There was surely a time, during the darkest days of his life, when Steve Pope could not have imagined clawing himself out of the depths of his despair, a lost world where God had most certainly forsaken him. He first used heroin when he was in the seventh grade. During the next few years, he overdosed multiple times and was in and out of juvenile hall. His drug problem only got worse when he was overseas in the military. Discharged and banned from military service at age 19, he and his 13-year-old wife Teresa terrorized his California hometown in the late 1970s, “robbing stores and kicking doors in at night at gunpoint.” He ended up on the district attorney’s list of the county’s most wanted criminals. Multiple stints in 21-day detox programs never took. His doctor told him, “You’re never going to get off drugs. You’ll die young. It’ll ruin your married life.”

When he moved to another city in an attempt to start over, Pope couldn’t resist again falling in with the wrong crowd, drug addicts. He and his wife, now a mother of two, panhandled and stole as many as 15 to 20 purses a day from unsuspecting elderly women. Then when he and Teresa bilked a well-meaning man out of $15,000, the vengeful victim shot Pope in the stomach at point blank range, and then in the back of the head, yet he lived — Pope knows it was “divine intervention from God.” Then Teresa supplied her husband with drugs while in the hospital. And when he was a trusty while serving a sentence at the county jail, his wife continued to feed his drug habit.

At his wits end, confronted by the realization that “I’m bound by these heroin demons and I can’t quit,” Pope experienced a spiritual conversion that turned his life around.

Despite 15 years hooked on drugs, more than a decade trying to stay one step ahead of the law, surviving two gunshot wounds, either of which should have killed him, and a final year-long jail sentence following his conversion, Pope emerged from what seemed an endless hell on earth with the epiphany he has come to appreciate during the past 40 years that he really has had a wonderful life.

If personal experience lends credibility to and is an integral component of being an effective and empathetic addiction counselor and evangelical disciple, then Pope’s tragedyturned-revelation might surely be the best testament for those seeking recovery as well as a spiritual connection.

“Not an average life, is it?” Pope asks rhetorically. “I probably have as much experience dealing with drugs as any man alive. Started in my own life at 12,” a preteen introduction which later included living with a meth-addict wife, and evolved into his prison ministry in 1991.

And that’s why about 10 years ago, Pope bought a church building in Pauls Valley and launched a non-denominational drug outreach program called New Hope Deliverance Outreach. Then about six months ago, the former Southside Free Holiness Church building on Iola Avenue in Sallisaw became available, which was donated to Pope so he could start an eastern Oklahoma ministry called Deliverance Outreach.

“I am convinced God is doing something divine here. This little outreach here in Sallisaw is where I’m going to end up permanently,” Pope says. That’s why he’s trying to find someone to take over operations in Pauls Valley. But until that happens, he’ll continue preaching Monday nights in Sallisaw, make the three-hour drive to Pauls Valley for services on Tuesday night — “I’ll keep doing that until somebody else wants to take it” — and return to Sallisaw to continue building his ministry.

Even if someone else takes over Pauls Valley, “I don’t think I’d ever quit going back, because I have 25 grandchildren there, for one thing, and then in the church, there’s 25 children that are coming to outreach (whose parents are on drugs). They all call me PaPa. I can’t walk away from them, because they love me to pieces. And I still have a house there. So I’m always going to have some ties there,” he says.

With his new outreach program and in an effort to rescue his wife — “Momma, I need to get you out of Pauls Valley” — Pope is committed to a new life in Sallisaw.

“This is going to be my home,” he says. “I’m looking for a house — I’m renting a house right now. I think Sequoyah County’s going to see a lot of me. I plan on doing a lot of street services and reaching out and trying to help people get off drugs.”

But Pope’s approach for rescuing his flock is different from programs like Narcotics Anonymous (NA).

“I’m a little different than NA. They teach you that you’re always going to be a recovering addict. But I teach that there’s deliverance in Jesus Christ,” Pope says. “And if I wasn’t fully delivered, I couldn’t do what I’m doing. I picked up a guy last night, took him to church, a drug addict I met in jail, so every day of my life I’m brushing shoulders with drug addicts. But there’s no craving, it’s gone. Delivered by the blood of Jesus Christ. And that’s what we preach.”

A daily witness

Much like the approach for Alcoholics Anonymous, Pope lives one day at a time. And that life is centered around sharing his testimony.

“I don’t think there’s been a day in 40 years that I haven’t given my testimony to somebody. I just can’t help it. There’s a passion. There’s a fire here I think came from God, and I’m going to be vocal about it until I draw my last breath,” he says. “When I’m on my deathbed, I’ll be witnessing to the nurses.”

