ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 14, 1996 TAG: 9607120033
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 11 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BUENA PARK, CALIF.
SOURCE: CAROL MCGRAW KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
It's a recent evening at First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, and Brother Bob Gillis is singing hymn No. 35: ``Then sings my soul, my savior God to thee, how great thou art, How great thou art.'' His 83-year-old voice is all Southern comfort transforming this urban sanctuary into a dusky rural church.
The song usually brings tears to the Rev. Wiley Smead Drake's eyes, but on this sticky summer evening, he's too busting with energy to be much overcome.
The congregation leans forward in synchronized excitement as Drake takes the pulpit. They're anxious to hear how in heaven's name it happened. They've been talking about it for days in the church's soup kitchen and thrift store where they feed and clothe the down-and-out.
Now, they want to find out from the horse's mouth just how it came to be that their pastor of eight years went off to Baton Rouge, La., to attend the Southern Baptist Convention's annual gathering as a fairly obscure preacher and ended up in their living rooms duking it out with the Walt Disney Co. on the national news.
``If someone told me to guess which local Baptist preacher would convince 16,000 delegates to boycott a major entertainment company over family value issues, I would have guessed it was him,'' says Wayne Derrick, head of the Orange County (Calif.) Southern Baptist Association, which represents more than 20,000 members and 100 churches. Derrick, who pastors Orangewood Avenue Baptist Church in Garden Grove, adds, ``Drake's a gadfly. No doubt about it.''
Drake, starched and pressed and wearing his fancy red tie with a majestic eagle on it, jumps to the podium and looks over his homey, modest church at a crowd that is mostly working class and elderly.
Pulling his suitcoat forward over his suspenders, he thanks them for praying for his mama, who lives in his boyhood hometown of Magnolia, Ark. - a town he ran away from to join the rodeo and ride bucking bulls when he was barely 13. ``I got to visit her on my trip, and we had fresh corn and peas from the garden. Praise God!''
But it's what else Drake did on his trip that is the real food for thought. Drake got the representatives for the 16 million-strong Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, to unanimously come around to his way of thinking.
At first, they had voted to merely give the Walt Disney Co. a public rebuke for what they perceive as anti-Christian and anti-family trends in its movies. They criticized Disney's decision last year to extend health benefits to partners of gays and lesbians and for ``promoting homosexuality'' by approving gay nights at its theme parks. But the delegates were afraid that boycotting the company might be too harsh and that the action might make the conservative denomination look foolish.
But when Drake felt the spirit move him to put in his 2 cents' worth, he bore down on Disney like one of those cyclones that used to churn up the grit near his paternal grandpa's sawmill.
Drake told the convention to send Disney a clear message - that there was no storm cellar they could hide in if they were bent on damaging the morals of America's children. He hit a righteous chord with the messengers, as the Baptist delegates are called. They voted unanimously to boycott Disney products, theme parks and movies.
Disney has increasingly been under attack by conservative religious groups, including Catholics upset about a gay cleric portrayed in ``Priest,'' a movie distributed by subsidiary Miramax.
Defending themselves, Disney officials first said they found it ``curious that the Baptists would boycott the world's largest producer of wholesome entertainment.'' A few days later, Disney Chairman Michael Eisner told reporters, ``They're a very small group of Southern Baptists that took a very extreme position, which we feel is foolish.''
Within a week, Disney announced it would increase its emphasis on family values. However, the company insisted the decision had been made months ago and had nothing to do with what happened in Baton Rouge. Soon after that, Disney announced it had named a Jesuit priest, the Rev. Leo J. O'Donovan of Georgetown University, as a board member.
``Disney's heading for the hidey-hole,'' a pleased Drake says.
He tells his congregation that the boycott is voluntary. In fact, he has some annual Disneyland passes that he uses when his three grandkids come to visit, and he's not about to waste all that money by tearing them up. He suggests using such passes until they expire, but just don't buy any of those ``Mickey Mouse things and concession foods.''
The battle with Disney has spilled over to the gay community, which calls Drake and other supporters of the boycott homophobic and un-Christian. Drake, in turn, offers the ``love the sinner but hate the sin'' argument. ``We don't hate homosexuals. But we believe that it is abnormal, biologically unhealthy, as well as contrary to Bible teachings.''
The Rev. Patricia Lefler, who heads a predominantly gay congregation at Christ Chapel Metropolitan Community Church in Santa Ana, Calif., retorts, ``They quote the Bible, but you can take any passage out of context.
``In one place in the Bible you can find a passage that says someone hanged himself,'' Lefler said. ``In another place, you can find the words `Go out and do likewise.' But intelligent people don't try to put them together and then go out and kill themselves.''
