13 Nov 2010

Cults on campus: how to spot recruiting techniques of predator conmen



New Jersey News Room - December 1, 2009

Predators on campus: An inside look at cults in New Jersey

BY JILLIAN RISBERG


Cults are probably the last thing on your mind when considering a place of higher learning for your son or daughter, but these groups regularly use college campuses to enlist kids aching for a sense of community far from the glare of discipline.

“The myth most people have is that people that join cults are looking to join a cult,” says William Goldberg, a licensed clinical social worker with a private practice in Englewood, New Jersey, who co-leads a support group for ex-cult members. “It’s usually not the case. Cult recruiters are predators and learn how to be good conmen. Healthy kids are more likely to get involved because they feel ‘if I don’t like it,’ I can leave.”

That’s not always so easy, as cults smother new recruits with affection to convince them to stay, a tactic known as “love-bombing.” This behavior often escalates to manipulation, threats, intimidation and mind control. Eventually they cut the person off from friends and family so the cult remains the driving influence.

They even have it down to a science – Goldberg says the cult blankets an area by fundraising or proselytizing there, and then sets its sights on bright students who are in a period of transition. Colleges are ripe with them.

Individuals believes they are being invited to join a religious, political or social group, but the cult often hides their true intention and the degree they’re going to attempt to take over a person’s life.

According to Rick Ross, of the Rick A. Ross Institute of New Jersey, groups called “cults” that have a history of recruiting on college campuses include the Unification Church, International Church of Christ, University Bible Fellowship, Transcendental Meditation, Scientology, Soka Gakkai International, Dahn Yoga, International Society of Krishna Consciousness, Kabbalah Center, Falun Gong, National Labor Federation, the Lyndon LaRouche Executive Intelligence Report (EIR), Prem Rawat/Elan Vital formerly known as Divine Light Mission, Twelve Tribes Messianic Communities, the Brethren led by Jim Roberts, Sri Chinmoy organization, Humana People-to-People associated with Tvind and Xenos Christian Fellowship.

And time has not slowed the proliferation of groups that lure young souls.

“Eighteen to 26-year-old college students have historically been the most targeted single demographic group,” Ross says.

He adds that there are cults operating on virtually every college campus, with Jersey as no exception, but the colleges aren’t likely to acknowledge such activity.

Both experts agree – to protect yourself, realize your own vulnerability and though it’s easy to be swept up in the intensity, make sure you thoroughly research an organization before moving forward.

During his tenure at Rutgers University in New Brunswick from 1989 to 2001, Father Ron Stanley, O.P., a former campus chaplain at the Catholic Center, says he became aware of a religious group, Campus Advance (part of the ICC) using high pressure and deception to take control of students’ lives. As a result, their recruits utilized the same unethical methods to scout for additional members and bring money into the cult.

An interfaith group of clergy stepped in and sponsored a panel, “Cults on Campus” that garnered sufficient publicity.

“We were able to get Rutgers to prepare and distribute a leaflet entitled, ‘Responding to High Pressure Groups on Campus’ and to include a skit on high pressure recruitment as part of its orientation for incoming students,” Stanley says.

Steve Hassan spent two years as a Unification Church (Moon cult) leader while a student at Queens College in the ‘70s and that early involvement left an indelible mark. Fresh off a breakup, three women claiming to be students approached him during a lunch break. He asked if they were part of a religious group and Hassan says, “They flat out lied.”

A leading cult expert and licensed mental health counselor, Hassan has studied the phenomenon of free will for more than 30 thirty years and believes that through unethical deceptive recruiting and mind control techniques, including hypnosis and sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation and environmental control – a person can be reprogrammed to have a different belief structure and even a different identity.

“When I was in the ‘Moonies,’ my cult identity would suppress any negative thoughts against the group and re-label my feelings towards my family as satanic,” Hassan says.

Can such brainwashing be reversed? Hassan says if a person has a monumental dissolutive experience, one may wake up to how one is being bullied - but more commonly, an erosion of the cult identity leads someone to incrementally question what’s going on.

He typically does three to five interventions a week and holds steadfast to the belief that making a difference in the lives of those affected by cults is possible.

With counseling, they’ll understand the issue of social influence and it will minimize any sense of guilt or embarrassment that they got involved with the group. Hassan also tries to connect them with ex-members, so they can talk to people who relate and won’t look at them and say, “They did what” or other less than helpful responses.

He offers some words of advice:

  • Remember that cult recruiters are attractive, intelligent, nice people and they don’t have a sign on them that reads, ‘cult member.’
  • Be wary of instant friendships; real friendships take time – and don’t disclose too many personal details with a stranger because they could use that information to manipulate you.
  • Many abusive relationship situations look like cults, except they’re just cultic personalities, religious cults.
  • Legitimate groups and people stand up to scrutiny.

Above all, Hassan says, “trust your gut (and) trust your inner voice.”

For more information:

William Goldberg or www.blgoldberg.com; Rick A. Ross Institute of New Jersey or www.rickross.com; Freedom of Mind or www.freedomofmind.com

This article was found at:

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/style/predators-on-campus-an-inside-look-at-cults-in-new-jersey


RELATED ARTICLES ON THIS BLOG

Their targets used to be university students, but today fringe religious groups are believed to be recruiting school-aged children.

Survivors in New Zealand documentary, How To Spot A Cult, reveal similar tactics used by cults with different belief systems

Japanese universities taking steps to protect students from cults

Cult survivor reveals deceptive recruiting tactics used by Scientology and similar cults

Exposing the abuses and frauds of cults makes advocate a target for regular legal and physical threats

The main difference between a religion and a cult is secrecy and total control of members lives

Books on cults, survivor stories, and recovery.


Video interview by Steve Hassan of top ex-Scientologist at international cult conference in New York


Video of former 30 year Scientologist discussing Jett Travolta based on her personal experiences of medical abuse


Cult exit counsellor gives speech, "Psychology of Mind Control Over Abducted Children", at Amber Alert symposium


Cult Recovery


Cult researcher reveals emotional cost of separation


Interview with psychologist Jill Mytton about religious abuse [VIDEO]


Cult Survivors: Was Membership Your Choice? [video]


How Cults Rewire The Brain [video]


Conquering coercion: Wellspring Retreat helps former cult members recover


Recovery workshop for people born or raised in cults


Apocalypticism is a simplistic but dangerous world view spreading rapidly like a toxic virus


Sects and sex abuse: battle of the apocalyptic sex cults


Kings and Queens of Cults


Australian cults "thriving under protection of politicians, police & courts" despite recent evidence of extreme abuse


Intentional ignorance and willful blindness keep members trapped in cults like Scientology


Lessons to be learned when cults make news


Closed societies conceal abuse of power


What makes a cult?


What makes a religious group a cult?


Cult Plus Time Equals Religion


UNSAFE SECTS: CULTS, CONSPIRACIES, AND SECRET SOCIETIES [book]


Cults reflect darker side of '60s rebellion for many children of the flower children


Stairway to Heaven: Treating children in the crosshairs of trauma


Family Radio apocalyptic cult says the Bible guarantees Jesus will return on May 21, 2011


Apocalypticism is a simplistic but dangerous world view spreading rapidly like a toxic virus


Canadian apocalyptic cult leader who maimed and murdered followers in religious rituals killed in prison


Apocalyptic cult leader dies, doomsday predictions never materialized


Confused California cult leader just the latest false prophet to endanger followers with apocalyptic fever


Apocalyptic Arizona cult controls members, competes with Scientology for weirdest sci-fi cult


Russian sex cult leader "from the star Sirius" charged with rape, sexual abuse and human rights violations


Novel Faiths Find Followers Among Russia's Disillusioned


Waiting for Armageddon


Sect members dig tunnel, await apocalypse in Central Russia


Cult leader seeks to free children, official says


Second group of cult followers awaits apocalypse in Penza, Russia


Sects and sex abuse: battle of the apocalyptic sex cults


Cult survivors reveal deranged mind of messianic leader of Australian cult Zion Full Ministry


Self-proclaimed prophets: Phillip Garrido, David Berg and Joseph Smith


The Making of a Twisted Sexual Theology: Q+A on "Jesus Freaks"


Enslaved by the cult of sex...for 25 years


UK survivor confirms mother's fears about abusive cult The Family International that tried to recruit her teen daughter


Fugitive leaders of The Family International found hiding in Mexico after former members sought psychological help


Family International a.k.a. Children of God: Once dismissed as 'sex cult,' tiny church launches image makeover


This Is What Wolves In Sheep's Clothing Look Like

A RESPONSE TO JAMES D. CHANCELLOR'S LIFE IN THE FAMILY: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE CHILDREN OF GOD


Castleconnell area was base for child sex cult, claims victim

Violent sexual abuse, brainwashing and neglect: What it's like to grow up in a religious sect


Underside of cult life emerges

The offspring of 'Jesus Freaks'

The Tragic Legacy of the Children of God

Not Without My Sister [book review]

Cult Activity in Uganda?