A roofing contractor by trade, Pope moved to Oklahoma in the late 1980s to work with his brother. But he needed to share his faith and use his checkered past to help others shed the shackles of drugs. “God is interested in people getting help. I’m glad He’s that way. The Bible says, ‘It’s not his will that any perish’,” Pope says.

When the Pauls Valley opportunity came along, he took out a loan and bought the church. But then when he had it about half paid off, his pastor called and told him he would pay off the remainder of the loan. Pope then labored in Pauls Valley for 10 years, building his outreach ministry and paying the electric bill himself.

Then, about five years ago, Pope got a call from a man in Kentucky who said he received a message from God telling him to pay off Pope’s house in Pauls Valley, which had a balance of almost $49,000. In addition, the man told Pope he would never have to buy another Bible, because the Kentuckian had just ordered 6,000 Bibles for Pope’s outreach. “I’m going to supply you with Bibles until you die,” he told Pope.

He then turned his focus to Sallisaw. “The guy that was in charge of that church called me and said, ‘If you want to start an outreach church, I’ll just give it to you,’ along with about $1,200 in the offering,” Pope says. “It’s just been wonderful. Lost people coming in.”

Then about a month ago, Pope received a phone call that a church that sits catty-cornered from his outreach church in Pauls Valley was no longer offering services, and that the former Full Gospel Temple, parsonage, zero-turn mower “and $54,000 in offering” had been given to him.

“I’m probably the only man alive that’s had two churches given to me in a six-month period. And then I just had a trailer donated to me — probably a $15,000 trailer; it’s a nice trailer.” But when he picked up the trailer in Kentucky, a pastor friend presented him with more than $5,000 donated from 25 people for his outreach ministry. That’s in addition to his house being paid off for him and “right around $60,000 given to me for the Word.”

“Every time I turn around, God is doing something else. I just feel like these are divine things that God is … because I labored for so long with nothing, through the darkness with my wife and the shape she was in … and when my son was dying. Those were such dark days,” Pope reflects, his voice cracking and tears welling in his eyes.

“I never dreamed it would grow to two outreaches three hours apart. I would start another one somewhere else … there’s a passion there, I can’t get away from it.”

How it began

Although he was raised in the church, Pope admits he was a rebel. After he began using drugs, overdosed multiple times and found a revolving door at the juvenile hall in California, his father co-signed for him to join the military just a month after his 17th birthday. “He thought maybe that could make a man out of me.”

But Pope’s demons were defiant, yet he was optimistic “there’s a God who can probably help me if I can get to Him.”

Despite attempts to change his circumstances, Pope and his wife couldn’t catch a break. That’s when Teresa, with two children in tow, met a man “and asked him for a hundred dollars, and he gave her a hundred dollars.” She capitalized on his kindness, eventually taking him for an estimated $15,000.

“The word got out that we were hustling him, and he was mad, and the word on the streets was ‘Pope, he’s going to kill you.’ We used that money — we’d been living on the streets — to rent a little trailer house. And I saw him walk by the window with a gun in his hand, so I ran and hid in the closet. He came through the house and he opened that closet door, and God blinded him. There wasn’t any clothes in there, but he did not see me. He looked both ways with that gun and left. But I told Teresa, ‘We’re going to have to get out of here, he’s going to be back’,” Pope recalls.

“So we rented a little apartment. The first night there, I kneeled down on the kitchen floor and I said, ‘God, I’m tired of being a heroin addict.’ And I said, ‘If I have to be in a car wreck, if I have to be paralyzed for the rest of my life, stop me from going to hell.’

“The next morning, my wife opened the front door, he was standing right there,” Pope says of his would-be executioner. “He stepped in and pulled that snubbed nose .38 out of his back pocket. I was asleep on the hide-a-bed in the living room. She grabbed the gun, and hollered, ‘Steve, he’s going to kill you! He’s got a gun!’ He yanked the gun out of her hand, and I tried to grab the gun. He yanked again, and then he pointed it right at me and pulled the trigger, buried it right there,” Pope says, pointing to his stomach. “I remember looking down and seeing that little red circle, black gunpowder around it, and felt blood running down my back. It missed my spine by about an inch. I turned around to run, and he put the gun to the back of my head and fired again.” The bullet pierced his scalp, but traveled along Pope’s skull and exited the top of his head.

