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Former stripper takes God’s word to world of porn
More articles on this topic: ChristianityA Christian mission that was founded by a former stripper is helping lap dancers and porn addicts, actors and actresses to find God.
Members of JC’s Girls are touring strip clubs in California, where they pay for private dances and use their time alone with the performers to try to convert them.
So far, the six-month-old enterprise has encouraged several strippers to start going to church.
Porn stars and men addicted to pornography are also contacting the group via its website and crediting the women with helping them to discover Christianity and change their lives.
JC’s Girls, described as “a biblically-based Christian ministry”, was formed by Heather Veitch, a former stripper and nude dancer at clubs in Las Vegas and several Californian cities.
She launched the project after a friend she had worked with at Club 215 Showgirls in Colton, California, died of alcoholism.
“Even though I had moved on and created this perfect Christian world for myself, a lot of people I cared about had not,” said Mrs Veitch, 31, who has children aged four and 13.
“They were alone and dying. My friend was angry and bitter and never had a chance to know that what she had done in her life could be forgiven. I knew I had to go back into the clubs and talk to strippers about God. There is nothing that they have ever done that God will not forgive them for.”
Mrs Veitch, who became a Christian about five years ago and works as a hairdresser, approached her pastor, Matt Brown, of Sandals Church, Riverside, and discussed setting up a group to visit strip clubs.
He helped her to form Matthew’s House, which is promoted as “a ministry to help people working in or addicted to the sex industry”.
Mrs Veitch, who cares for her terminally ill husband, said: “We are an evangelising team and this is our missionary work. We pattern our ministry after the very ministry of Jesus by going to the people who need him.”
She said that while she was working as a stripper with “a big drink problem and an out of control lifestyle” she felt too intimidated to go into churches.
“I thought, if it’s like that for dancers, it must be a lot worse for porn stars. So we developed the website to reach out to them.”
The site, which has had 40,000 hits in three months, borrows from the glamour industry. The three women behind JC’s Girls – the others are Lori Albee and Tanya Huerter, both teachers who grew up in Christian homes – appear in glamorous photographs that were taken by a porn film director.
Despite a barrage of criticism, Mrs Veitch said the photographs were intended to show sex workers that being a Christian did not mean “being locked up in a house with a Bible”. She added: “It is not a sin to be attractive or dress cute.”
Mrs Veitch said that the missionaries had been asked to stop only once.
“Everything I thought would happen – that we would be hated, thrown out, yelled at – hasn’t happened.”
Mrs Albee, 35, said of her first strip club mission: “I thought the girls would not listen to me. But when I spoke to one of the dancers, she told me, ‘I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to go into a church but thought I would feel like a pariah.’ She had tears in her eyes.”
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