Cult Claims To Be "Living by the law of love"

Children of God: Haunted By a Dark Past

Child-Custody Deal Favors Escapee of Notorious Cult 'The Family' aka The Children of God

Cambodian NGO exposed as a charity front for The Family International cult

Member of San Francisco pop duo, Girls, is a survivor of notorious Children of God cult, a.k.a. The Family International
Posted by Perry Bulwer at 11:52

38 comments:

  1. Perry Bulwer31 May 2012 at 14:37

    Universities learned the lesson of cult mischief, get proactive

    The Japan Times Thursday, May 31, 2012

    Kyodo - Toshiyuki Tachikake, an associate professor at Osaka University, pointed to a close-up picture of a man and asked his class of first-year students if they knew who the figure was. Only a few, perhaps about 30 percent, raised their hands.

    The person projected on the screen was Shoko Asahara, the infamous Aum Shinrikyo founder who is on death row for masterminding the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system and other crimes.

    The students' response reflects how memories of heinous incidents involving cults — even Aum, the worst of the lot — are gradually fading away and how the older generation has failed to educate young people about what happened.

    Tachikake's class in early May was part of a compulsory course on various aspects of college life for incoming students at Osaka University. While also covering problems such as alcohol and drugs, Tachikake and his colleagues devoted a significant portion of the course to the dangers of cults.

    "It's a university's social responsibility to prevent (students from being recruited into) cults," Tachikake says, while stressing that attention is paid to ensure freedom of religion.

    Osaka University, some of whose graduates were among the highly educated members of Aum involved in the sarin gas attack in Tokyo and another in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, in 1994, is known for being one of the colleges that began tackling the issue of cults early on.

    But even though cults' recruiting efforts on university campuses made headlines in the past, many students today appear to be unaware of this danger.

    Even today, so-called religious groups continue to recruit students by initially identifying themselves as campus sports, music or volunteer clubs.

    "There are many camouflaged groups out there," said Tachikake. "The problem is that they do not follow the rules of communication and fail to disclose accurate information (about their activities)."

    At Taisho University, a Buddhist school in Tokyo, religious scholar Tatsuya Yumiyama told some 100 students in his introductory course on religion: "You're probably thinking only weirdos join cults. Well, you're wrong.

    "You may think that a 'sempai' (senior student) with high aspirations gives you a helping hand and prays for you, and with 100 percent good intent," said Yumiyama, a professor known for his research on Aum and expertise on the relationship between young people and religion. "But that is illegal soliciting."

    continued in next comment...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Perry Bulwer31 May 2012 at 14:37

    continued from previous comment:

    To illustrate how often it is the most serious-minded students who fall prey to the repeated cycle of cult recruiting, he told the class of a case in which a university student joined a such a cult out of admiration for a sempai and ended up having to quit school.

    At the same time, Yumiyama stressed the importance of learning about true religion.

    He said many students told him after the class that they now realize how wrong they had been to think they would not be deceived by cult members.

    Kenji Kawashima, president of Keisen University, a Christian women's school in Tokyo, warns that cults have grown increasingly sophisticated in their recruiting tactics.

    For example, cultists passing themselves off as members of volleyball or other sports clubs will rent and host activities in gyms at public elementary schools to give their targets a false sense of security, Kawashima said.

    Also, as universities have stepped up measures against cults, recruiters have shifted to younger marks — high school students. Of particular interest are those preparing for their university entrance exams.

    Cult members typically approach such students as they cram for their tests in coffee shops and other public places, he said.

    Kawashima, a former pastor, said the shock from the Aum incidents prompted him to look into cult activity in Japan. He and others founded a nationwide network of universities to address the problem. It now numbers about 150 schools.

    He said his conviction that religious belief is important weighs heavily when he considers that students, aspiring to do good in society and thinking seriously about their futures, have been drawn into cults, where they have suffered both psychologically and financially.

    "I believe that had they not been taken into the cults, they would have been promising and talented members of society," he said. "It's a tough job, but one worth doing."

    http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120531f4.html

    ReplyDelete
  3. Perry Bulwer29 March 2013 at 14:49

    Shower baptisms, Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ: the Korean church recruiting Manchester students

    Andrew Williams investigates the World Mission Society Church of God, a mysterious Korean church hoping to convert you on your doorstep

    By Andrew Williams, THE MANCUNION MARCH 28, 2013

    “Imagine this is earth,” says Samuel, using the lid of a Pringles tube to illustrate his point, “and here’s heaven. The most valuable thing you can imagine on earth is less valuable than the least valuable thing in heaven. God sees this planet as a speck of dust.”

    At the age of 24, Samuel has left his home in London to live with members of a little-known church in Manchester. Pleasant, inquisitive and well-educated, he is far from the type of person you might imagine to join such an organisation, and yet he is utterly consumed by his new-found faith.

    The somewhat cumbersomely-named World Mission Society Church of God has accumulated 1.7 million members worldwide in its fifty year history. Whilst some of the basic tenets of the church’s teachings are in common with the more established branches of Christianity, it only takes a fleeting discussion with one of their members to realise that there is plenty that sets it apart; a leader revered as the Second Coming of Christ, a rejection of worship on Sundays, and a fervent belief that we are living in the ‘end times.’

    Founded in South Korea in 1964, its leader, Ahn Sahng-Hong, proclaimed himself to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ during his lifetime, joining a less than illustrious list of Messianic claimants including Charles Manson and the former BBC Sport presenter David Icke. Upon his death in 1985, Ahn’s ‘spiritual wife’, Zahng Gil-Jah, assumed leadership of the church. To believers, they are God the Mother and God the Father; the female aspect of God being a vital component of their faith.

    WMSCOG has gained quite a following in Manchester and the group has become increasingly prominent in recent times. After members of the group visited his house in Fallowfield, Religion and Political Life postgraduate student James Jackson brought the group to The Mancunion’s attention, telling us of reports that the church have been going door to door in student areas in an attempt to recruit new members.

    “When they came to my house they said they were theology students giving a presentation. Having studied theology for three years, I said I wasn’t interested in what they had to say, but they were extremely insistent,” James explained. “Once inside they opened straight up on the book of Revelation and started talking about Satan. It became clear that they were trying to convince me that the Roman Catholic Church was Satanic. At one point when I protested, I was accused of being in league with the Catholics and therefore, implicitly, Satan.”

    He continued: “I was alarmed to find out that one of the members had only joined a month ago and was already living communally with them and acting as an evangelist.”

    As suspected, James is not alone in having been visited by the group. Indeed, it appears that WMSCOG members are actively targeting student areas in their attempt to recruit new members. Reverend Dr Terry Biddington, the University of Manchester’s Chaplain to Higher Education, expressed concerns about the group’s tactics. “We are aware that this group goes ‘cold calling’ door to door and tries to pressurise students to attend meetings. Apparently one student dropped out of university having joined,” he told us.

    continued in next comment...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Perry Bulwer29 March 2013 at 14:50

    Though we have been unable to confirm whether this is the case, we have spoken to several students who have encountered members of the church. Jonnie Breen, a second year History student, was perhaps more polite than most when the church’s followers pitched up on his doorstep in early September.

    Having lived in South Korea for much of his childhood, Jonnie was amenable to the Korean trio who came to his house. “There were three of them, and they basically asked if they could come in and show me a presentation,” he recalls. “I got talking to them about Korea so we struck up a bit of a rapport, but before long they were pressing – fairly hard – for me to be, in their words, baptised by them. They weren’t intimidating, and I didn’t want to tell them to fuck off, but they kept coming back to this baptism.”

    Jonnie was told in no uncertain terms that his prospects were bleak unless he accepted the church’s teachings. “They said, ‘unless everyone recognises what we recognise, and formally accept it, you’re going to go to hell; but we can save you by baptising you, we can do it in your shower.’ That’s the point when I remember starting to get freaked out. They kept repeating themselves; ‘we can do it really easily in your shower, right here.’ They repeated it maybe three or four times and I said, look, I really don’t want to do that, but I’d be happy to come and see you at your church.”

    A month later, Jonnie made good on his promise. “They picked me up from my house, and this time there were some local Mancunians who had joined the church. As we drove in I realised that I wasn’t just there to have some food with a bunch of Korean guys. They showed me a half hour long film they had made about their church all around the world.”

    Though he didn’t feel physically threatened, the rhetorical bombardment made Jonnie feel “uncomfortable.” It was the last time he spoke to anyone from the church, but not for the want of trying on their part. “Perhaps stupidly, I gave them my phone number. They kept calling me – probably about four times a week for a month after I had visited the church. They’ve stopped calling now but it shows how incredibly persistent they are.”

    Gemma Reed, who has just completed a Masters degree in History of Science, Technology and Medicine, is another student who was recently visited by members of the World Mission Society Church of God. No mentions of shower baptisms here, but much of her experience tallies with those of James and Jonnie.

    “They’ve actually been round a couple of times,” Gemma tells me. “A young Korean girl came to my door the first time around. She said that she was doing a theology presentation and she wanted to practice it on us. I was shown a video about all of the work that the church does in the community, and whilst we were watching it she told us the Bible predicted nuclear Armageddon, and that we could save ourselves by joining the church. It didn’t really make any sense.”