“I tried to run out the back door, and he emptied the gun at me. There was a 5-foot-high fence in the back, and I tried to get over that fence, but couldn’t — I’d lost too much blood,” Pope describes his attempt to escape. “So I turned and he was standing there just looking at me, and he was reloading the gun. I could tell he was going to finish me off. And I was screaming, ‘Please don’t kill me! I’ll go to hell if you do!’ I’d been raised up in church, and I knew where I was going. But I could tell by his look that he was going to finish me off. So I tried to get around him, and he closed the chamber and tried to hit me in the head when I went by, but no bullets hit me.

“I made it across the street and collapsed, and he walked over, reloaded again, walked up to me and leveled it on my head to fill my head full of holes,” Pope describes what he believed were his last moments. “There was a fireman who lived across the street, and he stepped in between us right at the last minute and took the gun from him.”

The aftermath

Pope was taken to the hospital where doctors and nurses worked to save his life. When they couldn’t find a bullet in his head, surgery on his stomach was next.

“I woke up with my mom sitting there, and she said, ‘Son, you lost 80% of your pancreas, but they said that you have a chance of making it, but they can’t tell for sure.’ But that one bullet put holes in my kidney and liver, just the fragments,” Pope says.

Teresa smuggled drugs to him in the hospital, and the day after he was released, he overdosed and ended up back in the hospital. He ended up in the county jail for six months for probation violation.

“I hated myself, I hated what I had become, but I was bound,” he says. “So in the county jail, I was trying to pray and feel after God. But looking back on it now, I was just asking God to help me, I wasn’t really making a commitment to serve Him.”

When authorities caught Teresa providing her husband with drugs while working outside the jail, she was sentenced to four years in prison while he completed his incarceration. But it was while he was walking down a street in Yuba City, Calif., “crying and talking to God,” that he told his Creator: “God, I want to live for You, but I’m bound by these heroin demons and I can’t quit. If You’ll deliver me — I might sleep under a bridge tonight — but I’ll find a church to go to. I’ll be there every time the doors are open. I’ll find a Bible, I’ll read it, I’ll do everything you tell me to in the Word of God.”

Pope believes that was the commitment from him for which God was looking. “I felt it when it happened. I just felt something divine just settle over me, felt like I was about to float away. And I haven’t craved drugs since then.”

That was 40 years ago. When he told his mother, “Mom, I feel like I got saved, but I don’t know what to do.” She advised him to “find favor with God.”

As it turned out, he had 11 months to find favor — behind bars “on new charges” — and he spent every day in prayer.

When he was released, he started preaching in jails and prisons. But his struggle with the devil’s attempts to obfuscate his prison ministry — and to derail his conversion — continued.

“All these years I’ve kept preaching, kept going to jails and prisons … I decided we’ve got to do something,” Pope says.

Then, after years of struggling and finding herself, Teresa “ended up getting back in church. She came to me and she started going to church and praying. Then about eight months ago, she came to me crying and said, ‘Steve, I’m struggling’,” he recalls. “She’s had a real rough life. God changed her, too. And now I’ve got my helpmate back, and me and her are going to labor together in the streets.”

Because Pope had a history of doing street work with James Woodruff, pastor for Muldrow’s Eastside Holiness Church, “I started looking for something up here.”

And he continues to expand his outreach.

These days, Pope has been ministering in the Sequoyah County Jail every Saturday. “They let us stay as long as we want.”

Looking ahead

“Every time I turn around, God just points something else out to us. I can tell God’s in it,” Pope says. “A church is given to you. Money’s given to you. Buying your house. Buying Bibles. Those things don’t just happen. I’m positive God’s in it.”

And the interest he receives in his outreach efforts encourages him. He recalls what seemed an eternity that he labored all by himself, wondering how he could continue the fight for even another day.

But now that he is reunited with his wife in the church — he likes to portray their partnership as “The Pope and Mother Teresa” — he believes all the pieces are in place in God’s time.

“I’ll talk to the men in jail, and then my wife will contact their wives,” Pope says of their teamwork. “That’s the reason I needed her by my side. We have a lot of women get involved, and she can help me. She’s doing great, and I’m so thankful.

“I think my best years are ahead of me. And for a guy that’s been shot and a bullet trapped in my head, I’m 68 years old. I see people around me who are feeble and can’t hardly get around, and I feel like I’m going to live another 50 years. Probably won’t, but I feel good. I’ve got a lot of good days left.”

Which is good, because Pope foresees a lot of important work still to be done.

“In the 18th chapter of Revelation — and I think it’s talking about America — it says ‘she was the center of commerce in the whole world.’ It says ‘she became the hold of every foul and hateful and unclean spirit.’ So I’m seeing things like that, and then the drugs and all that stuff. Our world needs God. He’s the answer to everything.”