Waverly Church of the Nazarene is no megachurch. It sits in a small town in Tennessee with a population of around 4,000. It doesn’t have the largest following, but its 350 weekly attendees are devout. WCN’s pastor, Daron Brown, has served the community for 25 years. “Pretty much everybody knows everybody,” he said.
Unwillingly, this local church was recently pulled into the national spotlight.
On Nov. 4, the church received a phone call. The caller claimed that she was a mother who had run out of baby formula the night before and was afraid for the life of her baby. The church administrator who answered the call directed her to Helping Hands, a local food bank supported by WCN.
Confusingly, the caller insisted that she’d already reached out to Helping Hands but was told a complication involving SNAP benefits meant they could not help her.
The administrator was flustered. WCN is closely involved with the food bank: Several church leaders serve on the board, and church donations help keep the pantries stocked. She’d heard nothing about a shortage at Helping Hands, nor did they rely on SNAP for their services. Further, she knew that Helping Hands would not be open until later that day. How could the caller have reached out already? There were reasons to suspect dishonesty.
The administrator continued to suggest other resources, but the caller insisted that she’d tried them all, including other churches. She ended the call, suspecting she was being misled.
The administrator’s suspicions were correct. On the other end of the phone was Nikalie Monroe, a TikTok influencer who has made more than 40 such calls to places of worship posing as a mother seeking formula for her child. Across the course of her series, she grew her following from just 30 to more than 500,000. Millions of unique viewers saw the series.
Unwittingly, WCN had been featured in a series that would lead to a national harassment campaign against local churches like them. After that call, thousands of harassing phone calls, emails, and social media posts targeted the church. In the eyes of many viewers, they had shown themselves to be greedy and callous.
“You might give your last few dollars to church, and I’m curious if that church actually helps your community or not, or if they just pocket your money,” Monroe said in the first video of the series. Many times, she claimed that she hoped to be proven wrong. (Monroe could not be reached for comment.)
Each video follows a similar script: Monroe asks the audience whether their churches would feed a starving baby, turns on a recording of a baby crying, and calls a place of worship (most often a church, though she’s also reached out to a mosque, a Buddhist temple, and a pro-life pregnancy center) to ask for formula.
When these churches direct her to resources like food banks or pregnancy centers, she insists that she’s tried and been told to reach out to local churches instead. If they offer to find her formula themselves, Monroe reveals the experiment. “Let me pause my baby,” she says.
Some churches passed Monroe’s “test” and saw tremendous benefits. Heritage Hope Church of God, a small church in Somerset, Kentucky, saw nationwide support after they were the first to offer Monroe a yes.
“We never had anything happen like this. It’s kinda overwhelming,” said Pastor Johnny Dunbar, affectionately dubbed “Appalachian Papaw” by TikTok. “I think what got people’s attention is I asked, ‘What flavor?’ ” Dunbar said he didn’t understand exactly what had happened until an influx of donations came a few days later.
Another was Portico Story, a pro-life pregnancy center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
“We’ve gotten donations from all over the country,” Executive Director Laura Messick told me. “Probably $1,000 in donations just from people saying thank you … I was grateful that we responded well.”
Monroe placed 43 calls in all. Nine offered her the help she was looking for. Yet did the other 34 refuse to offer her help, or were they unfairly presented as greedy and indifferent? Nearly every church directed Monroe to partner organizations with ready access to these resources. Some, like WCN, only ended the call after it became apparent that Monroe was misrepresenting herself.
All of these have been reduced to the binary of yes or no. For those who said no, harassment inevitably followed. Churches changed phone numbers, shut down websites, and tried to hide from the national spotlight.
Monroe ended her campaign after finding that many churches were already aware of the series.
To her, this showed why it was necessary: “It brought a lot of change. A lot of change and a lot of movement has happened.”
But for pastors and churches, what was the lesson of the series? How should churches adapt to the TikTok era?
All churches involved were caught unprepared by the series. Employees and volunteers were unprepared to handle the calls. Leaders were lost in the aftermath. Churches, both small and large, had never considered that this could happen.
“I’m not aware of any coordinated efforts [to prepare for these situations],” said Tim Glemkowski, executive director of the Catholic parish renewal organization Amazing Parish.
While occasional pranks and hoaxes are nothing new, campaigns of this scale are largely unprecedented.
“This is very much an emerging topic. This is something we’re going to have to deal with moving forward,” said Patrick Diener, who oversees the parish division at Partners in Mission, a Catholic education leadership organization.
How can churches prepare for the spotlight of social media?
One major issue is deciding what the root problem is. Is this about church giving or handling dishonesty? Was there a charitable shortcoming on the part of these churches, or were they unfairly targeted?
Pastors and leaders tended to decide based on the responses they received. Organizations receiving a positive response said that the series encouraged them to remove barriers to giving. Churches receiving harassment defended their existing charitable programs. For those pastors, this was a targeted hoax, not a charitable failure.
Brown did not believe WCN’s administrator should have acted any differently: He referred the caller to legitimate resources and did not hang up until it was clear something was wrong. Going forward, he said that the church will take more steps to authenticate callers but will stand by their charitable practices.
Many churches said the same: They know what they do and their communities know what they do. Their focus is preserving that.
Certainly, part of the solution must be recognizing issues with church charity, whether perceived or actual. Glemkowski believes this campaign targeted the perceived “compassion gap” in churches. “At a local level, how do we receive people? It’s a good moment of reflection to say, ‘Are our frontline greeters and people who answer the phones ready?’ ”
For locals — both church members and neighbors — the church is expected to offer a special kind of community. “The church comes from the root of the domestic church, which is the family.” Diener said. Leaders, he said, must learn “to realize that pastoral aspect as father.”
Much of the frustration seemed to come from a sense that churches had neglected this responsibility: Pastors told me that many callers, both sympathetic and angry, said they had lost faith in the church. “Not in God, but in the church,” Dunbar heard many times.
Yet how can churches balance this face-to-face intimacy with national scrutiny and organizational responsibility? “The thought of being Christ at all times for the world has to manifest itself in a new way, because we are always on every time we answer the phone, every time we answer an email, every time we talk to a person,” Diener said.
Community responsibility is no longer enough. Churches — even small, local churches — can be called upon as national and even global representatives of Christianity at any moment. How can that sense of family remain at such a large scale?
For large churches, the demands of organizational responsibility may stand in the way of immediate help. Pastors must be able to account for funds. Catholic churches especially have no choice in the wake of abuse scandals. Diener told me about a similar situation: A parish priest broke diocesan guidelines by using his own grocery budget to feed the poor. The intention was good, but a responsible church must know where its money is going.
For many churches — from WCN to the nation’s largest Catholic dioceses — charitable discernment and verification are not obstacles to community trust. They’re requirements. Leaders believe that these are ways for churches to retain local trust in a rapidly changing world.
With these responsibilities in tension, churches are facing an impossible problem. Financial responsibility can easily seem like bureaucracy that stands in the way of a church family. Face-to-face trust and national accountability are not the same. How can churches practice all of these well without making compromises?
Nobody seems to have a solution. Yet churches have no choice but to adapt. When the next call comes, they need an answer — for the caller, the community, and maybe millions of viewers.
