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The Man with Two Worlds

How far would you go to rescue children from torture? Martyn Casserly meets Sam Childers, the real Machine Gun Preacher, whose story poses a moral dilemma for us all.

Sam Childers is a conflicting character. On one hand he’s the pastor of a church he literally built from the ground up, aided by the construction company he owned. On the other, he’s a feared figure in Sudan who rescues children from rebel forces, driving into the war zones armed with, as he puts it, ‘a wellworn Bible and a well-oiled AK-47’.

For nearly 15 years he has lived this double life, and in that time has built an orphanage in Nimule, on the Ugandan/Sudan border. This has been a haven for more than 1,000 children, refugees from the horrific violence that has destroyed the surrounding area. Now, with the release of the film Machine Gun Preacher, Childers’ story has been transferred to the silver screen. With it comes a difficult question – how far are you willing to go to do something good? ‘One thing you need to remember when you sell your life to Hollywood,’ Childers laughs, ‘is that there’s no life story that has ever been done that they’ve not amped up somewhere in the movie. The Africa part is amped up, but the early part of my life, where you see the stabbings, robbing drug dealers...that’s not amped up. It was a rough life, but only because I made it rough.’

Childers grew up in rural Pennsylvania and fell into a world of drug addiction, violent crime and self-destruction that had all the hallmarks of leaving him in prison for the rest of his life – or dead on the street. Then, through encouragement from his wife and his mother, he attended a revival meeting at their church and was dramatically saved. Over the next few years, God transformed him from a gun-toting drug addict into a businessman and pastor. But the biggest transformation came when he travelled to the village of Yei in South Sudan to help with a mission project that was repairing buildings damaged in the ongoing civil war. While there he came across the body of a child that had been torn apart by a landmine.

‘That’s what really changed my life,’ he says. ‘I’d seen a lot of death and violence, I’d been in it all my life, but all that had been from adults fighting each other. What I couldn’t understand was how this could be happening to children. When I stood over that little body I said, “Lord, I’ll do whatever it takes to help these people. Whatever it takes.”’

Childers has told the story so many times in interviews that he almost downplays the scene. Maybe it’s a form of self-preservation, saving him from revisiting this horrific moment over and over again? In his autobiography, Another Man’s War, he gives a more complete account of the experience that would shatter his world.

‘From the waist down there was nothing. I couldn’t tell if it [had] been a boy or a girl. The lower half was just gone. I stood over that little body, looking down at what had once been a precious child – playing, laughing, full of life and energy and hope... One more anonymous casualty out of millions.’

Childers returned to run a mobile clinic a few months later, taking much-needed medical supplies to the outer villages that were deemed too dangerous for the regular aid agencies to visit. ‘I knew I could do something,’ he said in a recent TV interview. ‘In James 4:17 it says that if you know you should do something, then not do it, you have sinned...’

The Sudanese civil war, with the accompanying famine and disease that it caused, has reportedly been responsible for the deaths of more than 2 million people. The outer regions have also faced the harrowing evil that is the Lord’s Resistance Army. This rebel militia, led by Joseph Kony, has left a devastating trail across Southern Sudan and Uganda. They rape, torture and murder villagers, then steal their children to become soldiers or sex slaves.

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