Drake wasn't always so concerned about things biblical. As a kid, Drake drank, chewed tobacco and stole minor stuff like gasoline from his neighbors. He never got along much with his dad, a roughneck in the oil fields. He spent most of his time with his horse-trader maternal grandpa, Hamp Smead Beasley, who not only taught him horse sense but took him to revival meetings.
``We called them brush-arbor meetings,'' Drake recalls. ``They weren't held in tents. The churches were small and mostly out in the woods, so they'd build shade arbors out of poles and brush for the churchgoers that would come form all over,'' he says.
But religion didn't agree with him in those days, and after winning a rodeo purse by staying on a big red horse named Thunderbolt, Drake ran off to the rodeo circuit and sometimes did carnival work. He says he had to steal food and slept in the back of pickups. ``I know what it feels like to be real hungry,'' he says.
At 17, he returned home just long enough to have his daddy send him to the Navy on recommendation of the sheriff. In Hawaii, he met his future wife, Barbara, with whom he has four children.
One night aboard the Kittyhawk off the coast of Vietnam, he was drawn to a group singing Christian tunes.
``One of them asked me if I knew for sure I was going to heaven if I got killed in this war,'' he recalled. ``I said, `I hope so.' He said, `Well, Christians don't just hope. They know.' He prayed for me, and I accepted Jesus right then and there.''
Over the years since, Drake seems to have managed to either endear or irritate just about everyone he deals with. Many praise his compassion and efforts to help the downtrodden, stamp out abortion and promote family values. But some see his stances as bullheaded and nonconciliatory.
Once, at a public meeting, he called Garden Grove residents ``racist'' when he thought they were making it too difficult for a Korean minister and congregation to find a home. In Buena Park, city officials are upset that he lets the homeless camp on church property. Teens attending raunchy rap-group concerts are often met by a picketing Drake, who decries the music as ungodly. He also has picketed several movies that he deplores as sin-filled, including ``Priest'' and ``The Last Temptation of Christ.''
A pornographic bookstore owner gave up trying to move into Drake's church's neighborhood, after Drake led his congregation in a noisy battle. A Veterans of Foreign Wars group met a similar fate when the minister was able to raise enough public outcry against having the post, which serves alcohol, move into his neighborbood. Even his next-door neighbor, a Masonic Temple, tangled with him because the overflow from his homeless camp slept on their driveway and urinated on their lawn.
Drake, who has a college education, including advanced theology degrees, approaches his battles and the pulpit with his Arkansas good-ol'-boy manner. But in 52 years, he's learned a thing or two about how much influence boisterous public pressure can exert, especially coming from a man of the cloth and his flock.
He once ran for City Council, losing by a few score votes. He says more ministers need to wake up to politics. ``When we separated religion from government, the country went downhill morally,'' he says.
He urges his congregation to be involved in such activism, which he calls ``salt and light,'' referring to Matthew 5:13-14. (``Ye are the salt of the Earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted. ... Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.'') The passage warns that those who make no effort to effect the world around them are of little value to God.
But there are perils to taking such a bullish community-activist stance, he said, noting that more than a few members of his congregation left because they didn't like his take-charge manners.
Even those who agree with him sometimes have trouble keeping up with his whirlwind moral crusades.
Such community clashes mystify Bob Gillis, who has been a Southern Baptist 54 years and a member of First Baptist for 13. He says he doesn't always see eye to eye with Drake.
``Take this Disney stuff,'' Gillis said. ``I wouldn't talk bad about them, because they are human beings, even though they are wrong. I figure all you should do is pray for them.''
Still, Gillis likes Drake's leadership: ``He knows his Bible. And he can preach real good when he's not shook up about something.''
Christina Bush, 44, says she joined the church especially because of the way Drake ``shakes up people to issues that need attending to.''
The voter-registration clerk adds that his Bible knowledge impresses her: ``When I'm clouded in a decision in my life, he uses the Scriptures in a very understandable way, so the answer to my problems become clear.''
Steve Bryan, church youth leader, says that what has impressed him most about Drake is, ``He won't ask anyone to do what he won't do himself.'' But sometimes he thinks the pastor should delegate things more. He points to the time Drake ended up on crutches because he tried to move by himself a heavy trailer that houses the mobile puppet show. It fell on his foot.
Drake runs Here's Hope, Orange County Southern Baptist Association's charitable program, out of his church. Volunteers provide meals for some 450 families a month, distribute 10,000 pounds of donated food to the poor and operate a clothing bank.
Says Derrick, county Baptist association leader: ``I couldn't take something like that on. And other ministers didn't want the job because they felt it would tie them down too much. But Wiley jumped at the chance. He has a special knack because of the things that he went through in his own life.''
Over the years, Drake has always worked at least part time in churches. His first full-time ministry was a small church in Bloomburg, Texas.
``Sometimes over the years, I had doubts,'' Drake said. ``I thought, `Should I go out and make a lot of money or stick to this?' But I'm glad I didn't do it different.''
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