Sam Childers

Sam Childers ran with a biker crew in Pennsylvania before a conversion in the early nineties, then went to Sudan on a building trip and stayed. Another Man's War tells that story: the orphanage he founded at Nimule, the armed patrols he ran into the bush to recover children taken by the Lord's Resistance Army, and the nickname the press gave him, the Machine Gun Preacher. Gerard Butler played him in the 2011 film. The account has been questioned from several directions. Two American medical visitors raised concerns about conditions at the compound, and Christianity Today went to look and found the children well; the FBI and IRS searched his Pennsylvania property in 2014, which Childers attributed to a former son-in-law, and a relative was later accused of taking around sixty-one thousand dollars from the charity. Childers has answered every version of the charge in public and continued the work.