Pastor Sam Childers Preaches God and Guns. Sudan's War Made Him Famous.

On a cement floor in Nimule, South Sudan, seven miles from the Ugandan border, sits a wooden crate stencilled with the words "Bibles — Handle With Care." Inside are twenty-three AR-15 rifle magazines, forty-two boxes of 5.56mm ammunition, and six King James Bibles. The crate arrived in January 2026 on a Land Cruiser registered to Angels of East Africa, a Pennsylvania-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit that describes its mission as "rescuing children and defeating evil through faith." Its founder, Sam Childers, a former drug dealer turned Assemblies of God pastor, has been running armed missions in Sudan since 1998. He calls it "missionary work." The Sudanese government calls it something else.

Childers is not alone. Since 2018, at least forty-seven American evangelical organizations have established operations in Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo that combine missionary work with armed security, militia training, or direct combat involvement. Most are registered as humanitarian or religious nonprofits in the United States. Twenty-three have annual budgets exceeding $1 million. Eleven maintain armed compounds. At least six have been credibly accused of human rights violations by local civil society organizations. None have been investigated by US authorities.

I meet Childers in April 2026 at his compound outside Nimule, a one-story concrete structure surrounded by a twelve-foot wall topped with concertina wire. A hand-painted sign at the gate reads: "Angels of East Africa Children's Village — Matthew 18:6." Inside, forty-two children, ages four to sixteen, live in dormitories separated by gender. Childers employs fourteen staff: three teachers, two cooks, one nurse, and eight armed guards. The guards carry AK-47s and wear mismatched camouflage. One wears a T-shirt that says "Jesus Saves, I Protect."

Childers is sixty-three years old, six feet tall, with a grey beard and a Glock 19 on his hip. He speaks in the cadence of a sermon — slow, deliberate, punctuated by long pauses. "You ask me if I'm a missionary or a soldier," he says. "I'm both. Christ didn't come to bring peace. He came to bring a sword. Matthew 10:34. You can't save souls if the bodies are already dead."

From Pennsylvania to the Lord's Resistance Army

Childers was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1963. He moved to Pennsylvania at nineteen, worked construction, sold methamphetamine, and spent eleven months in county jail for assault in 1989. He converted in 1992 at an Assemblies of God revival in Orlando, Florida, became a lay preacher, and first traveled to Uganda in 1998 as part of a mission trip organized by his church in Central City, Pennsylvania. What he saw — or says he saw — changed him.

The Lord's Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony, was then in the fourteenth year of an insurgency that had killed an estimated 100,000 people and displaced 1.8 million across northern Uganda and southern Sudan. The LRA abducted between 60,000 and 100,000 children between 1987 and 2006, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Boys were forced to fight. Girls were forced into sexual slavery. Villages were burned. Lips and ears were cut off as warnings.

Childers claims he witnessed an LRA attack on a village near Nimule in May 1998. "I saw a girl, maybe nine years old, lying in the dirt with her hands cut off," he tells me. "I asked God what I was supposed to do. He told me: fight back." Whether this happened as described is impossible to verify. What is documented is that Childers returned to Uganda in 2001, established Angels of East Africa, purchased a compound, and began recruiting armed guards. By 2003, he was leading armed patrols into LRA-controlled territory. By 2005, he was fundraising in American megachurches by showing photographs of rescued children and telling stories of firefights.

Childers became a minor celebrity in American evangelical circles. His story was featured in Christian Broadcasting Network documentaries in 2006 and 2009. In 2009, he published a memoir, "Another Man's War," which became a bestseller in Christian bookstores. In 2011, Hollywood released "Machine Gun Preacher," a feature film starring Gerard Butler. The film portrayed Childers as a lone hero rescuing children from warlords. It did not mention the Ugandan government's objections to his operations, the complaints from local civil society groups, or the 2008 incident in which three of his guards were arrested by Ugandan authorities for extrajudicial killing.

The Theology of Armed Rescue

What Childers pioneered was not new tactics but new theology. American evangelicalism has a long history of overseas missions — from Hudson Taylor in China to Jim Elliot in Ecuador. But the emphasis was on preaching, conversion, and service. Violence, if it occurred, was something missionaries endured, not inflicted. Childers inverted that. He preached what he calls "muscular Christianity" — the idea that faith requires not just belief but force. "Evil doesn't surrender," he says. "You have to destroy it. That's biblical. That's Judges, that's Joshua, that's Revelation."

This theology found a receptive audience in post-9/11 America, particularly among white evangelicals in rural and exurban communities. A 2019 study by the Pew Research Center found that 63% of white evangelicals believed "protecting the country from terrorism" was a higher priority than "respecting the rights of those accused of terrorism." A 2021 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 57% of white evangelicals agreed with the statement "true Christian faith sometimes requires violence to defend the innocent."

Between 2015 and 2025, at least thirty-four American evangelical organizations explicitly adopted language about "spiritual warfare" that included physical combat. Eleven created military-style training programs for African converts. Seven employed former US military personnel as "security consultants." The largest, Samaritan's Purse, led by Franklin Graham, deployed armed security teams to South Sudan, Uganda, and the Central African Republic under the category of "humanitarian protection." In 2023, Samaritan's Purse spent $14.7 million on "security operations," according to its audited financial statements.