    “I was just really aware of how vulnerable she was,” Gemma continues. “What she was saying to me was obviously a script. It was basically a load of small shreds of evidence which were picked from here, there and everywhere and put together to form this kind of mosaic which fits their narrative. But they really believe it, and I respect them for that.”

    continued in next comment...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Perry Bulwer29 March 2013 at 14:51

    Having not been visited by any members of the church myself, James and I arranged to meet with two members of the church to discuss their faith. The aforementioned former student, Samuel, is here with his friend Lot, a South Korean student who has moved to Manchester to spread the word of the church. Whilst Lot was born into the church, I am intrigued as to why Samuel elected to join of his own volition.

    “I was interested in learning about the truth, because there are a lot of lies out there,” he tells us. On the evening that we meet, white smoke emerges from the chimney of the Vatican to signal the election of a new Pope. How do Samuel and Lot feel about Catholicism?

    “Unknowingly, the Catholics worship a Sun God, because God never instituted Sunday as a day or worship,” Samuel explains. It’s a claim which would doubtless offend many Christians, and possibly some of the students whom the church are attempting to recruit. With that in mind, I ask how students tend to react them. “People are mostly quite nice, but sometimes they just say ‘go away’. It depends,” Lot tells me.

    Over the course of the next hour, the pair going into great detail in an attempt to explain to me why they are convinced that their leader, Ahn Sahng-Hong, was the Second Coming of Christ. Lot retrieves a heavily highlighted Bible from his bag, along with a huge tome embossed with the words ‘EVIDENCE BOOK’. I am shown numerous passages from the Bible which mention Christ’s Second Coming emerging ‘in the east’ or ‘from the farthest corner of the earth.’ With the help of a map, a hastily drawn timeline and a host of nonsensical charts, he is attempting to convince me that the Bible prophesised that the reincarnated Christ would come from South Korea.

    I am keen to delve deeper into their belief that we are living in the ‘end times’. The World Mission Society Church of God is adamant that Armageddon will be visited upon the Earth in our lifetime – does the thought not consume them with fear? “No, it makes me happy,” Samuel tells me cheerily. “We don’t have to be scared, because if we receive salvation we can go to heaven.”

    Frankly, I am quite terrified at the thought of the imminent destruction of the earth, and no less concerned by the fact that Samuel and Lot believe it to be the case. However, my overwhelming feeling is one of sympathy towards two young men who, to my mind, harbour such a bleak outlook. James Jackson echoes my thoughts shortly after we leave the pair.

    “I don’t think that the church is sinister,” he says, thinking aloud. “They seem to have a degree of freedom lacking in some other new religious movements. In a pluralistic society like ours everyone has a right to their beliefs, however intolerant or strange.”

    continued in next comment...

    ReplyDelete
  6. Perry Bulwer29 March 2013 at 14:51

    James is, however, concerned by the church’s determined pursuit of new student members. “I worry about the reports of a student dropping out of university, and their posing as theology students to enter student houses. Students are at a vulnerable time in their life and evangelistic groups can take advantage of that.”

    Ian Haworth succumbed to such an organisation in the late ‘70s. Having been “brainwashed” by a woman who stopped him in the street to tell him about her organisation, he resigned from his job and gave the church $1,500 – all the money he had. Though he quickly left, it took him many years to recover from the experience. He now runs Cult Information Centre, an organisation which monitors the activity of mysterious religious and political movements.

    Haworth is reluctant to use the ‘c word’ – cult, that is – but suggests that there are legitimate grounds for concern about the group. “We have had a couple of calls from people who are concerned about the World Mission Society Church of God. We have taken these calls seriously and it is a group about which we are concerned,” he told The Mancunion.
    “People who become involved in groups such as this one tend to be people who have changed and, according to family and friends, changed for the worse. Personality changes are a very common phenomenon in the field, and certainly in the two cases we’ve dealt with that is the claim of the families.”

    Haworth believes he has an explanation for the church’s focus on recruiting University of Manchester students as new members. “The easiest people to recruit are usually described as people with average to above average intelligence, well-educated people, people who come from an economically advantaged family background, and they’re usually people who are described as caring.”

    “Whilst they can be of any age, the average person who is recruited has probably been in higher education in the past if they are not already in it. Students are easy targets, and because students are smart, they assume that it is people who are lacking in some way who get involved; and that it could never happen to them, because they think that strength of mind and intelligence are things that would perhaps safeguard them. But that’s a complete and utter myth.”

    http://mancunion.com/2013/03/18/shower-baptisms-armageddon-and-the-second-coming-of-christ-the-korean-church-recruiting-students-in-manchester/

    ReplyDelete
  7. Perry Bulwer5 September 2013 at 16:24

    Wheel Of Fortune Star Vanna Whites Teenage Son Joins Hare Krishna Religious Cult

    Radar online September 3, 2013

    Bad grades, partying too much, relationship trouble — that’s what most parents have to worry about when their kids head off to school. But Wheel of Fortune glamazon Vanna White is struggling with an even more terrifying issue as her son Nikko is reportedly being “brainwashed” by a dangerous religious cult!

    The National ENQUIRER has all the details on the scary situation involving the University of Arizona sophomore.

    According to the ENQUIRER, Vanna’s son was swept into the infamous Hare Krishna cult after meeting 34-year-old monk Jaycee Akinsanyaas a freshman. The two now live together near campus and the magazine claims Nikko even asked his parents to give the man $1 million to build a new ashram!

    Vanna and the boy’s father, her ex, George Santo Pietro, were adamant that they wouldn’t lend their financial support to their son’s new friend, so Jaycee told Nikko that his parents have got to go.

    “Since then Akinsanya has been reminding Nikko that he should follow his own path and advance his spiritual life,” a source told the mag. “It’s like Akinsayna is trying to brainwash him!”

    Indeed, a cult expert explains, that’s been textbook behavior for the Hare Krishnas for decades.

    “They pressure members to reject family members and friends and even quit their jobs to live in the temple full time and serve the guru,” Nori Muster, a Hare Krishna member from 1978 to 1988 and author of Betrayal of the Spirit: My Life Behind the Headlines of the Hare Krishna Movement tells the ENQUIRER.

    “They also pressure members into giving their inheritances, bank accounts and material possessions to the guru.”

    Since Vanna is worth $40 million and her restaurateur ex sold a home in 2011 for $23.5 million, Muster says Nikko is a clear target.

    But Nikko insists he’s just building his own life, like many other college students.

    “Jaycee has not brainwashed me,” he told the ENQUIRER. “I didn’t ask my parents for a million dollars for a new Ashram. The money I asked for was for my living expenses — food, gas and for living my spiritual life with Jaycee.”

    For more details about the alleged monk’s shady past and troubles with the law, pick up the latest issue of the National Enquirer on newsstands Thursday.

    http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2013/09/wheel-of-fortune-vanna-white-son-cult-hare-krishna/

    ReplyDelete
  8. UberGenius21 March 2014 at 15:19

    I started attending Xenos back when it was known as Fishhouse. I was there for 7 years and the doctrine was thoroughly orthodox. There was a great sense of community and a sincere desire to love God in both intellectual and practical ways. However the immaturity of the Senior Pastor produced a very cult-like style.

    Typical leadership behaviors passed down from the Senior Pastor to local homechurch leaders seen at Xenos between 1980-1987:

    Manipulative

    They never recognized the rights of others and see their self-serving behaviors as permissible. They appear to be charming, yet are covertly hostile and domineering, seeing members as merely an instrument to be used. They dominate and humiliate their members.

    Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt

    Often when manipulation or humiliation didn't work the leaders would expose a deep-seated rage. They didn't appear to see others around them as people, but only as targets and opportunities. Instead of friends, they have victims and accomplices who end up as victims. The end always justifies the means and they let nothing stand in their way.

    Poor Behavioral Controls/Impulsive Nature

    Rage and abuse, alternating with small expressions of love and approval produce an addictive cycle for leader and member. Many of the leaders believe they were entitled to every wish, no sense of personal boundaries, no concern for their impact on others. The followers see them as near perfect.

    Leadership meetings would involve being cussed out and humiliated by the head Pastor for "not hitting your !@#$ing growth numbers." Much time was devoted to gossip about members of the home groups under the guise of "planning their spiritual development".

    In short, they exhibited many of the qualities of antisocial personality disorder (Sociopathy) stemming again from the one central extremely influential leader.

    I left knowing much more about scripture, evangelism, discipleship and community (all orthodox)than when I joined. These things I learned were also, to be fare, probably a result of this same Senior Pastor (and for that I am grateful). I also left with a notebook labeled "Abusive Leadership" filled with hundreds of things that I swore I would never do as a leader of a local church.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Perry Bulwer10 March 2015 at 10:37

    Tucson ministry a cult former followers say

    By Carol Ann Alaimo, Emily Bregel Arizona Daily Star investigation March 07, 2015

    The University of Arizona is investigating a religious group that more than 20 former members and staffers describe as a cult.

    Faith Christian Church, which is led by a self-proclaimed former criminal, has operated on the UA campus for 25 years. It is initially welcoming, then slowly imposes control over most facets of members’ lives, an Arizona Daily Star investigation found.

