitchen person. I think we connect through food. If we can eat together, we can talk.”
Hearn has been serving hot coffee, cold bottled water, and other forms of hospitality, tangible and intangible, here in her church home every Friday since The Way opened in 2010. She remembers missing only two services: once when her late husband, Lloyd, had bypass surgery; once to attend her friend’s retirement party.
“We didn’t go out; we didn’t do anything on Friday nights because I had The Way,” Hearn said. “The kids would say, ‘Oh, it’s Friday, mother’s going to The Way.’ They didn’t understand it, but it’s something that’s a part of you when you get into it. And I feel like it is a blessing. What else am I going to do when I grow old?”
The Way, now in its 15th year, has endured the suicide of its founding minister, Rev. Dr. John Kilzer; two years of wandering in the digital wilderness during Covid; the loss of major donors; and several changes in church leadership. The one constant through all the years has been Nancy Hearn — better known around here as Mama Way.
“John once asked me why I was doing what I was doing,” said Hearn, “and I said, ‘If you were gone and came home, your mama would pull out a tablecloth and she would empty the kitchen with everything you like that she could provide. And that was your welcome home.’ And John said, ‘So you’re Mama Way.’ That’s what people have been calling me ever since.”
Everyone calls her Mama Way. The ministers and band members who lead worship. The volunteers who brew coffee and tote water, make sandwiches and fill food bags, sort shirts and shoes and other articles of donated clothing. And the dozens of guests who come just as they are from wherever they are in their recovery — at home, in a halfway house, or on the street.
“So many people are just ignored,” Hearn said. “You look through them. You don’t see them. I know I did. Those people. That’s the way I felt about it when it started. Suddenly we were going to have those people sitting on our fancy pew cushions. A lot of us in the church were anxious about it. But Lloyd and I talked about it and we decided the best thing for us to do was go and see what it was about. And we were fascinated by it. And the next week it was not hard to go back. And at that point, I was in tears. I went to John and said, ‘I’m wrong. Let me help you. What can I do?’”
Kilzer, himself a recovering addict, said he called it The Way because in the Gospel of John, Jesus said, “I am the way”; because early Christians were called people of The Way; and because the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are known as a way to recovery. “This isn’t a replacement for AA,” Kilzer told me in 2010. “Those of us in recovery still need to go to AA meetings, still need to work the program, still need to rely on whatever that higher power means. In our case, that higher power is Jesus Christ.”
Like many in recovery, Kilzer got lost along the way. In March 2019, he died by suicide at the Hazelden Betty Ford treatment center in Minnesota. He is remembered as a survivor and casualty of addiction, a gentle and tormented soul whose life and death, head and heart, darkness and light were a parable, a revelation, a psalm. “Oh, it just broke my heart,” Hearn said. “It felt like an immediate family member had died. I still get emotional about it. We all struggled after that, but we had to keep going.”
The Way went on after Kilzer’s death, led first by Rev. Dr. Johnny Jeffords, the church’s senior pastor at the time; then by Rev. Mimi White, the associate pastor; and all mothered by Nancy Hearn. “When John died,” Jeffords said, “Nancy was bound and determined to continue the work, in part as a way to walk through her grief, but even more because the people mattered. Stopping was not an option.”
A year after Kilzer’s death, the pandemic pushed The Way online. Many regulars don’t have electricity, let alone Wi-Fi. So when circumstances permitted, Hearn and others organized The Way gatherings in the church’s parking lot, serving coffee, food, and fellowship. The Way returned to the sanctuary in May 2022, led by David “Bing” Bingham, a friend and former colleague of Kilzer who began attending The Way services in 2013 and went on to found a Way-inspired recovery service in Shreveport, Louisiana. “Finding The Way is the only way I find myself sober today,” Bingham said. Under Bingham’s leadership, The Way’s attendance has grown from a couple dozen to 150 or so every week.
The worship service hasn’t changed. Bingham welcomes his fellow travelers. The band, a talented mix of local musicians, performs several songs, including “Jesus on the Mainline.” A recovering addict talks about one of the 12 Steps. Participants recite the Serenity Prayer. Bingham offers words of comfort, encouragement and blessing. “That is the core promise of a life of recovery,” Bingham said one recent Friday after the band played Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Free.”
Other forms of service at The Way have changed. Volunteers once provided a sit-down dinner with hot food cooked at the church or catered by local restaurants such as The Cupboard, Central BBQ, and Just for Lunch. Now, participants are given sack lunches made by highly trained volunteers such as veteran Memphis restaurateur Mac Edwards and local caterer Randy Jefferson. Edwards credits Kilzer and The Way with his own recovery.
“John died and then my sponsor died, and my restaurant closed,” Edwards said. “I was in a deep funk. But when I ran into Bing at the grocery store in 2022 and he told me they wanted to start serving food again at The Way, something just clicked. I knew this was something I wanted to do, an act of service, and my depression immediately lifted.”
Acts of service multiply like loaves and fishes at The Way. While Hearn and her church friends, David and Jan Melton, serve coffee on the east side of the vestibule, Denise Linebarier runs Ches’ Clothes Closet on the west side. The ministry provides shirts, shoes, hygiene products, and other donated items to The Way participants. Chip Linebarier, Ches’ father, provides water for Hearn’s station. Ches’ Closet is a memorial to the couple’s son, Chester, who died in a single-car crash in 2018. He was 31. “I’ve seen Denise sit on the floor with a man’s foot in her lap and put shoes on him until she found one that fit,” Hearn said. “There is no love like a mother’s love for her child.”
Or grandchild. Every week, The Way’s volunteer corps is bolstered by students from the Civic Service Organization at Memphis University School, led by history teacher Jonathan Large. The students include Hearn’s grandson, Wallace. “He had over 500 hours of volunteer service before school started this fall,” said Wallace’s proud grandmother. “And he decided, as part of his civic involvement, to bring classmates here. So we started out with two friends. We’re up to eight now.”
Hearn has been bringing her grandchildren to The Way since the beginning. Joseph, the eldest, is now in college. “When he was just a kid, Joseph loved to sit up on stage with John and the band,” Hearn said. “He was fascinated by the musicians.” Granddaughter Katherine, 15, often sits next to her grandmother at the coffee table. “She’s the mini-me. I’m training her,” said Hearn. Evelyn, 10, is next in line.
“Nancy is one of those spiritual forces of nature any pastor is blessed to have in her or his congregation,” said Rev. Dr. Brad Thomas, who was St. John’s senior pastor when The Way began. “She believes in the hospitality of the ministry, and she is a pillar around that.”
Over the years, Mama Way has been called into service as Nurse Way. “I’ve sent three people here to the hospital,” said Hearn, who worked for years as a registered nurse. One man was having a heart attack. Another man with COPD was having trouble breathing. A third man who was wearing a colostomy bag had an infection that had become septic. “Once a nurse, always a nurse,” she said.
Once a mother, always a mother. Lloyd and Nancy were married for 60 years before he died in 2023. They raised two daughters, Barbara and Susan. They have four grandchildren. Mama Way has countless honorary children.
“I’ve had more people hug me and call me Mama,” she said. “And it’s a blessing. These people are like my family in a sense. I just think we miss the boat when we don’t take an opportunity to share God’s love. Jesus washed feet for people. He took the dead and revived them. He made sure everyone had enough food to eat. I don’t care what you do, but you’ve got to be involved in something besides your own little world. God needs us to do that.”
David Waters, a longtime Memphis journalist, is associate director emeritus for the Institute for Public Service Reporting at the University of Memphis.
