From Guns to the Gospel : Once a Gang Member, Robert Shipp Has Found a Calling in Pulpit

Robert Shipp is on an urgent mission, a mission to tell young hoodlums that they can leave the world of gangs, drugs and crime behind.

Shipp, a 32-year-old former gang member, tells his own story of redemption whenever he gets the chance--on the street corner to gang members and drug abusers, at funerals, during monthly rap sessions with teen-agers, door-to-door with other ministers, at the apartment complex he manages, in the churchyard, at the Boys market where he works days as a deli clerk, or at the Pearl White Theatre where he is co-director and an aspiring actor.

He tells it from the pulpit too, as a new Baptist minister.

“I want people to know that you have a choice, “ he said when he preached his first sermon recently at New Bethel Baptist Church in Venice. “There is another way of life, a way out of the darkness. You don’t have to end up in the penitentiary or six feet underground.”

He knows firsthand how bleak ghetto life can be, he told the congregation, how constant the threat of crime and violence, how crowded the living conditions, how inadequate the job training. He knows how it can wear you down. How you can think you’re winning when you’re really losing. How you can fool yourself and everyone else, except God. But God will have his way Shipp told them: “I’m a walking example.”

For Shipp, who was known as Robert Ware until he was 17, finding his way was a struggle--starting with his family. Of his seven siblings, four are convicted felons. One is in jail now on drug charges. A first cousin is in prison serving two consecutive life terms for murder.

Before he turned his life around, Shipp was a crack peddler, a gangbanger and a convicted robber.

He never knew his father, who left when he was an infant. His mother was on welfare. Strict but loving, Shipp said, she worked hard to keep her eight children in line as she reared them in Oakwood.

But her discipline was no match for the lure of the streets. When Shipp was 13, he joined the Shoreline Crips. “Crips don’t die, they multiply” was their motto. He often hung out with his older cousins who served as role models and as protectors from the powerful leaders of opposing gangs. Together, Shipp and his associates got into fistfights, snatched purses and set fires.

“I was ready for anything. It didn’t bother me that I might have to kill someone,” Shipp said.

“It was romantic for a while carrying around a shotgun, smoking PCP and pursuing women.”

Shipp’s most serious brush with the law came in 1977 when he was convicted of robbery in a juvenile court proceeding. But teachers and counselors at Venice High School who believed in him wrote letters on his behalf and he was sentenced to just three days in jail and probation.

It was school that kept Shipp from falling into the abyss. The teachers at Venice knew him because he was part of a special program to keep at-risk youths in school. At 16, he and five other gang members were targeted by a neighborhood youth association that paid him $200 a month in exchange for his promise to study three hours a day. He said he wouldn’t have finished high school if not for the program nor would he have become the only child in his family to leave Venice and go away to college.

Shipp had intended to attend Cal State Northridge, but his plans changed when his father, Robert Shipp Sr., returned after a 17-year absence to meet his first-born son.

Shipp’s father offered his son a chance to get out of Venice and to start over. It seemed like good timing. Shipp was hungry for change and a new identity and a chance to get to know his father.

He changed his name from Ware to Shipp and moved to Ann Arbor, Mich., with his father, who had remarried and had two other children.

Ann Arbor was quiet and pretty and there was dinner every night with his new family. Later, he enrolled at Eastern Michigan University, where he found a niche in theater.

But it was hard to shrug off old habits. Whenever he could, Shipp flew home to Venice and partied. A semester or so shy of graduating, he dropped out of school and returned to Venice in 1981. At home he drank heavily and experimented with crack cocaine.

Fortunately, Shipp’s brother, Gary Ware, was active in the Pearl White Theatre and invited Shipp to join.

The theater provided Shipp a distraction from street life. In 1983, he became co-director along with Melvyn Hayward Sr., a counselor with Didi Hirsch Mental Health Clinic in Venice and a well-known community activist. The two still run the theater today, but with some fine-tuning they’ve turned it into more of a community center where art and social consciousness come together.

There are 40 people active in the theater, mostly African-Americans aged 2 to 50. The actors write their own material on subjects such as teen-age pregnancy, peer pressure to join a gang and AIDS in the black community. But the theater is also a place to get help on your homework, discuss job leads, voter registration material and information about medical assistance and drug treatment.

There is only one rule: no drugs.

The theater is helped by actors Beau Bridges and his father Lloyd, who donate $3,000 a month to the group. The younger Bridges has been involved with the theater since 1981 and still serves as the theater’s mentor and liaison to the film industry. It was his idea to bring youths together in a theater setting to ease tension in the community.

“Robert has always been a leader,” said Beau Bridges, who was present at New Bethel to hear Shipp’s first sermon. “He is a man of action. He’s met difficult challenges in his life and has always come out on the positive side. And the best thing is that he’s not afraid to talk about his experiences.”

Since 1982, Shipp has appeared in the film “Wild Pair,” a cable program titled “Merry Christmas, Sarah” and a video for the Board of Education on how to look for a job. He has an agent now and is pursuing an acting career. “I’m interested in doing work with a positive message,” Shipp said. “I want to reach as many people as I can.”

The theater began the change in Shipp’s life, but he said it was the church that completed his transformation.

Shipp said his conversion began in 1985 when he accompanied a young woman to church and was moved by the sermon.

“My lifestyle was so opposite of everyone’s there. I squirmed in my seat. I had to get out of there.”

Over the next couple of years, he said, he kept feeling the pull of the church while at the same time he continued his old ways.

But the church won out on the Santa Monica Pier. “I was with some guys in the gang, drinking, laughing, fishing at the pier. We were getting ready to fight a couple of guys and I pulled out my knife to stab one of them. They ran away, but at that moment I realized the old Robert was dead. I was a different person. It was a very fast process. God telling me that he had something special for me to do. The message was so strong. I knew from that moment on that I would not do drugs or hang with the gang crowd again.”

From that night on, Shipp went clean. Then came the dreams--several times a month--that he would preach and travel the globe to deliver his message.

Two years ago, Shipp went to Marvis Davis, pastor of New Bethel, to discuss his feelings. Together, they decided that Shipp had been called by God to become a minister. In the Baptist tradition, Shipp said, an individual needs only a direct calling from the Lord to begin the transformation. Shipp studied the Bible on his own and went to Davis when he felt he was ready to take the pulpit.

“Robert is an ideal role model,” Davis said. “He has a tremendous gift to make people feel good in his presence. He has the ability to reach not only ex-gangbangers but present gangbangers too.”

For Shipp, who is married and the father of two, teaching personal responsibility and sharing his idea of salvation through God has become a crusade.

“It’s a race against the clock,” he said. “If I don’t speak to the children, the drug dealer will.”