NEWS FEATURE: Wiley Drake: portrait of a pragmatic fundamentalist

c. 1997 Religion News Service BUENA PARK, Calif. _ Cancer _ in the form of the homeless and dying Peter Maniaci _ is literally on the parking lot of the church of Wiley Drake, a Southern Baptist preacher known and criticized for his anti-Disney boycotting by day and crusading on behalf of the homeless by […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

BUENA PARK, Calif. _ Cancer _ in the form of the homeless and dying Peter Maniaci _ is literally on the parking lot of the church of Wiley Drake, a Southern Baptist preacher known and criticized for his anti-Disney boycotting by day and crusading on behalf of the homeless by night.

Maniaci is dying of cancer in a motor home on Drake’s church property and has become something of a symbolic epigraph for Drake’s ministry _ a ministry that has made the conservative a center of controversy, a convicted criminal and a puzzle to political pigeonholers.”I’m making a difference for him, ’cause he has no family and now he does,”said Drake, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park.”He has a pastor and a church and a place to live out the (last) few months of his life.” Locally, Drake, 53, has been the center of controversy since city officials prosecuted him this summer after more than a year of flare-ups over the housing of about 50 homeless people on church property each night.


A sympathetic California jury reluctantly convicted Drake and his church July 28 on four misdemeanor building code violations. On Friday (Sept. 19), Orange County Superior Judge Gregg Prickett sentenced Drake to 1,500 hours of community service and then credited him with 1,500 hours of service for the efforts to aid the homeless he had already performed.

Now, Drake is trying to help the homeless get into local motels and apartments because his church has been ordered to move the campers used to house the homeless off its property.

In addition, Drake and his 75-member church _ down from 250 members when he started his work with the homeless _ run the Here’s Hope Social Ministry Center, feeding some of the estimated 15,000 homeless in Orange County.

The poor can get a meal, bed, some clothes, a shower and a mailbox address to put on job forms. Drake said he gives out about 25,000 pounds of groceries per month, including food from the local St. Vincent de Paul Society, a Roman Catholic organization that helps the poor.

Observers view the portly, graying Drake these days as a media-hungry preacher with a heart for the poor. But he once was an alcoholic and ultimately, a fired middle manager.

The decorated Navy veteran came to faith in Jesus after cradling a wounded soldier who told the young Drake,”Don’t let me die, don’t let me die.”But the soldier did die as Drake held him in a helicopter gunship hauling the wounded out of a firefight in Vietnam.

In Baptist circles, Drake is best known as a former”spy”and proud foot soldier of the”inerrantists”_ those believing the Bible to be without error _ during the 1980s battle for administrative control of the Southern Baptist Convention. As a result,”moderate”Southern Baptists leaders were removed from many of the 15.6 million-member denomination’s agencies, boards and seminaries.


More recently, Drake has become known for his staunch opposition to the Walt Disney Co. During the 1996 annual meeting of the SBC, he pushed for a failed Disney boycott resolution. But at their meeting this year, Southern Baptists passed a milder, more polite resolution asking members to”refrain from patronizing”Disney and its 200-plus subsidiaries because of what they believe to be its pro-homosexual policies in employment and marketing.

But despite his anti-Disney stance, Drake still allowed himself to be seen at a Christian concert at a local baseball stadium owned by Disney.”We’re in what I call a `pragmatic boycott,'”Drake said of his attendance at the August concert.”You pick and choose.” In his daily contact with the poor in his local community, Drake has become a pragmatic fundamentalist, a man believing in the inerrant word of God in a very errant world.”Your major social movements often … have had social roots within the evangelical tradition,”said the Rev. Tom Wolf, a Southern Baptist minister and Biola University urban studies instructor in nearby La Mirada.”I’m grateful for his general direction, for a person compassionately involved in the life of others in the name of Christ.” Drake’s zeal for the homeless is akin to Salvation Army officers and other Protestant evangelists who are simultaneously social conservatives and rescue-mission staffers.”Drake’s very much a part of that tradition,”said Wolf, adding that the tradition condemns homosexual sex because”the Christian faith holds that human life is structured as male-female life. When someone says that today, it is considered an almost peculiar and odd position.” One of six children born to poor parents in southern Arkansas, Drake was a dropout who spent his teens drifting on freight trains, following carnivals and rodeos. After his Navy service in Vietnam, he worked as a machinist before becoming a preacher in Southern California. “I’ve always been a gabber, and I knew God wanted me to use my natural talents,”said Drake, a father of four and a grandfather of three.

After joining the Jesus movement in the late 1960s, Drake put aside preaching for a marketing job in New Jersey. But he said the late `70s are a blur from severe alcoholism.”A big part of three or four years, I honestly have very little knowledge of what happened,”he said.

Drake was fired around 1980, and sobered up _”not a drop”since, he said. He returned to preaching and began writing the church news column for an Atlanta, Texas, newspaper.

With press credentials, Drake attended annual Southern Baptist conventions, gaining access to the press room.

He became a spy for the inerrancy movement, observing and taking notes on moderates who felt freer to speak in a newsroom than on the convention floor.”That’s where everything happens,”he said,”and people lower their guard.” When asked if inerrancy leaders like Paul Pressler, a former judge in Texas, asked him to spy, or if he reported to Pressler, Drake said,”I volunteered. I was not recruited. I was writing and working in the newsroom, (which) gave me an undercover, inside track at the convention. I saw the need to be in the battlefield of inerrancy.” But Drake did say inerrancy leaders told him,”`We need some nobodies, we need you to get to the (convention) microphone.’ I was the guy at the microphone _ articulate and outspoken and yet a nobody.” In 1987, Drake left much of the infighting behind, coming to Buena Park and staying. He embraced the poor after being what he called a”hypocritical”fundamentalist for ejecting a bum from church property years ago, a man Drake said could easily have been won to Jesus.


Despite the court’s ruling this summer, some of the county’s 15,000 homeless still regularly show up at Drake’s church. And they can be saved, he said, not with fire-and-brimstone, but with simple math.”If every church in Orange County would take in four people, we would have no homeless in Orange County,”Drake said.

MJP END FINNIGAN

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