Rollins knew that the church needed to change, and he took to the stage and told the church that very thing. Need knows no color, he said.
He needed to jump-start this thing, prime the racial pump. So on one Sunday, Rollins asked two teenage girls to dress up as hobos and sit at the edge of the church driveway, holding up signs asking for food or money. There's only one route onto the church property, and everyone who came that Sunday had to pass these white girls before parking and coming inside. During the service, Rollins asked the congregation about the girls: Did you see them? Did you help them? Let's see a show of hands.
In an auditorium of 600 people, three hands went up.
Rollins let silence hang in the room. Then: "I looked out at them and said, 'We failed as a church this morning.' "
In the wake of this stunt and others , the church lost one-third of its original members.
Rollins made other sudden changes. In a church culture where some saw "God's favor" in the ability to purchase high-end alligator shoes and tailored suits, he began preaching in T-shirts and jeans. He grew the church's volunteer ranks and had them wearing red T-shirts underneath their suit jackets.
"For a year, I did culture," he says. "I preached: 'We don't exist for us. We exist for the people who aren't even here yet.'"
Rollins was in the process of relaunching his parents' church. Bishop James Rollins and his wife, Varle, who was the co-pastor and main speaker, had given their son their blessing, albeit a mixed one.
"We had felt that we were successful in what we were doing," says Bishop Rollins, who founded Living Waters in 1994 in the family room of the Rollins's home. "But Jimmy said: 'Dad, I am after a different people. They don't have suits and ties.' "
Today, Bishop James leads the senior ministry for the new church, while his wife runs Varle Rollins Ministries. "I believed our son was on the verge of doing greater things," Bishop Rollins says.
Between 2011 and 2012, Living Waters Worship Center morphed into something Rollins decided to call i5 Church. Churches in the United States have been experimenting with nontraditional names for at least two decades. Tulsa has a GUTS. New York City has a Dwell. Charlotte has an Elevation. Such names communicate a certain flavor, a style and mission. But i5? It's a moniker without immediate resonance.
Rollins intended it as a literal description of the thing he was creating: a church that is motivated entirely by meeting five needs: food, water, clothing, shelter and care. Race would not be a factor.
"Need has no color," Rollins likes to say. "We have to love beyond our preferences."
The five categories come from Matthew 25:31-46, in which Jesus tells his disciples that in the end, he will separate all people into two groups "as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats." The sheep are the ones who cared for "the least of these brothers and sisters" by giving them food and drink, by welcoming them in, by clothing them, by caring for those sick or imprisoned. The goats, who did not do these things, "will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."
It's a stark passage whose message fell especially hard on Rollins a few years ago. From 2009 until 2011, Rollins was unhappy with the reach of his church ministry, or at least his parents' church ministry, where he had served for 17 years. He was drinking too much. His marriage was suffering.
As one last test of his commitment to the church, Rollins took a trip to Africa with a team from Living Waters. One afternoon, their van broke down on the side of a remote road. As they waited for help to come, he experienced a breakthrough. "I got slam-dunked by God" is the way Rollins puts it. He was overwhelmed with a vision for how he really wanted to do church. He sat in the broken-down van and typed into a laptop as fast as he could.
Rollins imagined a courtroom. God was the judge. Jesus was the prosecutor. The jury was made up of prisoners, homeless people, the sick and naked and downtrodden. The defendant was Jimmy Rollins. And on every area of accusation — Did you clothe them? Did you feed them? Did you visit them in prison? Care for them in sickbeds? — Rollins was found wanting, guilty. A goat.
After three hours, Rollins knew exactly what kind of church he wanted to run.
That's the church he's running today.
Every week, i5 food trucks pick up about 1,500 pounds of perishable goods to deliver to a food pantry. Earlier this year, the church gathered 1,700 pairs of shoes to send overseas. They're digging wells for clean water in Tanzania and Kenya. In August, i5 partnered with the Board of Education in Anne Arundel County, Maryland to deliver 1,500 bags of school supplies to impoverished families.
"Every single Saturday, we're at a shelter in D.C., a shelter in Baltimore," says Steve Harris, an i5 associate pastor.
In 2013, Rollins entered into a partnership with One Child Matters, a child sponsorship organization based in Colorado, to change the church's approach to orphan care. The church had been supporting 14 orphans from its general fund; Rollins challenged church members to support orphans directly. In one Sunday morning, members signed up for over 260 monthly child sponsorships. In effect, Rollins freed up church finances for meeting local needs, but also managed to support more orphans overseas.
The net effect was a new culture of generosity: After the One Child Matters campaign began, giving per member increased by more than 60 percent.
While the i5 congregation has grown in size since its nadir, some of its most important initiatives are focused on serving a more diverse population. Neighboring the church building is the i5 Kids Early Learning Center, a preschool facility serving 120 children. Rollins' wife, Irene, runs the center, known until recently as Noah's Ark. "In any of my classes, I might have African kids, Asian, Caucasian, redheads, blond," Irene says. "It's what heaven is going to look like in our classroom."
The project that excites Jimmy Rollins more than any other is an athletic program called i5 Elite, geared to sixth- to eighth-graders. Irene and two volunteer coaches founded the program two years ago. i5 Elite employs two full-time director-coaches supported by more than 100 volunteers, and its multiracial ranks have swelled to 260 kids in track and another 90 in football. Girls' volleyball starts this fall, and Rollins hopes soccer will soon follow. i5 Elite athletes boast 40 national track-and-field titles so far.
The i5 church's growing diversity is new, but when you talk to Irene and Jimmy Rollins, it becomes clear that before this their lives had been far from monochromatic. Irene's father is white; her mother is a black Zambian. She's lived in Switzerland; she's lived in Africa. The all-African American years at Living Waters were an exception to the rule of her mixed-raced life.
And while James and Varle Rollins may have ended up leading an African American church in Living Waters, the bishop's whole life story is one of racial mixing . He was the first student to desegregate the schools in Anne Arundel County in 1961; as warden of the Maryland Penitentiary, he became the first African American department head in Howard County. Bishop James says that when it comes to racial mixing, "I've always kind of been first." Jimmy Rollins heard these stories growing up, and he said he always had at least as many white friends as black friends in this south of the Mason-Dixon state.
These days, Rollins spends a lot of time — "a lot, a lot of time," he emphasizes — thinking about how to get people to examine the issue of diversity in their own lives. In a recent staff meeting, Rollins asked his staff to pull out their cellphones.
He told them to think about Jesus' words: " 'Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.' Well, if we can tell what we think about money based on how we're spending it, we can tell how we think about diversity based on who's in your cellphone.
"Look at your contacts. Outside of business connections, how many of your friends are diverse?"
Rollins is taking the same message to his fellow pastors as he guest-preaches at majority-white churches and speaks at mostly white pastors conferences. "I tell them, 'Your church is never going to get diverse until your cellphone is.' "
Given the demographics of Odenton, Living Waters may or may not become known as a seriously diverse church. But there's an intentional spirit of diversity at the heart of the gospel Rollins has embraced, the good news he's preaching, a news that calls out the prejudices in his community, makes them come correct.
I ask Rollins if he had any idea how many nonblack people came to his church last week, and he answers almost before I can finish asking. Counting is a way of measuring progress, he says: "There were 115 diverse people last week." What does "diverse people" mean? "We count Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian, other.''
"We don't even count black people," he adds with a smile.
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