In a dingy Providence ballroom last Saturday night, "Little David" Walker terrified a crowd of 1200 people with his description of "what Providence would be like after Jesus comes." The chubby, sixteen-year-old evangelist has been stumping for salvation since the age of nine when he had "a personal conversation with Jesus." He has hit London, Paris and Mexico in this crusade. Last night Little David's pastures were not so green, but his theatrics and psychological programming made up for the decor.

For half an hour before the Miracle Youth appeared, assorted assistants built up an atmosphere of gloom and doom. A choir from the local Zion Bible Institute offered a morbid song called "Night and Day." Many of the lines, like "night is so depressing," reminded one of the famous "Gloomy Sunday" which drove scores of Europeans to suicide. After this selection, a former African missionary made ecstatic comments, "If angels can sing as well as that, I'm going to heaven--how about you?" There were shouts of "Yes, Oh Yes Jesus" from the front rows. Then the "Connecticut Songbird," a cheery fat man, sang a lament about his terrible life before "the Lord reached down his hand for me." He kept his eyes riveted to the ceiling while he was singing, as if he expected the hand to appear once again, and there were more shouts of "Beautiful!"

Without introduction or flourish, Little David himself suddenly appeared on the platform. Scrubbed and neat in a light gray suit, he looked more like an Eagle Scout than an evangelist. But he was up to fever heat in a few minutes and began screaming out passages from Matthew about the end of the world.

Then Little David went on to describe what would happen if Jesus arrived at twelve o'clock that night. "The skies will break apart, thunder will crash, and the body of Christ will come rocketing down through the stratosphere, the atmosphere, and into the hemisphere!" The audience began to fidget nervously, an old man on my right looked up at the roof in horror, but the show was just beginning.

"Like a thief in the night, Jesus will snatch up your loved ones. Little Billy and Mary will be taken from their beds, your husband may disappear without a trace. Engineers will vanish from the cabs of speeding trains, pilots from their planes. Those left behind will run frantically through the streets, meaning and tearing their hair." By this point, the crowd had reached a state of frenzied despair. "Oh Jesus spare me," screamed a white-haired old man. Several women in the fourth row were looking at a train schedule to see how soon they could leave town.

The audience was whipped up, but Little David had calmed down. "Ah," he said, with a smile of satisfaction, "I'm going to be far away from this teensy little world, but where will you be? Heaven is a safe deposit, don't you want to go and ESCAPE?" "Oh yes, yes," murmured the crowd

Then, after a brief interval of personal prayer between David and Jesus, thirty people came forward to be "saved." They were herded into an adjoining room for consultations. David retired to store up power for the healing period which was soon to follow, and his father took the stage. An easy two hundred pounds, Mr. Walker followed his son's pattern in dress--his tie was a mass of swirling purples. His speech was unusual however:

"When Little David told me he wanted to become a preacher, I told the Lord that if He sent him, He can pay the bills. Tonight we missed our goal by $262. Those that don't give will lack God's blessing, they will lose their money anyway because God will cut holes in their pockets. Lord, you have riches and glory, supply the fleece!" After this ominous warning, a second collection was taken. Mr. Walker never announced whether the Lord had made up the deficit.

Little David returned smiling happily and initiated the "healing services." While the loudspeakers drooled soft organ music, forty of the afflicted lined up in front of the platform. The first patient was a crippled woman in a wheelchair; David called on Jesus to heal this sister then tried a mental suggestion on her. "Don't you feel God's healing power flowing through you? you do, you do!" After five minutes of this, the woman rose out of her chair and walked thirty feet to an empty seat. The audience moaned in amazement; a man behind me cried out "Jesus, Jesus" for the next ten minutes. Less serious cases went through the line in a hurry, David mumbled a short prayer and in thirty seconds they had had it. A deaf woman got the full treatment, however--after five minutes of incantation she was able to repeat Mommy and Daddy then promptly broke into hysterics. Little David withdrew silently and the crowd filed out down the stairs.