About 100 people sat in metal folding chairs Wednesday night in the gravel parking lot of Grace Community Baptist Church in Trenton, listening to the Rev. Sam Childers talk about heroin addiction, biker gangs and African warlords. Mostly, though, the man who calls himself the Machine Gun Preacher talked about Sudanese children.
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He is a 47-year-old former drug dealer from rural Pennsylvania whose life of crime and drugs came to an end when he found Jesus in 1992.
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Even while carrying an AK-47 into the African bush, Childers sports a Harley-Davidson muscle T-shirt, and the wooden toothpick that rarely leaves his mouth.
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Childers is in Africa seven months out of the year and raising money back home most of the rest. His wife, Lynn, a former stripper, pastors the Shekinah Fellowship Church in Central City, Pa., where the couple live. Their grown daughter — who once asked Childers if he loved African children more than her — now runs his nonprofit group.
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Childers said his excursions into the bush, from southern Sudan into northern Uganda, the
Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and now the Darfur region of Sudan, have two purposes.
First, save children whose parents have been killed by a band of rebel Ugandan marauders called the Lord's Resistance Army. And second, kill the army's messianic, machete-wielding, dreadlocked leader, Joseph Kony.
For years, Kony — who also has been indicted by the International Criminal Court — terrorized southern Sudan.
Childers hinted that his interest in digging wells in the Darfur region has the added benefit of getting him close to Kony again. "I will get him," Childers said.
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That kind of disregard for one of the Ten Commandments makes some Christians nervous — even if the people Childers and his soldiers are killing are molesting, maiming and murdering children.
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"People who get upset tend to be thinking of the God of the New Testament," Childers said.
By way of example, Childers points to the Old Testament book of I Samuel where God tells Saul to "utterly destroy" everything the Amalekites have, including "man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey."