    The Star interviewed 21 former employees and church members — most of them UA alumni — and nine of their parents. Their stories include reports of hitting infants with cardboard tubes to encourage submission, financial coercion, alienation from parents, public shaming of members and shunning of those who leave the church or question its leaders. Some say that since leaving, they’ve spent years in therapy for panic attacks, depression, flashbacks and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

    Methods the church has used, as described by former members and staffers, meet all five warning signs for “religious practices gone awry” listed on the website of the UA’s University Religious Council.

    “The best word I can think of is ‘insidious.’ It starts off subtle,” says ex-member Scott Moore, 32, who graduated from the UA in 2005 with a degree in agriculture.

    Moore says his self-esteem hit rock bottom after he joined Faith Christian in 2000 at age 17. Church leaders’ criticism and authoritarianism caused him near-constant anxiety during his five years as a member, he says.

    Some ex-members and their parents say the UA should have acted long ago to investigate the church and the campus ministries it lists as affiliates: Wildcats for Christ, Native Nations in Christ and the Providence Club. But the university must abide by an Arizona law requiring all state agencies to “neither inhibit nor promote religion,” says Melissa Vito, the UA’s senior vice president in charge of student affairs.

    The UA wasn’t previously aware of what the Star’s investigation found, Vito says. It doesn’t monitor groups for signs of trouble, but relies on formal complaints related to current students. Former Faith Christian members say the way the church operates makes that difficult because the church often tightens its grip after students graduate.

    The UA can restrict the activities of student groups on campus if they’re not following UA’s standard of conduct. All groups, religious or not, are expected to provide “a positive experience for students,” Vito says.

    The investigation began a few weeks ago after the mother of a UA junior from Los Angeles contacted university administrators, alarmed by a “radical” shift in her son’s personality and behavior since he joined the church two years ago. Kathy Sullivan’s son told her he intends to abandon his planned career in business to become a campus minister for Faith Christian after graduation, she says. Their relationship has become so strained that she worries about losing him completely.

    “They get their members to believe that any questioning, any scrutiny, it’s the devil,” she says. “I want to get my son out of there. I want to do whatever I can to prevent other families from letting their children get in a situation like this.”

    Neither the group’s founder and head pastor, Stephen M. Hall, nor Hall’s neighbor and second-in-command, executive pastor Ian A. Laks, responded to repeated requests for comment over the past two weeks.

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  10. Perry Bulwer10 March 2015 at 10:39

    On Feb. 23, the Star provided Hall, 62, and Laks, 50, with detailed questions about the church’s alleged practices. The 42 questions were emailed to the contact address on the church’s website, as well as hand-delivered on Feb. 24 to the leaders’ west-side homes and mailed that day to the church’s post office box. The Star also left three voicemails at each of the families’ homes and three on the church’s office line. Finally, reporters reached out by telephone, Facebook or LinkedIn to 15 current members of the church staff. None responded.

    The church did provide a copy of its 2013 financial statement last week. Churches that are members of the national Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, as is Faith Christian, are required to provide the statement upon request to maintain their membership.

    Dan Busby, president of the Virginia-based Evangelical Council, says Faith Christian is a member in good standing and defended many of its practices.

    “The questions you have raised, compared to what we know about the church, does not give rise to a sensational story about the church,” he wrote in an email to the Star. “It is so easy for disgruntled folks who used to relate to a particular church to cast aspersions and create negative perceptions about churches that are doing good work.”

    VULNERABLE STUDENTS

    Faith Christian Church was founded in 1990 from the remains of the now-defunct Tucson chapter of Maranatha Christian Church, state records show. Florida-based Maranatha, which had chapters nationwide in the 1970s and ’80s, folded around 1990 amid allegations that its methods were authoritarian and posed a danger to college students on campuses where Maranatha recruited.

    Concerned parents told the Star that Faith Christian aggressively seeks out vulnerable young people and encourages some of them to give up their career paths to serve the church. Leaders also push them to cut ties with their families, parents say.

    Faith Christian is open about its goal of converting college-age youth, asserting in a 2012 YouTube video that “19 out of 20 people who become Christians do so before the age of 25.”

    Tyler Wachenfeld, the group’s associate pastor, says in the video, “The purpose of Faith Christian Church is to reach college students with the gospel during a very crucial time in their lives and to see them established in a local church, as the Holy Spirit leads.” Wachenfeld, who did not respond to two phone messages seeking comment for this story, is Hall’s son-in-law and one of 10 members of Hall’s family now on staff at the church.

    Weekly services — held in the auditorium at Amphitheater High School — are well-attended by an enthusiastic crowd. On a recent Sunday, nearly 400 people — the vast majority of them young adults — swayed together, hands in the air, many singing with their eyes closed as a 10-piece band played onstage.

    Faith Christian encourages some members, once they graduate, to become “campus ministers” who then work to bring other UA students into the fold. For example, they’ll stand outside dorms on move-in day and offer help, or they’ll approach students at random to take surveys that offer respondents a chance to win a bicycle or other prize.

    Rachel Mullis, 38, who was with the church from 1994 to 2004, recalls being “love-bombed” by ministers on her first day at the UA.

    “They shower you with attention and they’re super nice. They became my instant friends,” she says. “If they came right out and told you from the start that it’s a cult, you’d never get involved. They make it seem really amazing at first, then they hook you in little by little.”

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  11. Perry Bulwer10 March 2015 at 10:40

    To support themselves former campus ministers say they had to solicit donations from family, friends and strangers and hand over the money to a nonprofit subsidiary of the church. The church then pays them with that money — some told the Star they received as little as $400 a month.

    Dan Busby, of the Evangelical Council, says the concept “is often referred to as deputized support — an approach in which an individual staff member is responsible to secure gifts sufficient to cover their staff costs. This is a legitimate approach used by many organizations across the U.S. — for anyone to suggest otherwise suggests they are uninformed.”

    Faith Christian’s 2013 financial report shows that its campus ministry took in $880,203 in contributions and paid out $848,435 in salaries and benefits.

    Former campus minister Nick Puente, 32, who was raised in the church and left in 2005, says he once lived for a year on less than $10,000, support money he begged from friends, family and, sometimes, strangers. Puente says he survived on a diet of ramen noodles, boxed macaroni and cheese and cheap chicken quarters.

    Former member Lawrence Alfred, 38, says Faith Christian took away members’ freedom incrementally, over the course of years. He says he was penalized — in a ritual known as “casting the demons out” — for perceived infractions, such as spending too much time alone.

    “You don’t know yourself at the end,” says Alfred, who left in 2009 after nine years. “You don’t know you’re in a cult until you leave. Pretty soon, you’re at the point where you can’t make any decisions.”

    Alfred says that, until now, he’s never talked about what he calls his “traumatic” experience with Faith Christian.

    “I’m doing this for my kids,” he says of his decision to go public. “If they go off to college, I don’t want them to fall into the same trap.”

    JAILHOUSE CONVERSION

    Hall arrived in Tucson in the 1980s, ex-members say. Before that, he was living in Florida, and said he converted to Christianity while behind bars on drug charges in that state, they say.

    “I had cut a wide swath of destruction across the College of Agriculture at the University of Florida because I used my education to learn to breed and grow marijuana, and was arrested with just truckloads. ... Nothing to brag about,” Hall said during his Feb. 22 sermon at Faith Christian, which a Star reporter attended.

    “I was really a jerk,” he added.

    Former members say Hall tells tales of life as an outlaw, often from the pulpit. He talks about being busted for running a marijuana farm and working as an enforcer for a drug lord, beating up those who couldn’t pay their drug debts, recalls Nina Puente, 59, of Tucson. She says she’s known Hall since his Florida days and initially admired him, but left Faith Christian after 20 years in 2005 with her son, Nick, husband, Henry Puente, 59, and two other children.

    “Steve said he was sent to jail for growing what the sheriff’s department called ‘the best pot in the state of Florida,’” Nina Puente says. “He would brag about having looked down the barrel of a gun eight times.”

    The Star could not find records of Hall having a drug conviction. Records from Florida’s Miami-Dade County Police Department show he was arrested in 1976 because of an outstanding arrest warrant issued the previous year in Madison, Wisconsin. The warrant was for a charge of extortion. Details of the case are not available: Police agencies and the court clerk in Madison say they either have no record of the original warrant, or their records don’t go back to the 1970s.

    About six months out of jail, Hall was hired to lead a tiny Florida congregation affiliated with Maranatha Christian Church, Nina Puente says. He did not attend seminary, but that is not uncommon or troubling, says Dan Busby, of the Evangelical Council.

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  12. Perry Bulwer10 March 2015 at 10:41

    “The senior pastor has been with the church for 30 years, the executive pastor has been there for 28 years and the associate pastors have all served at the church for more than 16 years each,” Busby wrote. “To take the position that only seminary-trained individuals are qualified to pastor would be tantamount to suggesting that tens of thousands of pastors across the U.S. are unqualified — including my father, who pastored 73 years without even graduating from college.”

    Within a year or two, Hall left Florida and joined Marantha’s Tucson branch. Maranatha at one time oversaw dozens of ministries on college campuses before it shut down around 1990, Christianity Today reported.

    In Tucson, Maranatha changed its name to Faith Christian Church in 1990, Arizona Corporation Commission records show. Hall has been involved in Faith Christian and its predecessor since 1985.

