Another Special Life in Christ

These testimony lives are not stories of "role models". Jesus is the role model!
These are lives wonderfully touched & changed by Jesus!

Larstella "Star" Irby Parker:

Her 2016 video of her becoming an independent American, freed from the entrapment of the USA welfare system about 20 years ago, HERE. Her page on Wikipedia.

HERE: She has hosted her own radio talk show. She serves as a personal adviser to leaders in Congress. And her book, Pimps, Whores and Welfare Brats, arrived in bookstores in February [1997...205 pages]. Uncle Sam's Plantation is another book brought out in 2003. And she has formed The Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education which is doing phenominal work through organizations of mostly black pastors to educate them as to of the disastrous effects of liberalism on the black community, other minorities, and working class communities in general!

********Her Story & Testimony:

by Jennifer Ferranti June 1997 (from The Plain Truth On-line):

"When Star Parker steps up to a podium, it's hard to believe she ever helped rob a liquor store at gunpoint, aborted four babies in two years, or bilked the welfare system out of thousands of dollars. At 40 [born 1956...parents from Greenville, S. C.], she is a respected and enterprising [black] businesswoman, an articulate political activist and a devoted wife and mother.

"But there was a time in her life, Parker confesses, when she was a single woman living on the dole. In fact, she not only collected welfare, she exploited it.

" 'I was just fine living in my modern apartment with the subterranean garage, a fireplace and a jacuzzi,' she tells her audience. "I had no problem dropping my daughter off at a government-subsidized day care, selling off a few Medi-Cal stickers to buy drugs and hanging out at the beach all day.'

"In those days, white people were her enemies and the government was her provider, Parker explains. That changed one Sunday in 1983 when she listened to a sermon in a black church in Los Angeles. Parker suddenly realized she was the only one holding herself back, and God, not Uncle Sam, was her Source.

"Today, Parker is one of the nation's leading black conservatives and an outspoken advocate of welfare reform. From the streets of America's ghettos to the halls of Congress, she cries out: 'I am tired of the chronic complaining that black achievement is being undermined by institutional racism. Racism is not the issue that has driven our urban communities into crisis. Socialism is. The American Dream can only be achieved with limited government and more educational choices, economic opportunity and moral standards. Some people call these principles conservative. I call them common sense.' "

Larstella Is Born

Star Parker--Larstella Irby--was named after two aunts, Laura and Stella, when she was born on Thanksgiving Day 1956 in Moses Lake, Washington. Her father, a noncommissioned officer in the Air Force, was stationed there at the time. He was later transferred to Japan and moved his family with him.

When the Irbys returned from Japan in 1968, America was a different place.

Martin Luther King Jr. had just been assassinated, and America's cities were in turmoil. In the East St. Louis, Illinois, neighborhood where she then lived, the teachers were on strike and armed guards patrolled the schools.

"The playground was covered with glass, which we used to pick up and fling at the teachers," she recalls. "They were all white and the kids were all black, and we hated each other's guts."

It wasn't long before the tough little tomboy fell in with what would be considered a gang by today's standards. Always willing to go along with her friends, she began vandalizing school buildings and storefronts. Soon she was looting and burning cars. She helped mug soldiers as they passed by on their way to and from the military base. She tagged along on house burglaries. One night she even helped rob a liquor store at gunpoint...armed robbery! It was a miracle Larstella was arrested only once--for shoplifting a bathing suit at a department store. Horrified at  this last action, she sought a life change by moving to California.

"The older kids told me whites were the ones to blame for poverty and crime, and I believed them," she recalls. "For years, I used racism as an excuse to break the law and justify my behavior."

A Welfare Mother Is Born

When Parker graduated from high school, she got an apartment and a job as a record-store clerk and began saving her money to move to Hollywood. "I wanted to dance alongside Don Cornelius on Soul Train and experience the glamorous life," she remembers.

One day, a customer told Larstella the name Stella meant "star" in Italian. How perfect, she thought, adopting the nickname on the spot.

As soon as she had saved $300, Parker and her girlfriend tossed a few boxes of clothes and records into her brother's car, turned up their Funkadelics tape full blast and headed for the West Coast.

