Hook
Three Sisters Are Still Waiting for an Answer, Three Years After Their Sister’s Funeral
In October 2021, four people signed onto a federal lawsuit against the ministry they believed had failed them: William Rooker of Maryland, Rochelle Glasgow of Montana, Donna Landry of Washington, and Bonnie Martin, also of Maryland.1 Nine months later, Bonnie Martin died of the cancer she had been fighting since 2018 — still owing money to the hospitals that had treated her, still waiting for the case she had helped start to reach a hearing.
Her sisters did not withdraw it. Rochelle and Donna, together with their sister Joanne Gabris, buried Bonnie in the summer of 2022 and kept going. As of the most recent public filings, the case — now captioned Glasgow v. Beers — is still moving through the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, where a motion for class certification has been pending since 2025 without a ruling.2 Four years after Bonnie Martin put her name on a complaint, no court has yet been made to formally answer for what happened to her.
What the photographs from her memorial do not show is what her sisters already knew: that Bonnie had spent her final months not resting, but pleading — by phone, by email, and once in pen across the top of an overdue bill, in a line she underlined and that has since become part of the public record: WHY HAS THIS NOT BEEN PAID?
Bonnie was not especially religious, by her family’s account. But when she needed a way to pay for cancer treatment outside traditional insurance, she chose an organization that promised something insurance companies do not: to carry her burden, in the language of Scripture, because a community of believers had pledged to carry it together. The organization was called Liberty HealthShare. It marketed itself as a Christian alternative to Obamacare, built on Galatians 6:2 — “bear one another’s burdens” — stitched into its mission language.3
What follows is not primarily a story about a lawsuit, though the lawsuit is real and still open. It is a story about what happens when an institution borrows the vocabulary of faith to secure something faith was never meant to secure: the presumption of trust that comes before any accounting is demanded.
Historical Case
The Uncle Who Wrote the Blueprint Fifty Years Ago
To understand what happened to Bonnie Martin, it helps to go back further than Liberty HealthShare’s founding in 2014 — back to a rundown brick hall outside Canton, Ohio, in 1965, where a preacher named Bruce Hawthorn opened a rescue mission for men struggling with alcoholism.4
Hawthorn’s ministry was a shoestring operation for over a decade, sustained by small cash donations. Then, in the fall of 1981, tragedy struck: a truck broadsided his family’s car, killing his wife and young daughter. Facing medical bills he could not pay, Hawthorn wrote to his mission’s small circle of supporters. They responded by mailing him handwritten prayers and cash, folded into letters and cards, until the debt was covered.
Hawthorn had what looked, at the time, like a genuinely good idea. If strangers who had never met could be moved to cover one man’s bills out of shared conviction, why not formalize the arrangement — build an entire organization around it? In 1982 he launched the Christian Brotherhood Newsletter, charging members a monthly fee he called a “share.” Subscribers with medical bills would write in, and the organization would direct other members to send them money directly. For a while, it worked roughly as advertised.