    Claims that Faith Christian is less than a church come as a surprise to a former pastor in Tucson who worked with Hall in a local evangelical group.

    In the mid-2000s, Hall was president of the Tucson Association of Evangelicals, which has since disbanded. Dave Drum, who was also active with that group, speaks fondly of Hall’s work to forge partnerships between Tucson’s evangelical churches.

    Stories of Hall taking control of members’ lives “strikes me as very out of character,” Drum says. “I’ve heard some of the concerns over the years. There’s different perspectives, but I do not have any major concerns.”

    But Drum says he hadn’t heard about allegations that the church promotes corporal punishment for infants or that it tells members they will go to hell or suffer negative consequences if they leave Faith Christian. He would not support those teachings, if true, he says.

    “Most evangelical churches would not say that,” he says.

    CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

    Fourteen former staffers and church members, as well as three of their parents, told the Star that, at Hall’s urging, corporal punishment of children began in the crib.

    Some say they ended up leaving the church not long after their kids were born because they wouldn’t use Hall’s discipline methods.

    Spankings typically started soon after birth using a cardboard dowel taken from the bottom of a wire coat hanger, they say.

    “They train you as a parent that, once the babies are 8 weeks old, you have to lay them facedown. If the baby raises its head, that’s a sign of rebellion, so you smack them on the butt with the cardboard dowel,” says Rachiel Morgan, who earned a UA nursing degree in 1998 and worked for Faith Christian until 2008.

    “And you keep doing that over and over until the baby doesn’t put its head up again. And that’s how you train them to go to sleep.”

    Once children started standing and walking, the cardboard dowels were replaced by wooden spoons that sometimes left spoon-shaped bruises on toddlers’ buttocks, parents say.

    The marks never came to the attention of teachers or day-care providers because church children typically had limited contact with the outside world, former members say. Hall required that members’ children be home-schooled by their mothers, they say.

    Morgan, 38, and her ex-husband, Jeremy Morgan, 39, say they left the church when their second child was born. Their firstborn, who was 3 when the spankings stopped, still remembers them now at age 13, they say. Jeremy Morgan, now a nurse in Oklahoma, says it still pains him to recall the boy’s stoic reaction to the last spanking.

    “He just stared and let the tears fall, but he showed no sign of pain besides that. And I said, ‘Oh my gosh, what am I doing?’ I apologize to him every chance I get.”

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  13. Perry Bulwer10 March 2015 at 10:42

    Jeff Phillips 42 who graduated from the UA in 1995 with a political science degree, worked as an associate pastor at Faith Christian and its affiliates for more than a decade. He says he and his wife left in 2007 after church leaders pressured him to spank their second child. The boy turned out to have autism, which made him prone to verbal outbursts.

    The church saw the child’s behavior as evidence of willfulness, says Phillips, who attended Phoenix Seminary after leaving Faith Christian and now has a master’s degree in divinity.

    Ex-members say kids were spanked for typical childhood behaviors such as fidgeting, not finishing a meal or not falling asleep when put to bed.

    “The kids were unnaturally good,” says Jennifer Maynard, 38, who attended Faith Christian from 1997 to 2006. “They were like broken horses with all the spirit gone from them, and it broke my heart ... I remember thinking, ‘I’m so glad I’m not a parent right now.’”

    FINANCES AND CONTROL

    Church leaders were deeply involved in members’ personal finances, tracking how much they gave to the church, former followers say. Members were expected to donate at least 10 percent of their income, a biblical practice known as tithing, and the church disciplined those whose giving levels were deemed too low, ex-members say.

    Tithing and offerings accounted for $1 million in 2013, half of Faith Christian’s income for the year, its financial report shows.

    Connie Cohn, a member from 1982 to 1999, says church leaders criticized her family when their tithing levels dipped after her husband lost his job. When the Cohns said they couldn’t give anymore, elders asked them to leave the church, she says.

    In retrospect, she says, that was a blessing. “I thank God every day we got out when we did.”

    But for years, she says, she was haunted by warnings from church members, who had told her, “If you leave this church, I fear for you and I fear for your family.”

    Cody Ortmann, now 33 and living in San Francisco, says he still is hesitant to give money to a church after enduring Faith Christian’s scrutiny of his budget and insistence on tithing.

    “If you didn’t give 10 percent that week, you had to give double the next week,” says Ortmann, who graduated in 2005 with a double major in political science and sociology, and a minor in marine biology.

    When he graduated from the UA, Ortmann says church leaders asked him to become a campus minister. When he chose instead to do nonprofit work in Africa, he says church leaders told him he was no longer welcome, and all his former church friends stopped talking to him.

    “It’s something I look back on with embarrassment, because I wasn’t really strong enough to stand up for my own self,” he says. “I saw the red flags go off … and I didn’t do anything.”

    Requiring that members tithe “is very common in the evangelical church world,” says Dan Busby, of the Evangelical Council for Financial Responsibility.

    “The church appropriately teaches the congregation to be generous toward God with their lives and their financial resources,” he wrote to the Star. “The teaching of the church is based on their interpretation of the Bible on these issues — which ECFA respects.”

    Faith Christian rents space for Sunday services, currently at Amphi High School at a cost of $990 per week. The church’s assets have swelled from $200,000 in the mid-1990s to more than $5 million today, state and county records show. That includes a ranch as well as two cabins on Mount Lemmon that were rebuilt in 2013 at a cost of $1.38 million, its 2013 financial statement shows.

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  14. Perry Bulwer10 March 2015 at 10:44

    The Mount Lemmon site served as a getaway for Hall’s family when it wasn’t being used in the church’s efforts to control the behavior of its members, they say. Members with kids were invited to spend a weekend at a cabin with church leaders, who would watch closely to see if families were following Faith Christian teachings and critique perceived shortcomings.

    Salaries and wages for administrative and support staff accounted for $370,809 in 2013, the church’s financial report shows. Henry Puente, a member of Faith Christian’s financial board for several years, says when he left in 2005, Hall’s salary was around $150,000 a year and Laks’ about $100,000. The U.S. Department of Labor’s most recent workforce statistics in 2013 list the mean average wage for a clergy member in Tucson at $54,040.

    Busby, of the Evangelical Council, says Faith Christian bases compensation of top leaders on “a nationally recognized compensation study.”

    “This national survey data is far more pertinent for church leaders’ compensation than U.S. Labor data, in my experience,” he wrote. “In fact, working with churches for over 40 years, I have never heard of a church using the U.S. Labor data for comparables.”

    “JEZEBEL SPIRIT”

    As with children, female church members were expected to be seen but not heard, and weren’t supposed to have careers and kids at the same time, former members say.

    Former member Jason Bell, 43, says he was bothered by the church’s treatment of women, who were sometimes accused of having a “Jezebel spirit,” after a murderous female character from the Bible’s Old Testament.

    “I can’t tell you how many times I heard that term,” he says. “They were very much like, ‘Women have a certain place in Christianity, and it’s at the side of a man.’ Any woman that was like, uppity, she has this Jezebel spirit that needs to be cast out of her.”

    Nick Puente, who was raised in Faith Christian from age 6, agrees that, “The Jezebel spirit was something Steve (Hall) believed was rampant in all women. Women were supposed to keep their mouths shut and do whatever their husbands want and they weren’t allowed to have a life outside the home.”

    Single women suffered, too, former members say.

    Joan Moore, now 32 and working as a registered nurse, says she was raped as a UA freshman shortly after she joined Faith Christian in 2001. News of the rape had spread through the ranks of church leaders after she told her minister about it, Moore says. She says church elders suggested she was partly to blame for kissing the man in the first place, and, a couple years later, Hall called her a “whore.”

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  15. Perry Bulwer10 March 2015 at 10:45

    Church leaders discouraged her from seeking outside counseling, saying it was better to seek help from them, she says. But Moore says the church community didn’t provide any meaningful support.

    “I was shamed for it,” says Moore, who left the church in 2005. “I wasn’t really allowed to talk about it. It was kind of brushed aside.”

    Rachel Mullis, who attended Faith Christian from 1994 to 2004, remembers being mortified when Hall denounced a young woman for “fornication” in front of church members just after a Sunday service. Mullis blamed herself for the public rebuke because she’d confided to a junior pastor that the young woman was sleeping with her boyfriend. The pastor told Hall, who thundered his disapproval.

    “It was horrible watching her crumble in front of me as he humiliated her,” Mullis recalls. The woman dashed out and never returned, she says.

    ALIENATION FROM FAMILY

    After joining the church, UA students often became alienated from their parents, ex-members say.

    Lawrence Alfred, who spent nine years at Faith Christian before returning to the Navajo reservation in 2009, says he and his family were close before he joined. Afterward, he says, there was a three-year period where he didn’t even go home for Christmas.

    “I wanted to go back home one time, and they rebuked me,” he says. “They used one of the lines in Scripture: Jesus said, ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’”

    Ex-member Jeremy Morgan’s parents thought it prudent to outwardly support their son’s immersion in the church, despite their deep misgivings.

    “What was alarming to us, among other things, was you couldn’t think outside the box of Faith Christian. The chief minister, Steve Hall, had total control of them,” says Bill Morgan, a retired physician in Phoenix who is now getting a master’s degree in counseling.

