Dripping With Blood
How the Gospel Moves Mountains by Rhett Burns
Bob Childress’ earliest memory came at Christmas when he was three years old—he got drunk. The dirt-poor people of Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains didn’t have much, but they had apples and corn in abundance, which, with a little wizardry in the woods, they turned into brandy and whiskey. Young Bob took a swig at the family Christmas party, got dizzy, fell down and hit his head, was knocked out asleep, and woke up naked as a jaybird. There’s always that one guy at the Christmas party, I guess, but you don’t expect it to be the toddler. No one got mad, though. It was fine, just fine, to be drunk, they said.1
Drinking made life bearable in the Blue Ridge. But it also made life hard. Wine may cheer the heart of man, but whiskey mixed with weapons, anger, and grudges older than the hills led to lots of bloodshed. Shootings, stabbings, and killings were normal parts of life on Buffalo Mountain.
Bob Childress thought so, too, until the infamous Courthouse Massacre. On March 14, 1912, at the courthouse in Hillsville, some mountaineers rode into town to jailbreak a friend. They came into the courthouse shooting, and by the time they rode away the judge, the prosecutor, a witness, the sheriff, and a juryman all lay bleeding out on the courtroom floor. Dead.
Newspaper reporters flooded the town. And this was how Bob Childress learned that the Blue Ridge’s stilling and killing way of life was not normal elsewhere. He determined to do something about it. He tried law enforcement. But he saw too many revenuers getting drunk off the contraband. Saw too many officers taking bribes. Saw too many stills get busted only to be rebuilt within a few days. Law enforcement officers were sometimes able to halt liquor operations temporarily, but they were impotent to shut them down. Buffalo Mountain continued to drip with brandy and blood.
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Every Monday morning, I load a ladder and a loudspeaker into my truck and drive to the abortion clinic in town. We set up the ladder on the public right-of-way side of a tall privacy fence and preach the Gospel to mothers and fathers in the parking lot and waiting room. In the parking lot below a van that looks like it was just taken off the set of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, blares Girls Just Want to Have Fun on repeat. Vulgar graffiti is spray-painted on the fence, LGBT rainbow flags, trans flags, and BLM flags line the driveway, and vile women who call themselves “clinic escorts” curse at us. They aim a flatulence-scented spray at the Catholic ladies praying the rosary and the Protestant ladies holding signs and calling out to cars pulling in the driveway.
These pro-abortion demonstrators have turned the business—if you want to call it that—into a circus. But six days a week Christians walk the tightrope in order to preach the Gospel and attempt to persuade mothers to spare the life of their baby.
My native South Carolina is an overwhelmingly pro-life state. Our legislature has passed various pro-life bills in recent years. Our politicians and sheriffs are outspoken against abortion. But still, six days a week, mothers march into that clinic to pay a man to kill their child. Thus far, our legal system has managed to regulate abortion some and maybe even stop some abortions. But it has been impotent to shut down the abortion industry.
South Carolina still drips with blood.
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One night, after drinking whiskey and playing poker for hours, Bob Childress found himself six miles from home and within earshot of singing coming from a Methodist Church revival service. He wandered in and, eventually, knelt at the altar to pray. Rest came over him. Peace for the first time in his life. That night, he slept like a baby without so much as a sip of brandy. He didn’t even take his pistol with him the next day.
Bob Childress had become a new man.
Later, he started attending a Presbyterian church. His frustrations with the failure of law enforcement to put a stop to the drunkenness and murder on the mountains started to make sense. He realized only the Gospel could change people. He set out to become a presbyterian preacher. This meant going back to school. So, the year his six-year-old son started first grade, Bob started high school. They rode a mule together six miles to the schoolhouse each day.
A year after that, he started college. A year after that, he applied to Union Seminary in Richmond, but they wouldn’t relax their standards to let him in. So, he audited classes and provided for his family’s housing and necessities without the aid of scholarships until he became such a star student, they had to admit him. Upon graduation, he was offered a cushy pastorate in North Carolina.
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But Bob Childress wanted to go home to Buffalo Mountain. Only the Gospel could change people. And his people needed changing. Law is good. Just laws restrain evil and instruct people toward righteous behavior. The civil magistrate, when operating within its God-given bounds, rewards good and punishes evil. Therefore, we need good laws, holy lawmakers, and just law enforcement.
But we are kidding ourselves—worse, we are fooling ourselves—if we think we are going to turn back the globalist, corporatist Rainbow Empire through our political system alone. Political engagement is good and necessary, and I applaud and pray for those involved. But the demons of abortion carnage, transgender bodily mutilation, racialist power plays, and medical tyranny only come out by prayer and fasting.
Politics and law are downstream from culture, which is downstream from religion. Therefore, the need of the hour is white-hot Gospel preaching and vigorous worship. But it cannot be the preaching of ivory tower academics, who lecture on word studies and the finer points of textual criticism. Nor can it be the Ted Talks of self-help positivity preachers. Nor the health and wealth gospel of prosperity grifters. Nor the Christless civic religion of the patriot preachers. Nor the soft and smooth words of the cosmopolitan celibate gay pastor. Nor the “empowered, brave, and stunning” sermons of the lady preachers.
No, we need holy men preaching the blood-soaked Gospel of Christ with the winds of heaven at their backs, while the zeitgeist howls in their face. We need the type of preaching that proclaims Christ crucified, who took your sins to the grave, but did not bring them back out. We need the type of preaching that lays an axe to the idols of our day. We need proclamation of the Law of God, the Spirit of God, and the Gospel of God. We need the type of preaching that touches down into real life to deal with real sins and offer real, full, and free forgiveness.
When tens of thousands of preachers in tens of thousands of churches preach this Gospel without flinching, we’ll see our people converted. Then, downstream from these heavenly headwaters, we can restore our legal system and reform the civil magistrate. But this will not happen until America drips with the blood of Christ.·
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They said Bob Childress worked like a man running from the devil—or after him. He preached four to six times every Sunday and drove over 40,000 miles a year preaching and visiting folks. He lived among his people, started churches and schools, and worked to establish alternate economic opportunities so they could give up the liquor trade.
Over the decades, Bob Childress moved Buffalo Mountain. But Gospel preaching fueled the movement. At his first funeral on the mountain, Childress looked everyone square in the eye and told them the death of the young man was their fault. He’d been shot. It was their culture of drunkenness and anger. It was their sin. They needed grace.
Later, he told a group of hardened men, “Let the Lord cure your soul first, then you can start to work on your drinking.” And sixteen men, including Giles Harris, the most dangerous man on the mountain, came forward to repent and believe. Giles later became an elder. Over time, the Gospel did what the revenuers never could: it shut down the stilling and the killing.
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I vote. I’ve attended pro-life political rallies. I talk to legislators. I recently reached out to my county councilman about a local anti-abortion ordinance. I believe in political engagement, especially locally. But every Monday morning, I stand on that ladder—Girls Just Want to Have Fun blaring in the background—and speak of the cross of Christ. I step into the pulpit at church and preach the cross of Christ. I gather my kids around the dinner table and tell them of the cross of Christ.
Let the Lord cure the souls of our nation first. And following that, may He put to death: abortion, the LGBTQIA+ movement, feminism, racism, globalism, and every other rival for the affections and worship of our people. For He must reign until every enemy is made a footstool.
[From Fight Laugh Feast Magazine 3.2]
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The story of Bob Childress is told in The Man Who Moved a Mountain by Richard Davids. The stories in this essay are retold from this book.