Then it didn’t. Hawthorn’s nephew by marriage, a young man named Dan Beers, began working in the Brotherhood’s marketing department, and by the mid-1990s the organization’s money had begun flowing somewhere other than members’ medical bills. Beers started a company that billed the Brotherhood tens of thousands of dollars a week for services state investigators later found no evidence he actually performed. Hawthorn, for his part, used member funds to buy an airplane, a tour bus, and a stretch of ranchland north of Canton that would eventually become a family compound.5
None of this required Hawthorn or Beers to break new legal ground. State lawmakers, moved by the sincerity of a grieving father’s story and wary of regulating expressions of religious charity, had mostly chosen to look away from sharing ministries altogether — a permissiveness that would prove, over the following four decades, structural rather than incidental. The gap Beers exploited in the 1990s was not a loophole he discovered. It was one the law had already left open for him.6
By 1997 the Brotherhood had a $15 million backlog of unpaid medical bills. Ohio’s attorney general opened an investigation and, after two years, produced a dossier describing the organization as “a criminal enterprise” engaged in “a pattern of corrupt activity.” State forensic accountants recommended 65 felony counts against Beers. County prosecutors received the file in April 2000.7
No charges were ever filed. The lead prosecutor lost his re-election that fall; the case, in the words of a former assistant prosecutor who worked it, simply “went awry” and nobody now can say why. No declination was ever formally recorded. Decades later, the Summit County prosecutor’s office confirmed to reporters that it still holds no records explaining why the file was never acted on.8 A civil jury eventually found Beers liable for fraud in 2004, ordering him to pay $9.6 million. Hawthorn died in 2012 having never paid his own judgment. Beers avoided his for nearly twenty years.9
The relevant fact is not that the Christian Brotherhood Newsletter collapsed. Organizations fail for ordinary reasons all the time. The relevant fact is that the man at the center of it — never criminally charged, his felony motor vehicle theft conviction later expunged — went on, a decade later, to help build a second ministry using what a Liberty employee would eventually describe, in a memo to Ohio regulators, as “a pattern that is remarkably similar to the Brotherhood.”10 The uncle wrote the blueprint. Nothing in the intervening thirty years prevented his nephew from building the second floor on top of it.
Biblical Lens
The Burden They Promised to Carry
Scripture has a name for what happened between the promise Liberty HealthShare made and the debt it left behind, and the name is older than health insurance, older than nonprofit law, older than the concept of a regulatory “no man’s land.”
The prophet Ezekiel, writing to a people whose religious leaders had grown fat while their flock went hungry, records God’s charge against shepherds who used their position for private gain:
“Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks? Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock.” (Ezekiel 34:2–3, KJV)
The image is agricultural, almost uncomfortably literal for a family that would one day use ministry-derived wealth to buy a cattle ranch, a chain of butcher shops, and a steakhouse — the very fat and wool Ezekiel names, converted into an actual balance sheet twenty-six centuries later.
Jeremiah levels a related charge at leaders who scatter the very people they were entrusted to gather:
“Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! saith the LORD.” (Jeremiah 23:1, KJV)
Liberty’s own members scattered in exactly this sense — driven into debt collection, ruined credit, and years of unanswered calls, each of them isolated in a fight that felt, to nearly every member ProPublica interviewed, uniquely their own.
And in the Gospels, a warning about how such leaders are meant to be recognized — not by their language, which can be borrowed convincingly, but by what they produce over time:
“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:15–16, KJV)
None of these passages were written with health care sharing ministries in mind, and it would be a mistake to force them into that narrow a box. What they preserve instead is a much older observation about institutional trust: that language borrowed from faith — “bear one another’s burdens,” “a ministry that wants to help people” — carries a kind of authority that ordinary commercial language does not. It disarms scrutiny precisely because it invokes something sacred. Scripture’s warning is not that religious language is always false. It is that religious language, once spoken, obligates the speaker to a fruit that can be checked.
The harder question these ministries raise for a genuinely religious society is not whether such organizations lie — some do, some don’t — but whether the very protections built to keep the state out of the sanctuary have also, quietly, kept it out of the ledger, leaving the fruit unchecked by anyone but the flock itself.
Pattern Insight
What $140 Million Reveals About Whom the Money Was Actually Meant to Carry
Return to the numbers for a moment, because they say plainly what euphemism tends to obscure.
Between 2015 and 2021, Liberty HealthShare collected roughly $1.9 billion from its members. Over that same period, the ministry paid at least $140 million to businesses owned and operated by the extended Beers family — money that flowed through marketing and billing contractors into a network of shell companies, which bought a private airline, a 700-acre ranch, a small Missouri bank, and a former Oregon vineyard converted into an industrial cannabis operation.11 In Massachusetts, one of the few states that requires health-sharing ministries to report financial data, Liberty spent about 56 cents of every member dollar on actual medical expenses in 2019 and 2020 — a figure regulators noted would be scandalous for a licensed insurer, which is legally required to spend at least 80 cents of every premium dollar on direct care.12
The numbers matter. What they reveal matters even more. Ezekiel’s charge against the shepherds of Israel was that they fed themselves — literally, in the text, eating the meat and wearing the wool that belonged to the flock — while the sheep went hungry. The Beers family did not merely take a management fee. They converted shared medical funds into cattle, land, and livestock enterprises, while members like Bonnie Martin waited years for bills that would never be paid. Trust borrowed without accountability eventually becomes exploitation. No one intended this as an illustration of Ezekiel. It simply became one.
