Atlanta- Like a SWAT team of spirited Easter bunnies, a half-dozen evangelists descended on a Buford Highway strip club called Rooster’s Barnyard Etc., their hearts nervous, their hands full of gift baskets.

Inside the club, the Saturday night crowd was in full swing. Rock music rattled the walls, men hooted and knocked back shots of brandy, while naked women shook their moneymakers on a lighted stage.

The gift-bearers, all female, bypassed this scene, walking directly to the dressing room, where a handful of dancers in abbreviated costumes sat or stood, chatting and fixing their hair.

Within seconds the dancers clamored for the baskets and the gifts inside – perfume, scarves, jewelry, inspirational books – while the givers handed out brochures inviting dancers to join a support group or simply call a hotline.

“There was a little girl dancing for the first time tonight,” reported Andrea Johnson to her colleagues when the group met later that evening at a restaurant. “Her name was Michelle. She had that little, sweet innocent face. And after tonight it’s going to be gone. I can’t get that little girl out of my mind.”

A murmur of sympathy went around the table, and then Johnson, 35, and her team members prayed for the dancers by name.

The basket brigade is part of Victoria’s Friends, an Atlanta group that ministers to the estimated 4,000 strippers who work at the 40 adult clubs in the metro area.

Like urban diplomats, the members shuttle between churches that offer financial support and the clubs with dancers they hope to help.

It’s a tricky balancing act. “It’s not a ministry widely accepted within the church,” said Lisanne McMurray, of Anthony, Kan., a former stripper and author of a book, Web site and gospel newsletter tailored for exotic dancers.

Churches would rather help the poor and homeless, McMurray said. The sex industry makes them nervous.

Credit Victoria Teague, 42, with fashioning the unlikely alliance. With what her husband calls “the gift of gab,” she built a support network of about a dozen churches that extends from Dawsonville to Fairburn, receiving significant help from such megachurches as Victory World Church in Norcross and Perimeter Church in Duluth.

She also has won the confidence of dancers and club owners, claiming scores of conversions in five years.

Her street cred helps. Teague was a stripper for four years known as Diana to the patrons of the Cheetah until she retired her high heels in 1989.

“She’d been where you had been and come through on the other side,” said former stripper Charity Goss Comeaux, 26, of Norcross.

When Comeaux heard Teague speak about Victoria’s Friends at Atlanta City Church in Fairburn, she started shaking in her seat. “The spirit just hit,” Comeaux said. “I knew there was a connection.”

Comeaux danced under the stage name Aja until December 2003, when she left the club scene for a clerk’s job that paid half as much. The transition wasn’t easy. But Teague helped, by simply showing that it can be done.

While Victory World is home base for Victoria’s Friends, churches as far afield as War Hill Christian Fellowship in Dawsonville prepare gift baskets for their strip club visits.

Teague’s volunteers are also disparate. Some, such as Andrea Johnson, are counselors with a heart for helping those on the margins. Others, such as Cindy Hornemann, know the strip club world from the inside.

During the 1990s, Hornemann, a competitive bodybuilder, moved into the seedier world of oil wrestling and topless clubs. Champagne and cocaine followed.

“It starts out glamorous, and you’re traveling and having a good time,” she said, “and after a while it’s not fun anymore. You’re starting to have to drink to go in there.”

A cocaine hotline was her lifeline. Now Hornemann, 41, a Fairburn mother of two, offers a helping hand to other dancers in need “so they don’t have to hang themselves, so they don’t have to overdose – which they do all the time.”

During outreach visits to clubs such as Masters, Oasis and the Clermont Lounge, female members of Victoria’s Friends bring baskets to dressing rooms, while the men pray in the parking lot, their “direct connect” phones ready in case of trouble.

Inside Rooster’s, Amy Rue looked for a dancer she’d met on a previous visit who was three months’ pregnant and trying to raise money for an abortion.

Rue, a student at Georgia State University, has served as a missionary in poverty-stricken areas of Europe, Asia and South America, but still finds strip club ministry difficult. “It’s not all that glamorous,” she said.

Zane would agree. The 25-year-old nude dancer received a basket from Victoria’s Friends a year ago and came to a service at Victory World last fall. She was touched by the experience. But she went back to stripping.

“It’s an addiction – you get so used to making the fast money,” said Zane, who wouldn’t use her real name for fear of upsetting her family.

She has been working the clubs for five years, typically earning $1,000 to $1,500 a week. She’s also been taking college courses almost as long and is still a year from a degree.

Even though she hasn’t quit stripping, Zane is grateful for Victoria’s Friends: “It gives people the confidence; it makes people not so lonely.”

What wins strippers over to Teague’s message, said Joseph Buffin, 39, the 295-pound head of security at Rooster’s, is that she and her friends really care about the dancers.

“She’s one of the few people who doesn’t think they’re worthless,” Buffin said. His manager, Mike Shedd, a 60-year-old ex-Marine, agreed.

“It is so admirable what they are doing,” said Shedd on a busy Saturday night.

“If they reach one out of 10 girls, I think they’ve done their job.”

Holly Wood, 32, day manager of the eminent Cheetah, has been in the business for 13 years and respects the outreach. “Anything positive is good,” she said. “Some of these girls are kind of lost, and if she’s the one to help them, then she’s got a purpose.”

Victoria’s Friends doesn’t condemn the clubs, which generate $100 million a year and employ thousands, but does offer dancers a way out.

“I don’t think the answer is to pray these clubs shut,” said McMurray, the Kansas-based ex-stripper and evangelist, who praises the Atlanta ministry’s nonjudgmental stance.

“You’ve got to meet people where they are.”