Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 16, 1992 TAG: 9203160108
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE RELIGION WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Edward Plowman jokes that his partner has come a long way since his days as a drug dealer.
Well, maybe calling him a drug dealer is too strong. What he did was run a "head shop."
Twenty years ago, Stephen Wike was making bongs in the basement and hawking roach clips upstairs at his McLean business. He and his partners were catering to the thriving drug subculture of the time.
Today, in his Southwest Roanoke County offices that smell new, it's hard to imagine the clean-cut, dark-suited Wike as a long-haired, dope-smoking hippie in a VW bus.
He is, in fact, worlds away now in a different culture of Christian marketing and publishing, a respected member of Church of the Holy Spirit Episcopal parish. He's a man who moved to Roanoke from Washington, in part, to distance his children from the pervasive drug problem there.
Wike is publisher and Plowman is editor of National and International Religion Report, a biweekly condensation of religion news from around the world.
The report serves about 8,000 subscribers, targeted primarily at the busy religious professional who doesn't have access or time to read all that's available from the world of religion.
Both Wike and Plowman share a heritage from the "Jesus freak" days of the early 1970s - though Plowman was a journalist recording the phenomenon in a book and Wike was one of the converts.
They have been working together on the Religion Report for about five years, but the two first came in contact about 20 years ago, shortly after Wike's conversion to Christianity.
Wike's voice drops almost to a whisper as he describes the days in the "head" shop.
He had embraced the hippie counterculture after a visit to the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. And by 1971, he had left a job as a buyer with a grocery-store chain to get into the drug-paraphernalia business.
The foray into drugs - combined with other problems - almost cost him his marriage.
His wife, Michele, like Wike reared a Roman Catholic, had experienced a religious conversion after watching a Billy Graham crusade on television. She left Wike when he opened the shop.
Wike, 43, now says, "I believe God yanked her out of that" and later used the experience to influence him.
When Wike went to see Michele at her parents' home on Long Island, N.Y., to try to talk her into a reconciliation, "she talked me into seeing these `Jesus people' she'd met.
"After hearing these kids talk about Christ, I looked up and said, `I don't know if you're there, God, but I'd like to have what those kids have.' "
For days, "I ate, drank and slept the Bible," Wike says, voraciously reading through "Good News for Modern Man," a paraphrased version of the New Testament.
Eventually, he experienced what he considers to be a genuine conversion. He and his wife came back to Virginia, and from behind the counter of his business, he struggled with his new-found faith.
"I wondered would God ever love me? I thought for sure God must have assigned me to hell."
One day, a man came into the shop and asked, "Do you understand what you're reading?"
When Wike explained his wavering between wondering "whether God loves me or hates me," the man brought out a copy of a tract used by Campus Crusade for Christ to explain the Gospel.
"That was the beginning of miraculous changes in my life," Wike said.
It turned out the visitor was an advertising manager for Christianity Today, an evangelical publication founded by Billy Graham a few years before.
Not long after, in 1972, Wike joined the magazine's staff - where he met Plowman - eventually being named business manager. He left in 1978 to strike out on his own, selling advertising for other Christian publications.
In 1982, he began his current direct-mail marketing business - sending out bundles of postcards for everything from choir robes to church steeples to bulk recording tape - targeted at churches and religious professionals.
Within a couple of years, the Wikes felt a need to get away from the negative pressures of Northern Virginia. After looking at several cities in Virginia, they came to Roanoke.
In 1986, Wike and his wife were reconsidering an idea they had to start a newsletter that would condense religion news from around the world. It would be designed to get out fast, avoiding the three- to eight-week delays between deadline and distribution common at many Christian magazines.
After they prayed about the venture one night at home, the phone rang with a call from Plowman, a friend and former Christianity Today editor.
Although he didn't come aboard right away, Wike now says he "sensed that the Lord was somehow involved."
After six years of successfully publishing the newsletter, the last five with Plowman as editor, Wike seems more sure than ever of that.
And he needs no better evidence than his own family.
His oldest son, Danny, now 23, had been struggling at school and at home before the Wikes moved to Roanoke. He went on to graduate from Emory & Henry and now works with his father selling advertising.
The Wikes' son Joseph, 18, will attend Messiah College in Pennsylvania this fall, and David, 14, is a student at Roanoke Valley Christian Schools.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB