Strains of a church hymn float up from the basement of Shirley Phelps-Roper’s home, which is on the inside of the Westboro Baptist Church compound in the 3700 block of S.W. 12th.
Inside, more than 70 people are seated on metal chairs. The young girls’ and women’s heads are covered with scarves or cloth — long, uncut hair flowing down their backs.
Two treadmills are in one corner of the basement, and one wall is covered with a bright mural of the sun. The basement is serving as a place of worship for Westboro Baptist Church while renovations are being completed in the sanctuary, which is also inside the compound.
“Good afternoon, beloved friends,” Timothy Phelps says as he begins an hourlong sermon.
He doesn’t shout or shake his fists in anger. He reads his 11-page sermon word for word.
Toward the back of the temporary sanctuary, a small boy plays with toys. When he begins to cry, his father picks him up and cradles him.
It seems like a typical Sunday morning church service — a stark contrast from what people who have left the church remember.
It has been one year since the death of Westboro Baptist Church founder Pastor Fred Waldron Phelps Sr.
Some people in the community say it seems as if Westboro Baptist isn’t as active.
However, nine of the 13 Phelps children, and a few other families, are still picketing and preaching God’s hatred for sinners, Phelps family members say.
“It’s the same direction we’ve been going since the beginning,” says Margie Phelps, the second-born daughter of Fred Phelps Sr. and Margerie Simms.
Outside the church, some former WBC members are still trying to deal with the pain of losing all contact with their family members, and others are struggling with what they say was physical, mental and religious abuse inside the Westboro compound.
A cult?
When posed the question, “Is Westboro Baptist Church a cult?,” Mark Phelps doesn’t hesitate.
“Yes,” he says.
The second-born son left the church and his family at the age of 19.
“If you look at the definition of cult — they meet all the criteria,” Mark Phelps says.
For years, he was terrified of what would happen to him after he left the church.
“I had a stark terror that God was going to strike me dead,” he says. “It took me 20 years to come to terms with it.”
After years of therapy, he says he is finally able to share what he and his other siblings endured. His blog, “My Journey of Healing,” details beatings at the hands of his father.
Fred Phelps Sr. used physical, mental and religious abuse to run his church, Mark Phelps said.
“He was constantly violent and abusive,” he says. “He has left in his wake destroyed and damaged souls.”
Margie Phelps and Timothy Phelps don’t remember an abusive father.
“He was our father, and we loved him,” says Margie Phelps.
Timothy Phelps remembers being abused by the community, not his father.
“I was recounting to my children just last night things that happened to me as a child because my father dared — dared — to tell this community that they were committing racism,” he says. “My whole body has scars all over it.”
The scars are from beatings he received as a child from other children. Today, the church is still getting beat up, Timothy Phelps says.
“We are getting beat bloody,” he says. “Getting vilified by every human being that speaks about us.”
Westboro Baptist isn’t a cult, Margie Phelps said.
“The far better question is, ‘Is America a cult?’ ” she says. “That is the question you should be asking. Y’all salute that flag and bow down to that flag thoughtlessly. And you have the fat nerve to call us a cult.”
An idol
The general public made Fred Phelps Sr. the head of Westboro Baptist, Timothy and Margie Phelps say. Fred Phelps Sr. founded the church, but shouldn’t have been considered the head.
“Everybody had made an idol — an idol they hated — out of Fred Phelps,” Timothy Phelps says. “There are people in our midst who don’t have grace and those, who like in the community — the larger community, who turn him into a cult figure, a popular figure. They themselves, like much of the community, thought that Fred Phelps was (the head of the church). Well, he wasn’t.”
God is the head of Westboro Baptist, says Stephen Drain, who joined the church about 14 years ago. His daughter, Lauren Drain, left the church and has written a book about her experiences.
When Fred Phelps Sr. died March 19, 2014, it meant nothing else other than his life was over, Margie Phelps says.
“The Lord had ended his years on this earth,” she says. “You deal with that in a scriptural framework. What you don’t do is bow down and worship a dead body. What you don’t do is sorrow without hope. What you don’t do is pretend like he was anything other than what he was.”
