Pastor, citing Bible, donates kidney to stranger

CEDAR RAPIDS - When Jay Alexander asked if any of his friends on Facebook would consider donating a kidney to his ailing older brother, he never expected much response.

It was October and his brother's kidneys were in stage four renal failure. The organs, usually the size of fists, had swelled to the size of footballs. The cysts in Matt Alexander's kidneys, caused by a genetic disorder called polycystic kidney disease, had grown too large.

His best chance was to find a living donor, but 'it just seemed an insurmountable thing to me that you could ask somebody to donate an organ,” Jay Alexander said, 'and they would say ‘yes.'”

Doctors had recommended Matt Alexander, 47, and his wife, Jennifer Alexander, write letters to friends and families asking for donations. But after meeting an older patient who said he had written more than 85 letters, Jennifer instead started the search on Facebook.

Jay followed his sister-in-law's lead and soon Christian Shields, a pastor at Christian Life Church in southwest Cedar Rapids, had commented on his Facebook post.

'Can we give if we are in Iowa?” he wrote to his old friend, who lives outside of Seattle.

The social media campaign persuaded dozens of people to fill out questionnaires, and many of them took medical tests to determine eligibility.

Ultimately, Shields, 29, was deemed the best match. Last month, he boarded a plane to Seattle, met Matt and gave him a kidney.

Speaking from his home in Puyallup, Wash., Matt said he's recovering quickly from the surgery. Shields, who has returned to Cedar Rapids and will be preaching Sunday, said he had some postoperative complications but is healthy and recovering.

Why undergo invasive surgery for someone he had never met?

'The Bible says, ‘Let him with two give to him with none,'” Shields said. 'That applies pretty well to a kidney transplant.”

He had hoped to keep his donation anonymous, but Jay - a fellow pastor whose church Shields used to attend as a teenager - let the secret slip.

So the Alexanders and the Shields - Christian, his wife, Amanda, 2-year-old Ezra and 7-month-old Hannah - met and spent time together before the operation.

Shields said one of the Alexanders' two daughters thanked him for 'saving my daddy's life.” And he and Matt found they had a shared affinity for Star Wars.

'This will get a little preachy, but I believe all Christians are brothers and sisters,” said Shields, who founded a non-denominational church with his wife three years ago. 'Everything we have, we share and have in common. I believe it's our Christian duty to help each other.”

About 5,000 living organ donations occur each year, according to the American Transplant Foundation. One in four of those donors is not biologically related to the recipient.

'There is right way and wrong way to go about finding a living kidney donor,” Shields said, noting the Alexanders leveraged an effective social media campaign by posting photos of Matt and his children and a link to a screening survey.

The posts benefited others, too. One friend wasn't a match for Matt, he said, but she ultimately donated a healthy kidney to a teenager in need.

'There's a lot of people like me that are like, ‘Man, I'd do anything to save somebody's life,'” Shields said.

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