STREET PREACHER SAYS MORE `WACOS' WAITING TO HAPPEN

He's an unorthodox street preacher with a big family who drives a 1977 Ford station wagon with Texas plates and a "Soul Patrol" sticker on the back. Ever since David Koresh and the Branch Davidians burst into the headlines last spring, Timothy Shoults hasn't always found welcome mats as he Jesus-talks his way across the country.

The police inevitably come by, he says, wanting to know when he, his wife Joyce, their five children ages 3 months to 14 years and two young traveling companions will be leaving.

The station wagon is stuffed with their belongings a tent, bedding, kits for making signs and buttons (their income sources), boxes of books and tomato plants.

They've been spending their days at Capaha Park during the past week. When he sits and reads his worn Bible, the 36-year-old Shoults says, people gather around to hear his views about the Gospel.

He calls himself "an absolute literalist. I keep the commandments." As such, he won't allow his picture to be taken, considering photographs graven images.

Each night here, the Shoultses have depended upon the kindness of strangers for lodging. Their first night in town, the Ministerial Alliance provided a motel room. Monday night, some teenagers put them up in what would have been called a crash pad in the '60s.

Shoults has much in common physically and philosophically with the Jesus freaks who sprang from the hippie culture of the '60s. Bearded and barechested, he wore a sheet around his waist and rolled his own cigarettes.

He is an evangelical preacher whose model is the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi. He rejects the concept of ordination by man I don't very often offend sinners," he said. "I have a hard time with preachers.

He also doesn't think people need sumptuous churches. "Jesus was a carpenter. If he wanted us to have a building he would have left us blueprints."

Mainstream churches usually won't give him a chance to talk to their congregations. "The prosperity doctrine is very big the idea that God wants you to be rich," he said.

"They won't accept that God would want anybody to live like this."

But living like this has energized his ministry, Shoults says. "I could never get anywhere with people when I had a three-piece suit and a Bible. Since I've joined (the street people) I've had nothing but success."

"...The message is not to join a church, get a job and pay tithes," he said. "The message is to get to know Jesus Christ."

The young men, brothers Jeremiah and Peter Crook, hooked up with the Shoultses in Waco. The family was living there during the standoff at the Branch Davidian compound. Shoults had never heard of Koresh, but they drove to the compound to tell Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms officers how to persuade Koresh to give up. Shoults was jailed for five days for his trouble.

The ATF wasn't interested, he said. "They said, `We're going to get them all."

He predicts there will be more Wacos as the millennium approaches and evangelical groups who believe the "rapture" is upon us become more and more stressed. They believe the church will be persecuted and that economic collapse is imminent.

Koresh was one of those evangelicals who believed the way to survive the times of tribulation is to "go and hide and get a gun," Shoults said.

"I'm a pacifist. I'm one that believes I'm going to go down singing."

More paranoia is not called for, Shoults said.

"I know there are crazies out there, but just because they have a different point of view doesn't mean they're dangerous."

In a few days they're heading for Bowling Green, Ky., site of one of the Rainbow Gatherings expected to draw about 20,000 people who mostly share Shoults' choice in lifestyle.

Their gas tank is almost empty, there's very little food, but none of them seems concerned.

"We'll just go on faith," Shoults said.