ONE of the world’s great freedom fighters, Sam Childers (aka the Machine Gun Preacher), will be a special guest at the Shellharbour Community Church on Sunday, February 22.
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Famous for converting from a troublemaker and then businessman, to becoming the salvation for hundreds of South Sudanese orphans, his biography, Another Man’s War, was made into a Hollywood feature film called Machine Gun Preacher in 2011.
Mr Childers grew up in the hills of Pennsylvania. He had a troubled youth and by his early teens was sliding deeper into a life of violence and crime.
He became a shotgunner – an armed guard for drug dealers. It was during this time that he met Lynn, a stripper, who would later become his wife.
He gradually distanced himself from his former life, found a job in construction and prospered. His wife returned to the church she had forsaken as a young adult and the pair sought to re-establish their relationship with God and live clean lives.
Lynn gave birth to a healthy girl and Mr Childers started his own construction business, but little did they know that their greatest challenge was just around the corner.
The African nation was in the middle of the second Sudanese War when Mr Childers, urged by his pastor in America, joined a mission group to help repair huts damaged in the conflict.
During this assignment he stumbled across the body of a child torn apart by a landmine. He fell to his knees and made a pledge to do whatever it took to help the people of southern Sudan.
Later he decided to run a mobile clinic and to fulfil his promise he ventured far across the nation, from the western town of Yei to the eastern villages of Boma.
While passing the village of Nimule, on the Ugandan border, he says God sent him a message to build an orphanage.
The local people thought he was mad as at the time, the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal rebel militia that had kidnapped 30,000 children and murdered hundreds of thousands of villagers, was laying waste to the area.
After selling his business he returned to the village, during the day clearing the brush and built the huts that would house the children and during the evening slept under a mosquito net slung from a tree: Bible in one hand, AK47 in the other.
He has since released a second book, Living on the Edge: Sequel to Another Man’s War.
Mr Childers is at the church on Sunday from 6.30pm.