When the girls arrived in Los Angeles, they rented a small apartment in the mid-Wilshire district. Parker got a minimum wage job at a Fotomat store and spent her days hanging out at Venice Beach where "the supply of sunshine, good-looking guys and Angel Dust was plentiful."

It wasn't long before Parker was pregnant. Birth control was hardly necessary when abortion was so easy, she says. Still, an abortion cost $400.

The solution, her girlfriends told her, was "going on the county"--collecting welfare through Aid for Families With Dependent Children (AFDC). Parker learned that with a doctor's letter confirming her pregnancy, she was eligible for a monthly assistance check, food stamps and Medi-Cal (state medical benefit) stickers for prenatal care, eye exams and dental checkups. She could even use one of her Medi-Cal stickers for a free abortion.

No one in the Irby family had ever gone on welfare, so Parker was reluctant to apply for the handout. Instead, she paid $200 to a friend for one of her Medi-Cal stickers and used that for her first abortion.

Six months later, Parker was pregnant again. This time she headed straight for the welfare office.

"Going on the county allowed me to quit my job at the Fotomat store and live on the county for three months until I had my next abortion," Parker says. "I had only been earning $90 a week at the Fotomat. Now I was getting about $460 a month from AFDC welfare, plus $80 in federal-government food stamps." She soon discovered she could generate another $400 to $800 a month by illegally selling her surplus Medi-Cal stickers.

Over the next two years, Parker became pregnant five times. Four times, she went on welfare for three months, then had an abortion and resumed her partying lifestyle. When she became pregnant the fifth time, she decided to keep the baby.

"By now I was a pro at working the system," Parker says. "Once my welfare was squared away, my next move was to find a job that paid $100 a week under the table."

Someone steered her to a small advertising agency owned by three black men. However, the owners informed her they didn't pay under the table because they were Christians.

"In fact," Parker recalls, "they told me that with my attitude I couldn't even work there because I had to be born again. It was the first time I had ever heard that term. And so I asked them, 'What is that?' They told me that my present lifestyle was unacceptable to God. Then they read the Bible to me and prayed with me."

The first chance she found, she "got out of there," Parker says.

The staff from the advertising agency called Parker frequently, but she paid little attention.

A few months later, she was rushed to the emergency room, suffering from a life-threatening blood infection. It was a miracle she survived the premature delivery of her baby girl, Angel.

For the next week, Parker lay in the hospital, feeling lost and alone. No one visited or called her. Then she remembered Kenneth from the advertising agency. Hadn't he said she could call him anytime? Kenneth was happy to hear from her. He prayed with her on the telephone and visited her in the hospital.

Star Is Born Again

After Parker went home, Kenneth and his associates continued to prod her to go to church with them. Finally she agreed to meet them one Sunday morning at Crenshaw Christian Center, a 4,000-member congregation in South Central Los Angeles.

"There was something in that building that sent chills through my body," she says. She decided to return a few weeks later.

On her next visit, Parker met Paula and Gerald, a young married couple who invited her over for lunch after the service. Parker was impressed by their nice tract home. The last "real" house she had been in was her parents' seven years earlier.

After lunch, the two women sat talking over a cup of coffee. Paula mentioned that she was a stay-at-home mom. Parker was incredulous.

This lifestyle is not for black people in America, she remembers thinking. This was how white folks on TV lived.

Parker began considering a different life for herself. She was still living on welfare and occasionally partying with her old friends. But one Sunday, when the pastor gave an altar call, Parker gave her life to Jesus.

"When my pastor preached 'no sex before marriage,'" Parker says, "I vowed to get all those nasty men out of my life and abstain from sex until I got married." And when he said, "No more drugs," Parker quit her habit cold turkey. She even enrolled at Woodbury University, a business college in Los Angeles, where she earned a marketing degree.

"But of all the changes in my life, getting off welfare was the toughest," Parker admits. She finally did it one Sunday morning when her pastor looked out over the congregation and bellowed: "What are you doing on welfare? The government is not your source! God is your source!"

"I kept thinking about the sermon all the way home on the bus," she remembers. "By the time I got back to my apartment, I knew what I had to do."

On Monday morning, she called her social worker and told her to stop sending her welfare checks. "And just how are you going to survive?" the social worker ridiculed. Parker informed her: "God is my source. He's going to take care of me."

