FROM THE ARCHIVES: HER HAND ON THE GOSPEL PLOW:

: PATRICIA WATKINS IS CALLED THE EVANGELIST, AND NOT JUST BECAUSE SHE'S A PENTECOSTAL MINISTER. SHE CHASES DRUG DEALERS FROM THE STREETS AND WINS LEGISLATIVE VICTORIES IN SPRINGFIELD. (Don Terry, January 30, 2005, Chicago Tribune Magazine)

The Evangelist wipes a white handkerchief across her gleaming face, but it doesn't make much difference. Her cheeks continue to glisten. Tears or sweat, it's hard to tell from the back of the sanctuary at the Ambassadors for Christ World Outreach Ministries, a Pentecostal church on the South Side dedicated to salvation and struggle. n She's preaching hard. When she talks about fire and brimstone, you can feel the heat. n She lowers the microphone and pauses to say a private prayer as she does anytime she speaks in public. She is asking God to make her his instrument, to give her the words and the wisdom and the courage to say what has to be said here in church and to the high and mighty wherever they may be. She knows there are too many of God's children hungry and homeless on the streets, too much poverty and racism, too much war and suffering, too many mothers and daughters forced to sell their bodies to feed their children, too many fathers and sons returning from prison with no place to be somebody, no job to go to, no future to dream about. n She lifts the microphone back to her mouth and continues to preach. n "If we make a decision to stay in a place of despondency, we will die," she says. "We will lose ground. We will find ourselves someplace other than where we intended to be. Amen. That's why we have to encourage ourselves. Tell your neighbor to encourage yourself." n "Encourage yourself" spreads through the room. n "God wants us to encourage ourselves and speak righteously in the face of adversity," she says. "That's the only way we can be Christians."

Patricia Van Pelt Watkins is the Evangelist, a high-school dropout and former drug addict who once upon a dark and painful period of her life didn't like to eat because it took time away from getting high. Today, she is a Pentecostal minister and community organizer, saved and sober for 25 years, armed with a fortified faith and college degrees.

She calls herself, in the words of an old steel-your-spirit song, "a soldier in the Army of the Lord." Everyone else calls her Evangelist. "I'm the one who makes the noise," she explains.

Among her peers in the world of neighborhood advocacy groups and social service agencies, Watkins is hailed as one of the most effective grass-roots organizers in Chicago, a city that has often turned a cold shoulder and blind eye to its reformers and secular saints. No matter. Watkins is as stubborn as she is sanctified. Yet, she is also funny and warm, quick to laugh. "She connects with people really well," says Jim Field, program director of the Community Renewal Society, a coalition of religious and advocacy groups. "In organizing, that's very important. She's amazing."

She gracefully juggles the sacred and the secular, going from spirited church services to somber anti-violence vigils, from revival meetings to lobbying sessions with powerful state politicians. It is as though the spirits of Saul Alinsky and Martin Luther King Jr. have taken up residence in the body of this middle-aged, coffee-colored woman with oft-braided hair who speaks in tongues when moved by the Holy Ghost and allows neither cigarettes nor alcohol to touch her lips. Or bread, either-she's on the low-carb diet.

In her black leather jacket, which fits a lot better now, and her white clerical collar, she shows up at demonstrations holding a bullhorn in her left hand and a Bible in her right. She once held a months-long vigil on a drug-plagued street corner and chased away a dealer.

Watkins is also a loyal citizen of the America that attends church twice a week, studies scripture and spends at least an hour a day praying to God on bended knee. She believes that every word in the Bible is literally true. Most of all, she believes that faith was the only thing that kept her from going mad with grief when her 17-year-old daughter, Sheba, was killed in an airplane collision over Lake Michigan in 1997.

A couple of weeks after Sheba died, Watkins went back to work. She sat down with Field to polish a grant proposal. "She was in a lot of pain," he remembers. "I said we can wait. She said, 'I will see my daughter again. Don't worry about it.' You seldom see faith like that. What she believes, she believes."

She does not believe the term "moral values" is a synonym for the Republican platform or Christian fundamentalism. Her concern for the country's soul goes beyond same-sex marriage and Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction. At the top of her list is ending poverty, fighting for racial justice and keeping troubled teenagers in school and out of prison.

She says she is simply doing "what Jesus would do if he were here."

[originally posted: 2/10/05]