Nina Griffin often gives Christian nicknames to people, places and things. For instance, she calls herself a “Christ Ambassador.” In the 10 months Griffin sold cars for Josh Towbin (aka the Chopper), she appeared in infomercials as “The Church Lady.” Her promotional pitch: “I’m behaved and I’m saved.” Visitors to her www.sheepfinders.com website and listeners to her 3-year-old Sunday talk show on KKVV 1060-AM are continually reminded that this is “Win City” not Sin City, “because people are out to win souls for Christ.” Videos of her street evangelism often end up on “GODNET”—you know it by its government name, YouTube.
Prolonged exposure to Griffin also reveals a proclivity for making bold, if unproven, statements.
Like: “Las Vegas has some of the most spiritual people in world.”
And: “Steve Wynn is showing what evangelism can be. He’s creating disciples for his hotel. We, as people of faith, can do the same. Imagine if we called the hotels up said, ‘I’m a person of faith and I don’t want Playboy on my TV’. Once we start asking them to recognize our diversity, they’ll be receptive to our requests.”
Or: “Win City has more people invoking the name of the Lord and Jesus Christ 24-7 than any other place on Earth. Walk through a casino and I bet you’ll hear people saying ‘Help me to win, Lord,’ or ‘Thank you, Jesus.’ They’re referencing the name of the Lord. Now, they may be referencing his name for the wrong reason, but they do recognize his power.”
However, Griffin’s penchant for keeping it real about church problems might be her signature talent. In a YouTube video of a recent trip Downtown, she talked with a homeless man who dislikes church partly because a sanctuary merely offered him a bologna sandwich when he fell ill and lost his apartment.
On her August 19 radio show, Griffin led a discussion on adultery and sexually abusive relationships in the church. Her shtick is part Anderson Cooper, part Christiane Amanpour. God is truth, she says, and if hunting for truth exposes sin, so be it.
“You [as a pastor] can’t talk to a man about not beating his wife if you beat yours. We can’t run from our issues. We’ve got to police our own,” says Griffin, a Los Angeles native who devoted her life to Christ shortly before going into the Army in 1981 and holds an anthropology degree from the University of Southern California. “I got 58 minutes [her show’s length] to stop someone from committing suicide or to try God for the one millionth time ... I don’t have time to play.”
Divorced with a 1-year-old son, she followed her mother and stepfather to Vegas in 1989. She worked in human resources at the Mirage, but hated the city. “I didn’t have a social network.”
Out of the military in 1991, Griffin career-hopped, promoting musicians, working in telecommunications and co-founding an employee retention business that eventually morphed into Lost Sheep Consulting, through which she aids churches (250 to date) with strategies on reclaiming members.
Churches have to be bold to win souls for Christ, says Griffin. True to form, she ends the interview with a pronouncement—bold but also based in fact: “God allows 39 million people to come here every year, and I don’t think he allows them all to come and lose their minds. You know why? If you look in hotel rooms, from the Four Seasons to the motels on Main Street you can rent by the hour, you will almost always find a Bible.”