Editor’s Note: This is another installment in an interview with Gerry Charlotte Phelps (click her name to see the other articles in this series).
What follows in separate articles are some questions and answers directed to Rev. Gerry Phelps, a radical activist turned radical Christian by the grace of God. This is important because many in the mainline share at least the first half of her story. They are passionately committed leftist causes and methodology. They simply don’t have the courage or perhaps the naivete to act upon their convictions as she did by attempting an armed robbery to fund her activism. Or perhaps they have seen the church as a ready source of funding for left wing politics without the risk associated with an armed robbery? Whatever the case, her story needs to be heard by mainliners of every stripe because Rev. Phelps left her radical activism behind in becoming a radical Christian instead.
A self-described “Ex-agnostic, ex-far-left radical, ex-university economics teacher, and ex-con” she writes and ministers from a wealth of experience.
Why would a former Black Panther recruiter become a “recruiter” for Jesus?
How could a person devoted to questioning the “establishment” in toto eventually come to see one of the institutions she’d questioned the church become her home and the center of her ministry?
What transpired to make her faith in Marxist economics implode?
Many mainline leaders still indulge the myths and false solutions she came to reject.
What made the difference?
“Out of the Iron Furnace” tells her story in depth.
Ultimately though it was a personal encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ as revealed in Holy Scripture.
Her passion for the poor never changed.
But the solution she came to offer became Jesus Christ Himself, not the mythical Marxist utopia of her Christless dream world.
ReformationUCC: What turned you from being a radical leftist into a bible believing Christian?
GCP: What turned you from a radical leftist into a bible believing Christian?
Actually, I did not stop being a radical leftist when I became a Bible-believing Christian. I combined the two. In fact, I remember asking a good Christian, early on, “How can you be a Christian and be a Republican? The change from radical leftist to conservative took many years. (You can read about that in my book, “Out of the Iron Furnace,’ at www.outoftheironfurnace.blogspot.com, in Chapter 33.)
How I went from agnostic to Christian is another matter. It happened in two stages.
Stage one was when I suddenly encountered God, in a way that would convince a scientifically-trained skeptic. One day in jail, shortly before transferring to prison, God just showed me he was there. It happened in a few, powerful seconds, but in a way that I could never doubt it happened, or that it was God. (See Chapter 11 in my book above.)
That totally changed my world, instantly, turning it upside-down. I had to start all over again, re-thinking everything. Knowing that God exists does that. Still, I hoped he was not the Christian God. I didn’t like Christianity. So I wanted him to be any god but the Christian one. But I loved him, so I kept trying to find out who he was, and what he wanted with me. That led to stage two.
Stage two was being convinced, intellectually, that God was the Christian God. (See Chapters 12 and 13.) I set the terms. It was to be on my own turf, which was rationality, logic and evidence. No faith allowed. So this is what God did to me. On my own terms, over a two-year period, I was driven intellectually into the Christian corner, much against my will.
Eventually, the day arrived when the last piece fell into place, and I had to accept that the whole thing was literally true. My scientific training meant that when I set up standards and they were met, I had to yield. When I was wrong, I had to admit it. So I knew what I had to do then, but hated it.
On that day, I was in the Isolation tank of Goree Prison, which was down in the basement on the side viewing the kitchen wing. So I got down on that concrete floor at that steel bunk in the basement and said to God, “I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior.” It was no sweet surrender. It felt more like someone’s foot on my neck. What it meant to me then was laying down the flag, surrendering the sword – a battlefield surrender. I was crying with sheer frustration from losing – probably the most miserable Christian in the world at that minute. I didn’t know then about the love, joy and peace on down the road. All I knew was that yielding then was the only honest thing I could do. I had been beaten on my own terms, fair and square. And that’s how I became a Christian.
Later, the joy and peace came, and still later, I was called “to preach good news to the poor.” But that is another story.
Read more here.
