Pamela Moore sat in the waiting room of the Hope Center Dec. 19 for a few minutes and thought about how far she had come since August.

Other than a few Bible verses posted on the wall, the waiting room looked like any other doctor’s office she had visited — couches, chairs, a television and a few plants — but Moore knew as soon as she stepped into the back, her experience would be anything but typical.

“What’s special about this place is that when you come in, people know your name,” Moore said. “Lisa, the nurse practitioner, just walks through the door and hugs my neck. I think people perceive that when they come here, they’d be treated like trash. But you don’t. I’ve gotten better care here than from all the doctors I’ve been to over the years.”

Out of options

Moore, like the 3,000 other patients the Hope Center has served since opening in 2009, does not have health insurance.

Originally from Mobile, Moore moved to Tennessee for a job and got into a relationship there that was not good for her.

After five back surgeries left her unable to work, her boyfriend kicked her out in the summer of 2012. She was left without a home and was extremely sick.

“If you took a picture of me then and put it up next to me now, you would not recognize me,” Moore said. She was swollen from edema and had a host of other problems, and her medications were too expensive for her to purchase.

She moved back to south Alabama to be near her brother, who is a pastor in Creola.

“When I came here, I was so sick — in fact, I made the decision I was going to come home and die,” she said, remembering her thoughts of hopelessness. She even contemplated suicide, she said.

After living in a motel for a while, she found affordable housing in Foley in August 2012. The same month, her brother told her about the Hope Center. It was a shot in the dark, but she decided she might as well see if they could help her.

Helping the hurting

The Hope Center is a ministry of the Church on the Eastern Shore, located on Highway 104 in Fairhope.

In addition to medical care, the Hope Center provides dental care and counseling, said Dana Smith, the Hope Center’s executive director.

“One of the reasons COTES started the Hope Center is that we support all the ministries in Baldwin County, so we thought, ‘We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Let’s do something that nobody else is doing to reach people,’” Smith said. “We are able to reach people that wouldn’t necessarily come to our church, but they’ll come here and talk to us and let us pray with them, and they know we’re here if they need us. And I think that’s one of the things I love the most about being here — it is a mission field.”

Moore said counseling and prayer made all the difference for her. In addition to being in bad shape physically, she was extremely depressed.

“I’m a big believer myself that if you’re emotionally and spiritually hurting, it can sometimes lead to physical ailments,” Moore said. “They minister to your heart first before a doctor ever looks at you. When you start getting healed (emotionally and spiritually), you really do start feeling better physically.”

Chris Bell, lead pastor at COTES, said the inspiration for the ministry came from the Bible. While sharing the gospel is the church’s mission, Bell said Jesus set an example in helping people with physical needs as well.

“We want to care for those who are hurting in every way we can,” he said. “The heart of it really comes out of the gospel. So we feel like one of our greatest ways of worshipping Jesus at COTES is not a service or a song, but through ministries like this.”

Qualifications and costs

The Hope Center serves people without insurance. This includes people who have lost a job and are temporarily without coverage, Smith said.

“We are basically like a regular doctor’s office,” she said. “We take no emergency visits, and we don’t take walk-ins.”

For an individual whose household income is less than $40,000 a year, an office visit costs $15. The Hope Center charges only what it costs them to run lab work, x-rays and other tests or treatments.

However, most people who come to the Hope Center cannot afford to pay much at all, and Smith said she works with them.

“I’ve been here since day one, and I’ve probably only had about two people pay over $15, because the people who come here just don’t have it,” she said. “It’s not the money. It’s accountability. For instance, we have been paid in strawberries before. We want to meet people where they are, but we also want to help them take that next step of getting to a better place, whether that is physically, emotionally or spiritually.”

One woman even brought in her Tootsie Roll piggy bank as payment.

“We tried to give it back, and she wouldn’t take it,” Smith said.

The Hope Center is funded by donations, and all of the doctors, nurses, evangelism workers, dentists, counselors and helpers are volunteers.

The center also takes advantage of programs that help people get affordable care or medications, like the Patient Assistance program, which is run by pharmaceutical companies and helps low-income patients get free medications.

“One of the reasons doctor’s offices do not do this for their patients is it is so much paperwork,” Smith said.

Volunteers help patients fill out the extensive paperwork, and more than 300 Hope Center patients currently get their medications through the Patient Assistance Program, including Pamela Moore.

The Hope Center also offers the Alabama Breast and Early Cervical Cancer Detection program, which offers free breast and cervical examinations to women who meet the qualifications.

So far, five women have been diagnosed with breast cancer and have received the further treatment they need through avenues the Hope Center provides.

Changing lives

Smith said the Hope Center is transparent about its ultimate mission: introducing people to Jesus. Several patients have become Christians, been baptized and now attend COTES or other churches because of the program.

Moore said she was already a believer before coming to the center, but that she was so focused on her pain and depression that her faith was not a big part of her life.

“I really feel like mentally, emotionally and physically they saved my life,” she said. “They come in and counsel you. They don’t pressure you or anything — they just come in and talk about things that are bothering you. And then the medical part comes later. I was starving for that. It was good to talk to someone.”

But patients aren’t the only ones who have life changing experiences at the Hope Center, said Lisa Field, a nurse practitioner who volunteers at COTES.

Field went back to school to become a nurse practitioner later in life, and she needed to get some experience to practice the new information she was learning in school.

“I figured they’ll take anybody because it’s a volunteer thing,” she said. “They started ministering to me and inviting me to church here. They recognized that I was looking for something in my life. And what that was — I was looking for God.”

After a few months, Field said she became aware of the void in her life.

“They guided me in the right direction and ministered to me, and I became a Christian because of the Hope Center two and a half years ago,” she said. “Since then, I’ve been going on foreign medical missions and just growing in my walk with Christ and medically at the same time. How cool is that?”

Field said volunteering at the Hope Center has changed the way she looks at medicine.

“My perspective is to be able to minister to somebody in body, mind and mostly spirit,” she said. “Pharmaceuticals and nutriceuticals have their place, but if you have such a spiritual void, there’s no medication that’s going to help you. It’s all tied together.”

Moore agrees. She feels better than she has in years, and her outlook on life is more optimistic than it was six months ago.

“I feel like I’m gonna be OK. I’m not here to die anymore,” she said. “I’ve got my quality of life back. When I get well enough, I want to volunteer my time here. That’s how much it has affected me.”

GET INVOLVED: Volunteers are needed in all areas, from cleaning help to receptionists to medical professionals. For more information about volunteering or becoming a patient at the Hope Center, call 251-445-2273. Services are by appointment only.

LOCATION: 10274 Hwy. 104, Fairhope