Fred Waldron Phelps Sr. was excommunicated from the church after he advocated for a kinder approach between church members, Nate Phelps told The Topeka Capital-Journal right before his father’s death. At that time, Drain wouldn’t comment.
Drain still doesn’t want to talk about it. When asked why, Drain says: “We don’t normally speak to such things in the media. Church discipline is an internal matter, and really is no one else’s business.”
When other people have left the church, Westboro Baptist has been asked to respond, Drain said.
“Otherwise, I never talk about church discipline,” he said. “As far as what a person could do to be excluded from church membership, you can read about the scriptural standard at Matthew 18:15-17.”
That passage states if someone sins, “go and point out their fault, just between the two of you.” If the person doesn’t listen, more people should approach the sinner. If the person still refuses to listen even after the church speaks to him or her, the person should be treated like “a pagan or a tax collector.”
A board of eight elders — all married men — keep the church running.
“An elder is a servant of the body, not the boss of the body,” Drain says. “Christ is our head.”
Timothy Phelps says: “We are just a group of people that completely agree about what we are supposed to do in life. The Bible is the standard. It just happens to be in this generation we are the only ones that will stand flat-footed without being paid for it and tell you plainly what the Bible says. We didn’t make this stuff up.”
‘Nightmare on 12th street’
“Our pastor/father’s claims of bondage over our souls may have been invisible to our community,” Mark Phelps writes in his blog, “but were actually far stronger than the iron ones worn by the ancestors of those he often brags he’s helped free. The children who were raised in the nightmare on 12th Street carry their shackles in their hearts.”
Mark Phelps, who lives in Arizona and has changed his last name, and his brother, Nate Phelps, who lives in Canada, have been vocal about their childhoods in Topeka. Ten people who have left the church were contacted for this article. Several didn’t want to speak about their time at WBC, and others say they are trying to distance themselves from it.
Nate Phelps is working on a documentary, “Not My Father’s Son,” about his years at Westboro Baptist. Mark and Nate Phelps have been in contact, and Facebook shows several of those who have left the church have formed a bond.
“I’m so thankful for those relationships,” Mark Phelps says. “You better believe I’m going to be there for them.”
Mark and Nate Phelps came to Topeka a few months ago to do some filming for the documentary.
“It was surreal,” Mark Phelps says about seeing the compound. “I felt fine and comfortable. The street seems shorter.”
Mark Phelps’ blog describes horrific beatings of Fred Phelps Jr., Nate and Katherine.
One time, Mark Phelps remembers, a boy called for Katherine. For that, Fred Phelps Sr. beat her.
“He’d beat her routinely in the auditorium area of the church building/house where we lived, requiring her to lean forward with her hands against one of the foundation poles that ran down the middle of the church auditorium to allow him best swinging room and clear access to her backside with the oak mattock handle,” Mark Phelps writes. “He’d beat her with the oak mattock handle and then twist her arm behind her back and bend her backwards over the back side of the bench seats in the church auditorium. While holding her arm painfully behind her back, he would hit her in the face with his fists.”
‘Love my neighbor’
When someone wants to leave Westboro Baptist Church, all ties are severed. There are no phone calls home or emails between siblings. However, church members say, the people who leave are treated fairly.
“We look at our fleshly relationships quite differently than most of the world does,” Drain says. “I literally believe, because the scripture supports this, there isn’t anything to blood relatives. The fact that there are many people who live here who are related by blood has nothing to do with the concept of who your spiritual kin is. I spend my time, my resources and my heart on those who keep His commandments.”
When asked if Drain still loves his daughter, Lauren, he had this to say: “I love everybody on this earth. I’m not allowed to hate people. I’m supposed to love my neighbor as myself. Lauren is still my neighbor, and I’d still warn her about her sins.”
While Margie Phelps says she loves every niece and nephew who has left the church, she doesn’t dwell on it.
“I shed a few tears when they left, but they quickly fade into the sunset,” she says. “They don’t want to live the way I want to live. They don’t honestly want to be in communion with me. They don’t honestly want to be in touch with us.”
Today, Margie Phelps says, church members make sure the person has transportation and everything that belongs to him or her.
