PULPIT IN THE SHADOWS

Why do we send so many missionaries to Africa...when we've got nearly as many savages in our own jungles who need saving?"" A broken home, abrupt moves from one place to another, and the search for--""something"" led Freddie Gage into a late childhood and adolescence of rebellion including stealing, assault, truancy, narcotics, and gang leadership. His early marriage, and his tentative attempts to reform, would have come to nothing, but his father coerced him into attending a revival meeting one night, and he found religion. He soon decided to become an evangelist, and he answered his own question about domestic savages by taking his own case before the young hoodlums and drug addicts he had left behind in the alleys and pool halls of Houston. His uphill fight against influential clerics and laymen of his faith (who felt aid to young hoodlums was beyond their province) stiffened his resolve, and he was able to get enough support to start the Freddie Gage Evangelistic Association, Inc., which ultimately bought an old mansion and created Teen Liberators, a ""whole-way house"" for addicts and alcoholics. Even though somewhat awash in a pool of religious dogmatism (as in the Appendix giving the Teen Liberator ""Message"": ""...If anyone claims cures outside the power of God, they are lying....""), this is an eye-opening first-person account of what is really going on among a certain stratum of teenagers in our society today.