Guns to God: My journey from drug dealing to deliverance

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Claud has now passed his Bishops’ Advisory Panel (BAP) and is in the process of training for two years to become a Church of England priest. Once ordained, he would love to plant a church and to work with young people to decrease gang culture and knife crime. As he approaches 40, he is deeply grateful for ‘God’s truly amazing grace [which] took a once successful London drug-dealing street trader all the way from deliveries to deliverance, from guns to God’. After 20 years of dealing, I decided I needed a cover. So I started volunteering, mentoring young offenders. If anyone stopped me and asked what I did, I’d produce my council ID and say I was a mentor.

Hopefully the play does well in San Francisco and someone will take a chance and bring the play to Arizona," said Claude. "I'm hoping I can bring it to Arizona. It's a great story and I want to show it off to not only my community, but to the other O'odham communities, and to other tribes." Moses also noted "Cashed Out" is the first Native play the San Francisco Playhouse has produced, allowing for the first time their audiences to experience Native theater.When Claud was approached about becoming a mentor for high-risk young offenders for the local council, it initially seemed like a handy ‘respectable’ cover for his drug-dealing activities. However, he found that he really enjoyed it and, one day, he heard a colleague (Pete) talk about his faith and knew that he had to know more. Pete recommended the Alpha course – as it happened, there was one starting locally the following evening, and Claud was bowled over by the warm welcome he received. He really looked forward to the sessions and, one evening, ‘my heart dared Jesus to come into my life and make a change’, giving him a sense of deep joy and peace. Shortly after, he confessed his life of crime to the vicar, who encouraged him to get a ‘proper, full-time, permanent job’. Leaving his old life behind, he started to read the Bible and pray daily, and surround himself with people who would point him in the right direction. By the time the Alpha course had finished, the desire to sell drugs had completely left him. Watching him develop over the years and working with the Autry, it’s a great opportunity for me again to be exposed to the theater in that way,” Roberto said. “As brothers knowing what addiction meant to some of our relatives and even in our own lives, and to see it used as a way to comment on society, it's powerful stuff.”

I was born and raised in a busy south London household. It was turbulent, and there was a lot of domestic violence.Claude is excited about the San Francisco premier, but he is hoping to bring "Cashed Out" to Arizona.

Claude's powerful play is one of the many being written, produced, and shared, and every single day I am thankful that there are more and more opportunities for Natives to see ourselves onstage," she said. "Theater didn't begin with the Greeks like we're taught. Theater began with us, Indigenous peoples, telling stories for thousands and thousands of years before Greece even existed, so every Native storyteller has a place in the theater if they so want it." 'The theater nerd I always wanted to be'

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Born in Clapham, the youngest of six siblings, Claud grew up in the shadow of domestic violence, with a London-born mum and an abusive and controlling Jamaican dad. He spent his childhood treading on eggshells, keen not to provoke the anger which his dad would regularly take out on Claud, his mum, his siblings and their dog. ‘Terrible pain and darkness filled our lives on a daily basis’, Claud writes, with fear and anxiety being constant companions for him as a young boy. Early sense of power Claud has now passed his Bishops’ Advisory Panel (BAP) and is in the process of training for two years to become a Church of England minister. Once ordained, he would love to plant a church and to work with young people to decrease gang culture and knife crime. As he approaches 40, he is deeply grateful for ‘God’s truly amazing grace [which] took a once successful London drug-dealing street trader all the way from deliveries to deliverance, from guns to God’. It was hypocritical of me, but I never used drugs myself because I’d seen the damage they’d done to people who took them. THE ENCOUNTER When I started to be in these plays I loved it," Claude said. "I loved the process. I loved the rehearsal. I was the theater nerd that I always wanted to be." It won some awards," Claude said. "It was featured in two well-known Native American film festivals. Even if it didn’t cost a lot of money to make, it took a long time because we had to do it on weekends, and it took over two years to film.”