Although many South Phoenix residents were Baptist, very few of them could afford to donate the kind of money required to save the building, and the pastor of the church had approached the Arizona Church Construction Council with the offer to give the building away to any congregation able to afford moving costs. The pastor had reached an agreement with the Methodists, who were going to allow him to give his sermons ha their chapel on Sunday afternoons, after their services were over, but he stir wanted his old church to be saved. And Pastor
Wheeler was here to save it.
Praise the Lord.
Wheeler had received a call yesterday from the chair man of the ACCC, who'd told him about the church. He had filed a request for assistance from the coundl over a year ago, before he had independently worked out his deal with the Rio Verde Presbyterians, and he'd heard nothing from them until now. He'd assumed that the council had rejected his proposal and forgotten about him.
It was the hand of God, Wheeler realized. The Lord was working to ensure that His house of worship would be completed on time and in the manner He desired. God wanted him to have this building.
And the church was perfect. Certainly it was ugly, but its nondescript flatness would complement the small town homeyness of his Rio Verde chapel, and the two of them together would blend into the background and form the foundation of the new house of the Lord that Jesus had told him to build.
He looked at Paul Davis, the restoration coordinator for the ACCC who had accompanied him to the site. "It's perfect," he said. "We want it."
"Don't you even want to look inside?" Davis asked. Wheeler smiled.
"No."
"Suit yourself. I've already been in, to examine the structure, and I don't think the moving itself will pose much of a problem. This thing was built in the fifties, and it was done sectionally. We'll take it apart the same way and transport it in two segments on flatbeds. The only possible setback will be your lack of a foundation at the Rio Verde site. This here's resting on a flat reinforced concrete base, and you really should have something similar ready for it, as well as plumbing hookups in the proper locations."
Wheeler continued to smile. "We Will arrange the building to our satisfaction once it's in place. We'll take care of everything. All you have to do is move it."
Davis nodded, though he looked more than a little uncomfortable. "If you don't mind me asking, what are you going to do with two churches out there? Your congregation can't be very big in a town that small."
"I mind you asking," Wheeler said. He turned away from Davis, and now he glanced around at the neighborhood surrounding the church. He saw about him graffiti, garbage, and other familiar, unmistakable signs of a slum. He knew this place. He had begun his evangelical career in a neighborhood not unlike this, in the poor part of Dallas, although there the ethnic makeup had been heavily Hispanic rather than black.
Not that it made any difference. They were all trash in the eyes of the Lord.
He had come to Dallas at the tender age of twenty-two, unschooled, untried, and inexperienced, and he had learned by doing, preaching at first from the bus stop bench of a street corner, then from a portable podium of his own making. He had attracted auention as an object of curiosity, had become an object, of ridicule, and had graduated to an object of interest. People began to listen to what he had to say, and he preached to them, converting many to the teachings of the Lord, though, truth be told, he had never liked any of his followers. He had often wondered why. It was not a question that had kept him up nights--he knew his purpose was to ducate, not befriend--yet he wondered why he took no joy in the conversion of these heathens. Why did he not enjoy bringing a new soul into the fold? He truly did not care one way or the other, did not care if these people believed or disbelieved, although he would never show that in public. Indeed, he became quite adept at hiding his true emotions while in the pulpit, at masking his disgust for these dirty, ignorant savages.
He prayed on it, and he came to 'realize that these people were merely practice subjects, that the Lord had provided him with warm bodies so that he might hone his skills and develop his talents before moving on to the truly worthy.
Most of his current flock Were worthy. Oh, there were a few who would not be joining the rest of them in the kingdom of heaven. Taz Penneman, for all of his do-goo ding was an unrepentant heathen. And he didn't like Mary Gale, who always looked lustily at him with her harlot's eyes. She'd burn in hell. Marge Howe' What you looking at, motherfucker?"
Wheeler blinked, focused. A large overweight black man was staring belligerently at him from the doorway of the adjacent house, a small wooden structure painted shocking pink. He had not been aware that he'd been looking at the man, and he glanced quickly away.
"Motherfuckerl" the man yelled.
Wheeler smiled, said nothing. This entire section of the city would be destroyed when the Lord Jesus Christ established His kingdom on earth.
It would be leveled and weeded, then seeded with goodness and populated by the righteous, people who understood the ways of the Lord and had a healthy fear of God.
That was the root of the problem, he knew. Not enough people had been instilled with the fear of God. Even many so-called Christians these days seemed to see God as some sort of benevolent hippie, kindly smiling down on all of their humanistic endeavors. Those men and women had strayed far from the scriptures, had let their conceptions of the Lord be influenced by the ungodly secular interpretadons of mealymouthed liberal atheists, yet they still dared to say they believed. They'd forgotten that the Lord was a great and terrible God capable of exacting a steep toll for transgressions. They'd been raised to think like Catholics, to believe that the Lord forgave all, that they could steal, murder, whore, and blaspheme, then apologize and all would be forgotten.
He had been raised differently.
He was glad of it now, though he had not been at the time. He had been swayed as a youth by false companions and had wanted to share their simple easy rationalizations, had wanted to believe that he could confess his sins to the Lord and be forgiven, or that the Lord was not concerned with the petty misdeeds of youth at all. But his father had set him straight, and had lectured him and beaten into him the fear of God. His father had understood that the Lord would accept no losers, no sinners, no transgressors, that He had provided His son to the world as an example, to show that it was possible to live on earth as a perfect, unblemished human being, and the old man had made sure that Wheeler understood that as well.
Even if that meant using The Scourge.
His father had also made sure that Wheeler knew, from the beginning, the truth about his mother. So while he had never known his mother, he had always known of her. He had known exactly what she was. His father had told him. Many times his father had told him.
His mother was a harlot, a strumpet, a brazen wanton woman. A whore
One of the wicked. : : .... She'd always been that way, his father had explained even when he'd first met her--but he'd foolishly thought he would be able to convert her, to make her change. He'd been seduced by her striking beauty, her soft voice, her even temperament and easy ways. It had been the sole mistake of an otherwise exemplary life, and it may very well have cost him entrance to Heaven. But if it was the last thing he did, he was going to make sure that his son did not follow in his footsteps.