    But he and his wife, Beverly, worried that their son would cut all ties if they confronted him.

    The church forbade members from dating, and the Morgans say they were shocked when, in 2001, Jeremy announced his engagement to Rachiel, whom he barely knew, in a pairing arranged by the church.

    Rachiel’s parents — whom the Morgans met the day before the wedding — were bewildered, too, Bill Morgan says.

    “We sat down to breakfast, and Jeremy’s (future) father-in-law turned to me and his first sentence is, ‘What the hell do you think is going on with this church?’” he says.

    Last year, Southern Baptist pastor Patrick Branch helped a Colorado State University student quit a Faith Christian affiliate, Grace Christian Church, in Fort Collins, Colorado. (The church did not respond to two messages seeking comment.)

    It took an intervention — organized by the young woman’s mother, Sandy Wade of Denver — to help Kayanna Wade recognize the group’s complete control over her life, says Branch, who’d been a youth minister to Kayanna when she was an adolescent.

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  16. Perry Bulwer10 March 2015 at 10:45

    He says Faith Christians teachings are dangerously out of line with scripture.

    “A portion of their ministry was well-meaning. They wanted to lead people to Christ. But when it came to how they did it, it was completely wrong,” says Branch, now a pastor in Alabama.

    Among his biggest concerns: Kayanna had dropped all of her childhood friends who weren’t church members and was spending her summer raising money for the church, cold-calling hundreds of random people in the phone book — all day, every day. She would give the money to the church, which would dole out allotments for her to live on, he says.

    “There’s no scriptural precedent for that anywhere in the Bible,” he says. “If they want to go out and get a burger, they have to ask the pastor for money. It is completely about control. It just really gives Christianity a black eye.”

    HEALING THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

    Social media has brought together former members for a new kind of fellowship.

    A few years ago, ex-staffer Jeff Phillips and others launched the Facebook page “Former Members of Faith Christian Church Tucson and its OffShoots.” The site, which has about 230 likes, contains dozens of personal accounts. The Star found most of the former church members interviewed for this investigation via the Facebook site.

    Nearly two decades have passed since Bell was a member of Faith Christian in his early 20s. But his reaction was powerful when he found the page and began reading narratives of his old church friends. He says he was overwhelmed with relief that he wasn’t alone.

    “I just started crying,” Bell says. “I realized that it wasn’t just me not being a strong enough Christian. That’s how I felt when I left, that I couldn’t handle it. I realized that was not true. I had done my best. I had given everything I had, and it was not really my fault.”

    Faith Christian leader Stephen Hall responded to the negative Facebook postings during a 2013 sermon in which he told followers they shouldn’t make or read negative comments about a church or a Christian on social media. A former member provided the Star with a recording of the talk.

    “That is one of the most grievous sins. Reading about people’s complaints about other Christians, it’s just like you did that yourself. A grievous, bitter, nasty, nasty thing,” Hall preached. “If any of you read negative things about any Christian on the Internet, you’re participating in wickedness and deeds of darkness, and it’ll come and get you.”

    To Doug Pacheco, a former member of Faith Christian’s predecessor church, what’s most grievous is the negative control the church exerts over its followers.

    When Pacheco uprooted his family and left the church in 1990, he says they lost all of their church friends. Even 10 years later, when they visited Tucson, those friends “would have nothing to do with me,” he says.

    That exemplifies the church’s failings — and its dangers, says Pacheco, who now lives in Indiana.

    “Anywhere someone does not have the freedom to go make a decision on their own, without feeling shunned, without being shamed, it is not a biblical church,” he says. “Churches don’t shun you. Churches don’t shame you. Churches don’t put you in a place where you no longer have any friends.”

    http://tucson.com/news/local/article_8824efc5-f210-5041-8088-a654585e4673.html

    ReplyDelete
  17. Perry Bulwer12 March 2015 at 11:49

    UA asks churchs campus recuiting arm for answers

    By Emily Bregel, Carol Ann Alaimo, Arizona Daily Star March 11, 2015

    University of Arizona officials are meeting this week with the president and faculty adviser of Faith Christian Church’s campus recruiting arm to ask about allegations of wrongdoing raised in a recent Arizona Daily Star investigation of the church.

    The leaders of Wildcats for Christ “are going to have to show up and answer questions,” said Melissa Vito, UA’s senior vice president.

    The Star interviewed 21 former employees and church members and nine of their parents as part of its investigation. They described Faith Christian as a cult that promotes spanking of babies that show a “rebellious spirit,” exerts excessive control over members’ lives and finances and encourages students to cut ties with family and friends outside the church.

    Faith Christian’s top leaders, senior pastor Stephen M. Hall and executive pastor Ian A. Laks, have declined for more than two weeks to comment on the Star’s findings.

    Four people have told the Star they raised concerns to UA about Faith Christian Church as far back as the mid-1990s. But Vito said the school was unable to act because doing so requires a written complaint related to a current UA student.

    She asks those with comments to email DOS-deanofstudents@email.arizona.edu or call 520-621-7057.

    Vito said Tuesday that some tactics used by the church’s campus ministries have come under scrutiny over the years and were addressed informally by UA. For example, around 1995, the UA restricted the group’s access to student dorms in response to concerns about overly aggressive door-knocking and soliciting. The UA also banned the group from holding Bible studies in students’ rooms, she said.

    The UA recently began an investigation after hearing from a Los Angeles-based mother of a current UA junior who is a church member. Kathy Sullivan said she has witnessed “drastic” changes in her son’s personality and behavior, and she worries about losing him completely. Sullivan told the Star she has filed a written complaint.

    Since the Star’s investigation was published Sunday, the UA has received eight emails from former students and their parents criticizing the school for not taking action. Some said they would not send their offspring to the UA if the church is allowed to continue recruiting there.

    “I have four children, and I would love to see them go to the U of A as well,” wrote one alumnus. “However, if this cult is still on campus by the time my oldest goes to college then neither she nor the other three will be allowed to attend.”

    The UA also received a complimentary letter about Faith Christian Church from the parents of one former student who joined the church in 2008.

    “I hope you recognize that the Arizona Daily Star was participating in yellow journalism,” the writer said. The names of writers were blocked out of the emails, which the UA provided to the Star.

    Cody Nicholls, an assistant dean of students in the UA dean of students’ office — which handles complaints about campus groups — is a current member of Faith Christian Church. Nicholls acts as a liaison between the University Religious Council and the dean of students’ office.

    The UA said the situation does not pose a conflict of interest because Nicholls has no role in investigating complaints. He oversees veterans affairs and has only acted as the interface between the dean’s office and the campus religious council for about a year, officials said.

    Faith Christian Church is a member of two national evangelical organizations. Neither one will comment on allegations that the church shuns outsiders, shames members who question church leaders and encourages members to hit infants with cardboard tubes to make them submissive.

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  18. Perry Bulwer12 March 2015 at 11:49

    Dan Busby president of the Virginia based Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, expressed support for Faith Christian’s financial practices last week. In an email Tuesday, Busby said, “Since the issues were raised last week, we have had a senior ECFA executive on the ground in Arizona to confirm the Church’s compliance with our standards.”

    Faith Christian also is a member of the National Association of Evangelicals, which has recommended pastoral practices but does not provide any oversight of member churches, said communications director Sarah Kropp Brown. “We provide guidance, but compliance is the church’s commitment and responsibility,” Brown wrote in an email.

    Former University Religious Council chairman Dan Hurlbert said that, as early as 1999, the council was hearing about Faith Christian’s controlling practices and “badgering” of students. Hurlbert was URC chairman from 2000 to 2002.

    He recalled the mother of a student mailed her concerns to then-UA president Peter Likinsaround 2002. She said her son was so deeply involved in Faith Christian that he was failing academically and was harassed by campus ministers after trying to distance himself from the church, said Hurlbert, now senior pastor at Tempe First United Methodist Church.

    Former Faith Christian member Jason Bell said that after he left the church in 1996, he spoke with someone in the UA dean of students’ office about how Wildcats for Christ funneled students to Faith Christian and about the church’s controlling practices.

    “They were concerned, but they needed more people, and they needed more formal complaints,” said Bell, now 43. But he said he didn’t file a written complaint because he felt he would be targeted by the church. He was already hearing rumors that church members had been telling his friends he was mentally unstable since he left the church.

    “I didn’t want to be alone trying to fight that fight,” he said.

    Susan Barnes, a nurse educator in Oklahoma whose daughter Rachiel Morgan left the church in 2008 after more than a decade, said she called the dean of students office around then to share her concerns about the church’s practices. She said she got a “very, very lukewarm” response from whoever answered the phone.

    The person who answered told her everything seemed fine because the UA had no complaints about the organization, Barnes said. She was promised a call-back but said she didn’t receive one even after she called back to leave a reminder message.

    UA alumnus and ex-member James Peeken, now 42, also said he spoke to an employee in the dean of students’ office in 1995. Peeken, who joined Faith Christian as a UA sophomore in 1993, left the church after a year and a half. He said he was disturbed by leaders’ control over members, their intense focus on tithing and the pressure to confess sins publicly, during Bible study groups.