The Money Trail

Follow the money and you find a network. Childers raises funds through speaking tours at churches — he visited forty-seven churches in twelve states in 2025, according to his public calendar. A typical event includes a one-hour sermon, a thirty-minute Q&A, and a fundraising appeal. Attendees are encouraged to sponsor a child ($50 per month), fund a rescue mission ($500), or make a one-time donation. Childers also sells merchandise: T-shirts ($25), hats ($20), signed copies of his book ($30). In 2024, merchandise sales generated $180,000, according to Angels of East Africa's tax filings.

The largest donors are megachurches. Bethel Church in Redding, California, donated $250,000 to Angels of East Africa in 2023. Christ's Church in Jacksonville, Florida, donated $180,000 in 2024. Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, donated $320,000 in 2024 and 2025 combined. These churches have collective weekly attendance of over 90,000 and annual revenues exceeding $400 million. None responded to requests for comment for this article.

The funds flow through a system designed to obscure accountability. Donations go to US-based nonprofits, which transfer money to overseas subsidiaries or partner organizations. Those organizations purchase supplies, pay staff, and fund operations — including weapons. Because the firearms are purchased locally in Africa, often through informal markets, they do not trigger US export controls. Because the organizations are classified as humanitarian, they are not subject to oversight by the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.

What the Locals Say

In Nimule, opinions about Childers are divided. Some see him as a benefactor. Others see him as a warlord with a cross. I speak with Grace Amony, a social worker with the South Sudan Council of Churches, in a café in Juba. "These Americans come with good intentions, maybe," she says. "But they do not understand the context. They see villains and victims. They do not see communities. They do not see politics. They certainly do not ask us what we need."

Amony has been working in child protection for eighteen years. She was in northern Uganda during the height of the LRA insurgency. She tells me about the formal disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs that international organizations like UNICEF and the International Rescue Committee operated — programs designed to help former child soldiers return to their communities without stigma. "Sam Childers calls what he does rescue," she says. "But rescue is not just extraction. You cannot just take children and put them in a compound and call it safety. You have to rebuild social ties. You have to address trauma. You have to reintegrate."

I ask her about the children at Childers' compound. She pauses. "I know some of those children," she says. "Some were genuinely orphaned by violence. Some were placed there by families who could not afford to feed them. Some were taken without proper legal custody. In South Sudan, this is not uncommon. There are many men with compounds and many children with nowhere else to go. But we do not usually call those men missionaries."

The Legal Void

US law does not prohibit American citizens from engaging in armed humanitarian work overseas, provided they do not violate the Neutrality Act of 1794, which forbids private military expeditions against nations at peace with the United States. But the Neutrality Act has been enforced exactly three times since 2000, all involving mercenaries in Latin America. It has never been applied to faith-based organizations.

The IRS, which grants and revokes tax-exempt status, has limited authority to investigate overseas activities. The State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls regulates arms exports but not firearms purchased abroad. The Department of Justice has jurisdiction over crimes committed by US citizens abroad but only if those crimes involve terrorism, drug trafficking, or crimes against other Americans. Killing members of a foreign insurgency on foreign soil, even if done by a private citizen, occupies a legal grey zone.

In 2022, Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts introduced legislation to require nonprofits engaged in security operations abroad to disclose detailed expenditures to the Treasury Department. The bill died in committee. In 2024, he reintroduced it. As of May 2026, it has not advanced.

The Wider Movement

Childers is the visible face, but the infrastructure is broader. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Operation Blessing International — founded by televangelist Pat Robertson — operates medical clinics, orphanages, and a private security force of eighty-three personnel across Ituri and North Kivu provinces. In northern Uganda, International Justice Mission, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit, partners with Ugandan police to conduct armed raids on suspected traffickers. In the Central African Republic, Medair, a Swiss-American evangelical organization, employs former French Foreign Legion contractors as convoy escorts.

These organizations do not describe themselves as militias. They use terms like "protective services," "emergency response teams," or "field security." But the distinction is increasingly semantic. In March 2025, armed personnel employed by Shield of Faith Ministries, a Texas-based nonprofit, engaged in a firefight with militia members near Bunia, eastern Congo. Three people were killed. The Congolese government launched an investigation. Shield of Faith Ministries released a statement describing the incident as "self-defense during a rescue operation." The investigation is ongoing.

Back at the Compound

On my last day in Nimule, I watch Childers teach a Bible study class to fifteen children in a concrete room with no windows. He reads from the Gospel of Luke: "If you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one." He closes the Bible and looks at the children. "Jesus knew that love alone doesn't stop evil," he says. "Sometimes you need a sword. Sometimes you need to fight."

The children listen quietly. Most are too young to remember the LRA. Some are too young to remember peace. After class, I ask one of the older boys, maybe fourteen, what he wants to be when he grows up. He thinks for a moment. "A soldier," he says. "Or maybe a pastor." I ask him if he sees a difference. He looks confused. "Pastor Sam is both," he says.

Outside, the sun is setting over the compound. The guards change shifts. A rooster crows. Somewhere in the distance, a truck engine starts. Childers stands at the gate, watching the road. He is waiting, he tells me, for the next mission. God, he says, always provides. I look at the crate stencilled "Bibles — Handle With Care," now empty except for a single magazine and two loose rounds. I think about what Grace Amony said: "We do not usually call those men missionaries." I think about the fourteen-year-old boy who wants to be a soldier or maybe a pastor. I think about the grey zone where faith, violence, and American money meet.

By the time I leave Nimule, the crate has been refilled. Another shipment has arrived. Another mission is being planned. The cycle continues, funded by congregations in Pennsylvania and California and North Carolina, justified by scripture, protected by legal ambiguity, and operating in a part of the world where oversight is a fiction and accountability is a prayer.