Beware the Grace of God
Missionaries at a Baptist home for troubled boys so loved their young charges that they chained them to beds, kept them in leg-irons, and locked them in stocks.
will says: i was one of the boys they were talking about in this story. (June 25th, 2009 at 10:50am)
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If one did not know, from talking to the boys or reading state affidavits, that these posts had held up the stocks to which disobedient souls were consigned, while the fire-and-brimstone voice of the late founder of People’s Baptist Church, Lester Roloff, rumbled out of the Realistic Powerhorn speaker—if one did not know that this shed was used to punish children, then one might be able to stand just outside of it, facing north, and while squinting through the trees, admire the recreation yard where the boys played basketball and volleyball on summer afternoons. From this bucolic perspective, the Grace of God resembles a haven for boys, a place where even black sheep would be content to graze.
But this was no summer camp. Nor was Brother Provorse a camp counselor. Provorse was an imposing potbellied, bald-headed, heavy-jowled man, 61 years of age, with a taste for overalls and a rural twang that was given to periodical fulminations. His worldview borrowed heavily from the Old Testament, and the spiritual diet he prescribed at his boys’ home consisted of Scriptures, a spartan and highly structured environment, and harsh punishment. Provorse took a dim view of mischief, cursing, arguing, sloppiness, rock music, wasting time, and adolescent fantasies. He would not stand for misconduct. But slaying the evil that festered within his boys was too big a job for one man.
Provorse always had help: first, from an ex-Marine; then, from an assistant who extolled the virtues of hard physical labor. That assistant was replaced, in September 1990, by a thirty-year-old ordained minister who had worked both with youth groups and with prison inmates in his native state of Florida. Brother Kurt Gross was handy with tools and enjoyed farming. The outdoor work had made him stronger than his scrawny appearance suggested, just as his slow and earnest tones gave no hint of the talent he had acquired in his prison work—that of spotting deceit. While Brother Provorse and his wife busied themselves with cooking, administrative matters, and communicating with the boys’ parents, it fell chiefly to Brother Kurt to crack the whip.
The 22 boys under their care were, with 5 exceptions, strangers to the state of Texas. Some came from big cities like Dayton and Orlando, and others from towns with names like Eden Prairie, Minnesota; East Flat Rock, North Carolina; Lithia Springs, Georgia; Computa, South Dakota; Rawlins, Wyoming; and Wenatchee, Washington. For all the miles that separated the parents of the boys, two depressing realities united them. First, they each had a son over whom they could exert little control, a son who did poorly in school and, in most cases, seemed destined for jail or worse. And second, each parent had exhausted every available option.
Exhaustion, in fact, is the tone most evident in their voices when they recite all the traditional avenues for dealing with a troubled child. “The state’s facilities are overcrowded—they’ve turned me down twice.” “My son had used up $250,000 worth of mental health care insurance.” “He kept running away from the rehabilitation hospital.” “I was at the point where I didn’t know what to do.”
State agencies had no answers for these parents, other than institutionalizing the boys or letting them run loose in the streets. Thus neglected by the state, many of the parents appealed to their ministers. I love my boy, they would say, but he is out of control. Where can I find help? And the reply in many cases was, call People’s Baptist Church in Corpus Christi, Texas.
The parents may not have known where to find Corpus Christi on a map, but they had heard of People’s Baptist Church and its controversial founder, the late Lester Roloff, a pioneer of religious youth homes and an unapologetic proponent of corporal punishment as a means of turning spiritually wayward youths into God-fearing citizens. Roloff’s methods drew the attention of Texas state officials, who in 1973 demanded that Roloff’s homes be subjected to the regulations of state-licensed child care facilities. Roloff refused to apply for a license, claiming that as church homes, his facilities were protected from regulation by the state. The court battle between People’s Baptist Church and the State of Texas continued even after Roloff died in a plane crash on November 2, 1982. Two years later, the Texas Supreme Court sided with the state, and the issue was settled when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case in 1985. Rather than close down the homes or apply for a state license, the Roloff homes—including eighty children—relocated in the dead of night to Calvary Bible College in Kansas City, Missouri, where state licensing and inspections were not required.
But the massive People’s Baptist campus in northwest Corpus Christi, referred to around town simply as “the Roloff farm,” continued to carry on educational and church functions in the spirit of its great departed leader. And while the state could prohibit Roloff’s successors from operating a child care facility, it could not prevent them from encouraging outside parties to pick up where People’s Baptist Church had left off. When parents from Florida to Wyoming began calling the campus in early 1990, asking if someone could do something with their boys, invariably the switchboard operator took the parents’ numbers and said someone would call them back. And someone did. Though it was not immediately volunteered, that someone was not an employee of People’s Baptist Church but instead an independent missionary from Kansas named Gerald Provorse.
Provorse was one of several missionaries who admired the teachings of Brother Roloff and found themselves drawn to his spiritual haven in Corpus Christi. Some came purely to visit and worship; others lingered for months at a time, doing volunteer work on the Roloff farm until God’s calling urged them elsewhere. Provorse and his wife, Nancy, arrived in Corpus Christi on a houseboat in the late seventies and went to work on the Roloff farm. By the mid-eighties the Provorses were temporary managing conservators of several girls on the property. Heeding what Provorse described as the call “to help the parents who were trying so hard to protect their children from the evil in the world and to get them through these dangerous teenage years,” the missionary decided to open a boys’ home and went to Missouri to raise funds. Later the Provorses would claim to parents that they were missionaries sponsored by Midwest Baptist Church in East Florissant, Missouri. That church’s pastor, Eddie Paul Oats, confirms that the Provorses visited now and again, but, he says, “We have never financially supported them. I don’t even know if you could say they belonged to our church.”
The first hint that the Provorses were violating state civil codes came in 1990. While looking through courthouse records, Corpus Christi Caller-Times reporter Scott Williams discovered that Gerald and Nancy Provorse and two other couples had filed papers seeking to become temporary managing conservators of various children at the request of the children’s parents. The mailing address listed by each couple was that of the Roloff farm. Williams called DHS, who responded that it had been aware that the two other couples were living in trailers on the Roloff property and caring for children there. But the agency had never heard of anyone named Provorse.
On June 20, 1990, DHS licensing investigator Dan Matthews paid a visit to the Provorses in their trailer home on the Roloff farm. Already present was People’s Baptist Church attorney Clyde Jackson, who had set up the meeting at Matthews’ behest after the Provorses had not responded to his letters. The couple received their guest politely if warily. Nancy Provorse, a plain-faced sixty-year-old woman with large spectacles, let her husband do the talking.
Gerald Provorse answered the questions Matthews asked and volunteered little else. He said that they were independent missionaries who had arrived at the Roloff farm from Missouri in February 1990, that they had no formal connection with People’s Baptist Church, and that they had received financial support from a Missouri church. Four boys, aged fourteen and fifteen, currently lived with the Provorses, though they were nowhere in sight during the meeting. When Matthews asked how the boys’ parents knew about the Provorses, the missionary responded, “Word of mouth. God sent them to us.”
Walking the fine legal tightrope, Provorse informed Matthews that he and his wife were managing conservators of the boys and were taking care of them “just like we did for our own children.” Theirs was not a child care facility, Provorse said; no one else was assisting them. The missionary rounded off the conversation with a few sharp remarks about the evils of the state, and Matthews left.
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