“We make sure they are still on someone’s insurance,” she says. “That they get everything they need to take care of that. And on and on — every logistic. Because we are not forcing anybody to live this way if they don’t want to. It is done with kindness, and it is done with respect.”
Mark and Nate Phelps say they didn’t experience that when they left the church dozens of years ago. Nate Phelps left under the cover of darkness because he was afraid of being caught. Mark Phelps says when his siblings would try to leave the church, they would be tracked down and dragged back to the church.
New families
Mark Phelps doesn’t remember very many families joining Westboro Baptist during his years as a church member.
Margie and Timothy Phelps say there are people from about six other families who belong to the church.
Recently, Chris Jaques uprooted his four children — ages 13 to 18 — from Phoenix and brought them to Topeka. He hadn’t met the Phelps family but had listened to some of their sermons on the Internet.
“I want to obey the word of God,” Jaques says. “I want to follow the Lord. Westboro goes with the Bible. It was the right move. We are here to stay.”
His oldest child, Rebekah Jaques, 18, believes coming to Topeka “was a complete blessing.”
“I felt comfortable,” she says. “I sensed I was among God’s people.”
Outside looking in
Heather Young had no idea 40 years ago that something she said to Mark Phelps would help him leave Westboro.
About a year and a half ago, Young received a private message through Facebook from Mark Phelps.
“I could have so easily hit delete,” Young says.
But she didn’t. Instead, she read about an incident that occurred when Mark and she were juniors at Topeka West High School.
Mark Phelps was using the book of Genesis to support some church beliefs, Young says. Young challenged Phelps, and the two had a short verbal argument.
“I went home to my mom bawling,” Young says.
Young, who now lives in Milwaukee, has heard about the Phelps’ picketing. She has witnessed it firsthand in Topeka when she comes back to visit her mother. But she didn’t think any more of that teenage argument, until Mark Phelps contacted her.
“You put a crack in the facade,” Mark Phelps told her. “I’ve been waiting 40 years to thank you.”
Today, the two are friends and keep in touch. Young helps edit Mark Phelps’ blog. In reading the blogs, Young says she feels such incredible sadness.
“There is some really deep, dark stuff in this family,” Young says. “I think he (Fred Phelps Sr.) was a brilliant man and brilliantly twisted. He had a need and desire to control people.”
Even after Fred Phelps Sr.’s death, his grip on the church is strong.
“I always thought it might fold,” Young says of Westboro Baptist after Fred Phelps Sr.’s death. “Maybe that is my hope. If it doesn’t end, he did his job so well they (his children) believe it to be true. They have pushed thousands away from God. God is a loving God, and he did everything to say otherwise. They portray him as a God of hate, when in fact, he is a God of love.”
The future
Back in the basement of Phelps-Roper’s house, the Sunday service is coming to an end.
Phelps-Roper’s singing fills the temporary sanctuary as the church concludes with the hymn “O That Will Be Glory.”
Afterward, children are invited to have Girl Scout cookies while their parents shake hands and chat.
These children are the next generation of Westboro Baptist. While many of the Phelps children received law degrees, the church’s youth today are studying computers or health.
Upstairs in Phelps-Roper’s house, the smell of a homemade noon meal fills the air — perhaps fettuccine alfredo, Timothy Phelps guesses.
While the Phelps children are out of the living room, a small elderly woman, the late Fred Phelps Sr.’s wife, shuffles into the room. She is quiet, but asks if the younger children are attending a movie.
Seconds later, Timothy Phelps appears with Margie Phelps and Phelps-Roper, and their mother heads to another room.
The three settle into Phelps-Roper’s comfortable living area. Phelps-Roper says she plans to picket as long as the Lord allows her.
While she has taken a step back and allowed Drain to take over media calls, she still actively pickets.
“The jobs are so big, help is needed,” Phelps-Roper says.
The church, which should be meeting in the sanctuary again in two weeks, will continue to share its message — even if its members are spit upon, vilified and hated.
“The future of the church is to preach the gospel to every creature until the time of the return of the Lord in flaming fire,” Drain says. “And our message? The same as Christ’s — repent or perish.”