    Church leaders would exert control by saying they’d received “a word from God” about minute details of members’ lives, he said.

    “They would get a word from God about what classes you should take, what car you should buy. If you didn’t follow that, you would be accused of having a rebellious spirit,” he said.

    “After I went to them and said, ‘This is really troubling,’ I felt like they kind of dropped the ball,” he said. “That should have raised some red flags.”

    UA seeks feedback

    University of Arizona officials ask that anyone with concerns about Faith Christian Church or its campus ministries email the dean of students office at DOS-deanofstudents@email.arizona.edu or call 520-621-7057.

    Website: health.arizona.edu/caps.htm

    http://tucson.com/news/local/ua-asks-church-s-campus-recuiting-arm-for-answers/article_8ca014fc-3c10-54ac-8712-b5979675d0ae.html

    ReplyDelete
  19. Perry Bulwer5 April 2015 at 14:50

    Love bombing group at University of Arizona called cult thrown out of religious council

    By Susan Svrluga, Washington Post April 1, 2015

    Too much love, apparently. A religious council at the University of Arizona, after looking into reports that a longtime on-campus ministry known for what one student called “love-bombing” recruitment efforts, was, in fact, a cult, has revoked the church’s membership on the council.

    Earlier this month, the Arizona Daily Star reported that 21 former members told them the church, which has operated on campus for 25 years, was operating as a cult, controlling members’ lives and enforcing disturbing rules such as disciplining infants who lift their heads by smacking them with a cardboard tube. The student who said they were known for “love-bombing” added that they lured in freshmen with repeated friendly gestures.

    After numerous complaints about student safety, the University Religious Council of the University of Arizona revoked the membership of Faith Christian Church and affiliated campus ministries.

    Church officials did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

    Michelle Blumenberg, of the executive committee of the religious council, sent the following statement:

    “Effective immediately, the University Religious Council (URC) at the University of Arizona revokes from membership the organization known as Faith Christian Church and its affiliates Wildcats for Christ, Native Nations in Christ, and Providence Club.

    “Reason: The number, seriousness, and pattern of red flags raised compel URC members to no longer believe that Faith Christian Church and its affiliates operate at the highest level of integrity, transparency, safety for students, and respect for students, standards required for URC membership.

    “This has come to light via numerous letters and testimonies recently sent to URC members which have brought to a head historic and current concerns related to the campus activities of Faith Christian Church and its affiliates.”

    University officials are looking into more than 30 complaints, but because many of them involve internal actions of the church or allegations about alumni and non-students, they are limited in what they can investigate, said Chris Sigurdson, a spokesman.

    “The Dean of Students staff are continuing to follow up on the reports we’ve received, checking in with the student organizations and ascertaining our students’ well-being,” he said.

    “I believe the University Religious Council wanted to be fair and take into account the numerous complaints from fellow students about the church,” said Warren Throckmorton, a professor at the university. “Given the allegations, it seems understandable that they would take action.”

    Susan Svrluga is a reporter for the Washington Post, covering higher education for the Grade Point blog.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/04/01/love-bombing-group-at-university-of-arizona-called-cult-thrown-out-of-religious-council/

    ReplyDelete
  20. Perry Bulwer7 May 2015 at 20:53

    DVD shows how easily cults can recruit young people

    by Kentaro Isomura and Yu Yamada, THE ASAHI SHIMBUN May 07, 2015

    Working with lawyers and psychological experts, victims of cult groups have released a DVD to warn young people of the danger of joining religious cults and antisocial organizations.

    The DVD was created by the Japan Society for Cult Prevention and Recovery (JSCPR) to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Aum Shinrikyo’s nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system that left 13 people dead and thousands sickened.

    The DVD is titled “Cult: Sugu Soba ni Aru Kiki” (Cult: Crisis just beside you).

    “What is important is that people understand cults can exist right beside them,” said Kimiaki Nishida, a psychological professor at Rissho University who serves as chairman of the group.

    Nishida added that some cult groups are currently working to enlist recruits as young as junior and senior high school students.

    “I will be happy if our DVD will be used for classes and orientations at schools,” he said.

    The group, formed after the March 20, 1995, attack by Aum Shinrikyo, works to develop strategies to combat groups that violate human rights and exhibit antisocial behavior. These include religious cults and groups that claim to hold self-improvement seminars, but often have other aims.

    The DVD features interviews with five former cult members who warn students how skillfully cult members can deceive them.

    A woman interviewed says she joined a cultist group at a state-run university believing it was simply a volleyball club.

    “Links with members came to be more and more important to me,” the woman said. “I felt they gave me the meaning of life, which then led to a thought that I was relieved thanks to them.”

    In the documentary, Takashi Uriu, a JSCPR director, shows through role play how cult members entice new recruits.

    A typical technique is adopting an over-the-top friendly attitude, even toward strangers, such as suddenly tapping them on the shoulder and saying hello.

    A student playing the role of an individual wooed by a cult member eventually reveals to the cultist his Line social messaging account, illustrating how easily young people can be fooled into cults.

    “I did not feel a sense of wariness, and rather thought joining the group may lead to more connections with people,” the student says in the video.

    The “Cult: Sugu Soba ni Aru Kiki” DVD is available for 8,000 yen ($66.90).

    http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201505070046

    ReplyDelete
  21. Perry Bulwer2 January 2016 at 15:40

    Tucson church some call a cult laying low

    By Emily Bregel, Carol Ann Alaimo, Arizona Daily Star December 26, 2015

    The holidays weren’t always happy for Doug Pacheco, but this year he feels blessed by a season of forgiveness.

    For years, Pacheco says his family suffered because of his unquestioning devotion to the leaders of Faith Christian Church, which encouraged corporal punishment of infants, unquestioning obedience to church leaders and mandatory tithing even by families in financial distress.

    He shared his story last spring as part of an Arizona Daily Star investigation into the Tucson-based ministry that’s been recruiting members on the University of Arizona campus for more than 20 years.
    Twenty-one former followers described the church as a cult that targets UA students and inflicts financial, spriritual and emotional abuse.

    New parents were trained to start spanking babies soon after birth to rid them of “rebellious” spirits, the former members and staffers said. They often used cardboard dowels from wire clothes hangers to hit infants who wouldn’t sleep, then switched to other implements as children grew, they said.

    Pacheco, who joined Faith Christian’s predecessor church and left in 1990, said he and his then-wife accepted the church’s teachings. When the Star’s initial story ran in March, Pacheco — now remarried and living in Indiana — emailed links to the story to each of his children, now 33, 31 and 29.

    “They knew just by me sending that article that dad is facing up to something here,” Pacheco, 58, said in a recent phone interview. “I got to call each of my children and tell them I loved them and apologize to them.

    “Each of them said, ‘We love you, we forgive you, we’re with you.’ Ever since that time, my relationships with all three of them has just improved.”

    His eldest son, Isaac, was about 8 years old when the family left the church. He recalls harsh discipline, living on food-bank donations and dumpster-diving for canned goods, even as his parents kept giving to the church.

    “I just remember my parents fighting and crying and not having enough money for anything, like gasoline for the car, and still giving that 10 percent,” said Isaac Pacheco, now the editor of a U.S. State Department publication in Washington, D.C.
    After reading the article, Isaac called his father and they spoke for a long time.

    “It was kind of like the smell after a big rainfall. The air is clear again,” Doug Pacheco said of their conversation. “It was exactly like that.

    “I think what my son needed to hear me say was, ‘I recognize that that was not right.’ Saying those words set him free like a bird out of his cage.”

    Faith Christian’s head pastor Stephen M. Hall and executive pastor Ian A. Laks have refused for months to respond to allegations that members were harmed by the church’s practices. Neither has replied since March to dozens of calls, emails and letters from Star reporters.
    Hall often advised his underlings to lay low when facing criticism, said Jeff Phillips, a former associate pastor who left the church in 2007. Phillips now is an adjunct professor at American Christian University in Phoenix.
    He recalls Hall’s advice for dealing with negative publicity like this: “If someone throws mud at you, don’t try to wipe it off. Just wait for it to dry and it will fall off on its own.”

    UA SCRUTINY

    At the University of Arizona, officials say they are keeping closer tabs than in the past on three student clubs linked to Faith Christian, which has been recruiting on the UA campus for more than 20 years.

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  22. Perry Bulwer2 January 2016 at 15:41

    UA spokesman Chris Sigurdson said staff members from the dean of students’ office now drop in unannounced at club meetings, a practice that began at the start of fall semester. The staffers, whom Sigurdson wouldn’t identify, haven’t found any problems that would warrant disciplinary action, he said. The UA also made the clubs’ advisers take cult awareness training.
    UA officials say they have authority over the student groups and must tread carefully because religious freedom is protected by law.

    The UA will take complaints only from current students or their parents, but former followers say those who leave often are too traumatized to come forward until years later.

    The University Religious Council, a campus entity separate from UA administration, isn’t bound by the same rules and has taken the most definitive action against the church. Council leaders did their own investigation and banished Faith Christian from the council because the church’s leaders refused to answer questions about the allegations, council spokeswoman Michelle Blumenberg said.
    “The number, seriousness, and pattern of red flags raised compel URC members to no longer believe that Faith Christian Church and its affiliates operate at the highest level of integrity, transparency, safety for students, and respect for students, standards required for URC membership,” a statement from the religious council said.