There is a second layer. This was not a single family’s isolated failure of character. It was a structure that had already repeated itself once, inside the same family, with nearly identical mechanics — unpaid bills, shell companies, a compound bought with member money, an investigation that produced findings but no consequences serious enough to prevent a second act. A Liberty employee who tried to raise the alarm internally in 2017 described the resemblance to his own bosses in almost clinical terms, warning that the ministry was following “a pattern remarkably similar to the Brotherhood.”13 He was right, and being right changed almost nothing. Ohio’s attorney general eventually reached a $6.4 million settlement with the family in 2021 — a sum that did little for members left holding medical debt, and considerably less than what the same family had been ordered to pay, and largely evaded, two decades earlier.
This is the same gap a previous installment of this series examined in a different register: the space between what the evidence has already made plain and what an institution is willing to formally confirm. The lawsuit now working through class certification in Ohio — brought in part under RICO, the federal anti-racketeering statute originally built to dismantle organized crime — is not establishing a new fact. It is asking, years late, for an institution to admit what has already been demonstrated, a delay that arrived, for Bonnie Martin, after the point where it could still help her.
Academic legal scholarship warned about this exact structural vulnerability over a decade ago. A 2013 law review analysis of the health-sharing industry concluded that because these ministries occupy a deliberately created gap between insurance law and religious-liberty protections, they leave members almost entirely without recourse when an organization simply declines to pay — precisely the “no man’s land” ProPublica’s investigation later documented in granular, human detail.14 The warning existed in print nine years before Bonnie Martin joined Liberty HealthShare. It changed nothing about the law she was relying on when she got sick.
Closing
The Ministry Still Owes an Answer
The photograph from Bonnie Martin’s memorial shows her sisters standing together, holding images of a woman who spent the final months of her life not resting, but pleading — on the phone, in emails, in pen across the top of a bill — with an organization that had promised to carry what she could no longer carry alone.
That plea is still, in a formal legal sense, unanswered. The class Rochelle Glasgow now represents in federal court has not yet been certified. The RICO claims have not yet been resolved. Liberty’s current leadership says it is working through a backlog of unpaid bills inherited from the family that built the conglomerate on member money, though how much of that backlog will ever be paid to families like Bonnie’s remains, as of this writing, an open question.
In the previous installment, What the Ground Refused to Forget, we watched an Oklahoma family wait for the earth beneath their house to be believed — for an agency to say plainly what months of testing had already shown. Bonnie Martin’s story is a different register of the same wait. She was not waiting for a commission to name a well. She was waiting for an organization that had borrowed the language of a shared burden to actually share it, and she ran out of time before that language was made true.
The verse Liberty borrowed turns out to ask a simpler question than any lawsuit ever can: who actually carried whose burden? Scripture’s oldest complaint against false shepherds was never that they used the wrong words. It was that the words outran the fruit.
1. “Liberty HealthShare Sued in Federal Court, Members Seek Class-Action Status,” Canton Repository, 2021.
2. Liberty HealthShare Class Action Lawsuit: Status and Claims, LegalClarity, 2025; Class Certification Sought In RICO Suit Against ‘Insolvent’ Health Sharing Ministry, Mealey’s, July 31, 2025.
3. Ryan Gabrielson and J. David McSwane, “A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline,” ProPublica, Feb. 25, 2023.
4–13. Gabrielson and McSwane, ProPublica, 2023.
14. Benjamin Boyd, “Health Care Sharing Ministries: Scam or Solution?,” Journal of Law and Health, Vol. 26, Iss. 2 (2013), Cleveland State University.