Parker had no trouble finding a full-time job. But for some time, she had been weighing the idea of starting her own business. Soon she launched a monthly publication that listed all the social activities sponsored by the black Christian churches of Los Angeles.

Parker decided to name her magazine Not Forsaking the Assembling (NFTA), based on Hebrews 10:25. She typed the first issue on a borrowed typewriter, paid for the printing of 10,000 copies by selling ads to local businesses and distributed the publication free of charge.

NFTA was a hit. Over the next year, Parker sold $50,000 in ads and published 10 issues. It was hard work, and many months the income she drew didn't match what she had formerly received on welfare. "But then a welfare check is no substitute for the pride and self-satisfaction that comes from the fruits of your own labor," the new entrepreneur concluded.

Before long, the publication expanded to include feature articles and political commentary, which prompted Parker to do a story about [former pro football great] Rosey Grier's community service & ministry in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. That's where she met Peter Pentecost Parker, a white pastor 15 years older than her.

Star was touched by Peter's heart for ministry and the special bond he immediately established with her daughter. That night, as Star tucked her 5-year-old into bed, Angel said she wished Peter was her daddy.

Over the next several months, Star and Peter learned what they shared in common was far greater than the differences between them. They were married in March 1985.

Together they expanded NFTA to 64 pages, with annual advertising revenues of $180,000 and a staff of eight. The Parker family grew, too. Rachel was born in 1988.

But the Parkers' American Dream came to an abrupt halt on April 29, 1992, when a jury acquitted the police officers accused of beating Rodney King. By evening, parts of Los Angeles were engulfed in riots.

Throughout the night, the Parkers watched many of their advertisers' businesses go up in flames. Within 30 days, the Parkers' monthly advertising revenues plummeted from $18,000 to $2,000.

"Black spokespersons like Jesse Jackson and Maxine Waters suggested the solution to the chaos was to create some government jobs for these hoodlums," Star says.

"Meanwhile, I had to shut down my magazine and lay off good, honest, hardworking people who did not go out looting and burning at the first sign of disorder. I was angry, and I vowed not to stay silent as the liberals attempted to turn the riots into another reason to fill black neighborhoods with more social programs for hoodlums."

Two weeks after the riots began, Vice President Dan Quayle delivered his famous "Murphy Brown" speech in San Francisco.

Among other proposals, he insisted America needed reforms placing time limits on welfare benefits and requiring recipients to work or go to school.

"That's right!" Star exclaimed when she heard Quayle's remarks. She knew all about the welfare trap. She had also learned how to free herself from it.

"Star, you have a message that needs to be heard," urged a friend, Steve Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition. "Let me fax some of your statements to the media." Star agreed, and a black-female conservative was born. [Rush Limbaugh took quite an interest in her.] Her phone hasn't stopped ringing since.

The Parkers now live in Orange County, California, where Peter is enrolled in seminary at St. Michael's Charismatic Episcopal Church. Star continues worked in the black community through the Coalition on Urban Affairs, an organization she founded to provide a black conservative response to urban issues. This may have morphed into her current organization, Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE). And as welfare reform has climbed to the top of the nation's political agenda, Star Parker has become one of its most vocal advocates. Last summer, she addressed the National Republican Convention. She has debated Jesse Jackson, gangsta rappers and other black liberals on network television.

But while Star addresses some of America's most pressing political problems, her message remains inspiringly spiritual. "God is our source," she says. "He is the way out of the ghetto." Check out many articles on line about Star, her books, YouTube videos; and consider helping her as she works through black pastors and other leaders to show the way OFF of Uncle Sam's Plantation! Others breaking into the mainstream since 2016 with hopes of encouraging blacks to get off of Uncle Sam's Plantation and be independent thinkers are Candice Owens (BLEXIT), Kanye West (BLEXIT founder), Dr. Ben Carson, Thomas Sowell, Allen West, Condolezza Rice, and Alan Keyes.

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(posted 24 March 2002; latest addition 29 October 2016)

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You have just read a very brief example of the powerful, supernatural transformation of a person's life which is possible through the acceptance of Jesus as your savior. Are you tired of life as it now is for you? He will accept you just as you are right this second! Consider accepting Jesus now [check it out]!