‘Underworld preacher’ Freddie Gage shook things up
This article was first published on June 14, 2008, and is reprinted today as a remembrance of evangelist Freddie Gage, whose organization was based in Northeast Tarrant County for years. Gage died Sept. 12 in Houston. He was 81.
The Rev. Freddie Gage of Euless grew up on Houston’s tough north side. He stormed into the world of evangelism at age 18 as “the underworld preacher.”
The former street fighter and leader of a Houston gang preached to prostitutes, pimps, members of his former gang and anyone else who would listen.
He knew little of the Bible. “I called Psalms ‘Palms’ and preached that God rescued Moses from the lion’s den,” Gage said this week.
It didn’t matter. After 55 years, the resident evangelist at the First Baptist Church of Colleyville is one of the denomination’s most honored evangelists.
Last week in Indianapolis, he was inducted into what amounts to the hall of fame of Southern Baptist evangelists.
Gage was in good company. Among the 29 living and dead evangelists named to the initial “hall of faith” were Billy Graham; Graham’s music evangelists, Cliff Barrows and George Beverly Shea; and former Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith.
The awards came during the Conference of Southern Baptist Evangelists, of which Gage is a former president. The meeting was held before the national Southern Baptist Convention.
“It’s unbelievable and incredible to be named with the most godly evangelists of the 21st century, including Billy Graham,” Gage said.
Early notice
When Gage burst on the scene in Houston, he was featured in Newsweek for his work with teen addicts and others. The magazine described Gage as “a short, stocky man who wears a white blazer, pink shirt and sunglasses.” The magazine quoted a sermon in which he told a youth group, “Sin thrills and then it kills. It fascinates and then it assassinates.”
Gage grew up in what he called the “bloody” 5th Ward of Houston. When his father and mother divorced, he lived with his grandfather, who owned a restaurant next to a bar. He dropped out in the ninth grade and inherited his own gang, which got into fights and burglarized stores.
He married his wife, Barbara, when he was 17 and she was only 15. In one of his 13 books, Pulpit in the Shadows, Gage tells how his love for her forced him out of the gangs. Both attended a revival led by the Rev. Daniel Vestal Sr. and professed Christianity. He attended Decatur Baptist College and Baylor University briefly but dropped out to start a rehabilitation center for teen addicts in Houston. Over the decades he conducted hundreds of revivals. His converts include leading pastors and evangelists.
New mission
In the late 1970s, Gage suffered from depression and burnout. He recovered and started a new ministry, Wounded Heroes, which helped pastors and other church leaders come out in the open about their emotional and psychological difficulties.
“We Baptists are the best in the world at sweeping things under the rug,” he said.
That Wounded Heroes ministry is still going on, conducted by staff members of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Gage could not attend the awards ceremony in Indianapolis, but two of his proteges — the Rev. Darrell Robinson of The Woodlands and the Rev. Johnny Wilson of Boone, N.C. — accepted for him. They praised Gage as a phenomenal soul winner.
I can believe it.
I had lunch with him at the 62 Main restaurant-bar in Colleyville.
“Hey, man,” Gage said, greeting the owner and handing him a book on Christianity written by Gage’s son the Rev. Rick Gage.
“I’m trying to get the owner to let me speak during happy hour,” the elder Gage told me later. “I think he’ll do it someday.”
One of the waitresses he met in the bar now attends his Colleyville church, he said.
Gage and his wife raised four sons, all ordained Baptist ministers.
Revival needed
Long before this week’s announcement that the Southern Baptist Convention is declining in membership and baptisms, Gage had been warning that Baptists had grown lukewarm about seeking converts.
“We’re suffering from spiritual obesity,” he said recently. “We’ve got it from just sitting in our pews. We have billions and billions of dollars in buildings, Bible schools, seminaries and church plants. We are in need of nothing. We are rich. We are dying.”
Gage was a key player in the 1980s revolution in which biblical conservatives won control of the Southern Baptist Convention from moderates. “I got involved for one reason,” Gage says now. “I thought it would bring a spiritual awakening to our churches and to our country.”
Instead, he said, the result has been “dead orthodoxy.”
“All we’ve done,” he said, “is play chess with the moderates.”
He’s happy the Southern Baptist Convention voted to seek new programs to reverse the membership decline.
“It won’t happen until it becomes a priority in the pulpit,” Gage said. “If you have a polar bear in the pulpit, you’ll have ice in the pews.”