    To warn the new crop of freshmen that arrived this fall, the council announced its actions against the church in fliers that were included in UA orientation packages.

    The council also added “religious manipulation” to its list of red flags for “religious conduct gone awry.” Religious manipulation includes “strategies that target vulnerable students, methods which seek to break down and then rebuild students, and instances of over-the-top niceness used as a form of entrapment,” the URC wrote.

    The addition was specifically aimed at the Faith Christian recruiting tactic former members called “love-bombing” — showering new students with attention and affection to gain their trust.

    “The University Religious Council hopes that the situation which happened with Faith Christian Church will lead more students and parents to do their homework about faith groups with whom they would like to become involved,” Blumenberg said in an email.

    Faith Christian doesn’t answer to any larger policymaking body, the way a Presbyterian church falls under a synod, or a Catholic parish, a diocese.

    The little accountability that did exist evaporated in April when the national Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability began an investigation into complaints from former Faith Christian members about high-pressure demands for donations and other church practices.

    Faith Christian responded by resigning from the financial accountability council. The resignation halted efforts to determine whether the church met council’s standards for responsible stewardship, a council spokeswoman said.

    The church remains a member of the National Evangelical Association, and touts that membership status on its website. The evangelical association has recommended pastoral practices but does not oversee member churches to ensure they are followed, the group’s communications director said.

    SMALLER CROWDS

    About a dozen former Faith Christian members and supporters picketed the church’s Sunday services at the start of fall term, typically the church’s busiest season for bringing new UA freshmen into the fold.

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  23. Perry Bulwer2 January 2016 at 15:42

    In years past, a few hundred freshmen usually showed up. This year, “I was shocked by how few students we saw,” said former church member Rachel Mullis, 39, one of the picketers.
    “It seemed like attendance was way down from what it historically has been,” agreed picketer Phillips, 43, the former associate pastor.

    Laks, Faith Christian’s second-in-command, called police, but officers who responded found the picketers weren’t causing trouble and allowed them to stay, public records show.

    Faith Christian, which has never built its own worship facility, has been without a home for several months. For years, the church used rented space at Amphitheater High School for its Sunday services, but chose to leave shortly after the school district began its own investigation in April.

    In recent months, the church has held its services at the Tucson Marriott University Park hotel just outside UA’s main gate. Last week, a few days after the Star tried again to reach church leaders, Faith Christian’s website was changed to remove any reference to the location of its Sunday services.

    The negative publicity may be affecting the church’s fundraising efforts.

    Former church member Connie Cohn said she’s been approached five times in recent months by current or prospective donors who said they were put off by news reports of Faith Christian’s methods and the church’s refusal to address the allegations.
    All five said they had decided against giving to the church, said Cohn, 52, a former lay leader who left Faith Christian in 1999 after 18 years.

    Henry Puente, a member of Faith Christian’s financial board for several years, says when he left in 2005, Hall’s salary was around $150,000 a year and Laks’ about $100,000. The mean average wage for a clergy member in Tucson was just over $54,000 in 2013, U.S. Department of Labor statistics show.
    The church also employs at least nine members of Hall’s family, according to a staff list on its website. They include Hall’s wife Teresa, the couple’s five grown children and three sons-in-law. It isn’t clear how much the relatives are paid.

    Faith Christian’s assets have swelled from $200,000 in the mid-1990s to more than $5 million this year, state and county records show. That includes a ranch as well as two cabins on Mount Lemmon that were rebuilt in 2013 at a cost of $1.38 million, the church’s 2013 financial statement shows.

    SATELLITES AFFECTED

    Faith Christian has six satellite churches as far away as New Zealand, all of which recruit on college campuses.

    In New Zealand, New Palmerston Victory Christian Church — launched a decade ago by staffers who trained at Faith Christian — recruits at Massey University. In March, Massey banned nine representatives of the New Zealand church from setting foot on campus. School officials there said they’d been looking into complaints about the church prior to the Star’s investigation, but said the newspaper’s findings prompted additional scrutiny.

    Massey officials became “sufficiently concerned about the actions and behaviour of certain members of the Victory Church,” spokesman James Gardiner said in a March email. “What has been alleged is that vulnerable young people have been offered friendship and support, but then made to feel dependent on the church and its members and isolated from other support networks, such as family and friends, with a consequent loss of self-esteem.”

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  24. Perry Bulwer2 January 2016 at 15:42

    In April, the Tampa Bay Times investigated Faith Christian-affiliate Cornerstone Christian Church, which recruits on the campus of the University of South Florida campus. That school received complaints from two former students about the church’s overly controlling practices, but officials said there was little they could do without complaints from current students.

    In August, the Florida school received another complaint from a former church member who claimed Bill Cooper, the church’s senior pastor, had a yacht. The writer also described the church’s controlling tactics.
    “They want to know all your business. All your misfortunes. All your weaknesses. All your sins. All your family problems. If you don’t open up to then, you will be accused of a rebellious spirit,” the complaint read. “Once you decide to leave or if you’re kicked out, your contact with church members ceases. ... I couldn’t believe how fast my friends of three years forgot about me. People struggle for years after they leave.”

    CAUTIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC

    The mother of a UA junior from Los Angeles launched the Star’s investigation into Faith Christian when she emailed a reporter with concerns about her son. His behavior and personality had changed dramatically after two years with Faith Christian, Kathy Sullivan said. She feared losing touch with him entirely and was bewildered by the level of influence church leaders wielded over him.
    “I felt like I was in a tug-of-war with strangers over my son,” she said in a recent interview. When she made the decision to contact the newspaper, “I felt like a mother bear protecting her cub.”

    Sullivan is cautiously optimistic that her son, who graduated from UA this month, has read the Star’s reporting and could one day pull back from the church. In recent months, he’s been warmer and more like his old self, she said. But they never talk about Faith Christian and have not directly addressed Sullivan’s role in the media coverage.

    Sullivan said she believes speaking out has protected others, if not her son.

    “Even if it doesn’t succeed in getting him out, it’s had a positive impact and I’m very happy for that,” she said.

    The Star’s coverage also fueled conversations within the UA’s religious community about healthy church conduct, said Ben Garren, chaplain of the Episcopal Campus Ministry at the UA. The ministry is a member of the University Religious Council, a coalition of ministers and directors of religious and spiritual groups at the university.
    Garren said he heard the same refrain from many students in the wake of the Star’s reporting: “I thought there was a problem, but I thought I was the only one who saw it.”

    “Once the information was out there, students started talking about it,” Garren said. “Then suddenly, they’re all nodding their heads.”

    Garren said he wishes the UA could do more to shield students from Faith Christian’s influence. But without hard evidence, he said, the school can’t ban church representatives from a public campus without risking violating the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

    “I’m stressing to students the need to report when they have concerns to the dean of students’ office, so if there is something happening that is chronic and systematic, the dean can see that and act upon it,” he said. “Without concrete evidence, they can’t do much.”

    http://tucson.com/news/local/tucson-church-some-call-a-cult-laying-low/article_5011ffe1-bba7-5647-b0a2-b1b6dec83d48.html

    ReplyDelete
  25. Perry Bulwer4 July 2024 at 10:04

    University students report approaches from cult group: Campus workers

    by Hannah Felsbourg, Melbourne Anglican June 25, 2024

    A cult group has been targeting university students across Australia, spreading teachings that diverge from mainstream Christianity.

    Campus ministry workers report that Shincheonji Church of Jesus has been actively recruiting on university campuses, approaching people to bring them into the cult.

    Workers fear the cult will draw people away from Christianity. SCJ believe salvation is exclusive to members and is only obtained through good works.

    St Jude’s Carlton UniChurch assistant minister Sam Oldland said SCJ recruiters tried to infiltrate the church by attending services and inviting people to their Bible study groups.

    Several members of UniChurch found freedom from SCJ teaching and have shared their testimonies of leaving the cult to help others who might still be involved with the group.

    Mr Oldland said the SCJ recruiters visiting the church never revealed where they were from but ex-SCJ members in his congregation had identified them.

    He said SCJ drew people away from the true gospel, and many who left the cult abandoned Christianity entirely.

    University of Melbourne Christian Union worker Bryn Weightman said many students he worked with had been approached by the cult.

    He said SCJ recruiters used casual conversation to determine if someone was a Christian then invited them to meet the recruiter’s mentor.

    Many of the students were approached at Melbourne Central Station in the CBD or at South Lawn at the university, but quickly realised something was strange.

    One student was approached by a stranger on a similar train line to them and had a lengthy conversation about various biblical topics.

    The stranger said the student reminded them of their mentor and suggested they all meet up together.

    The student sought advice from the Christian Union, asking if it was a cult, and they confirmed it sounded like SCJ tactics.

    Mr Weightman said other Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students workers from across the country reported seeing SCJ activity on their campuses.

    He said universities were a place where young people could explore who they were and what they wanted to do with their lives.

    This opened the way to share the hope and forgiveness of Jesus on campus, but also for cult groups to recruit.

    Mr Weightman said it was important for students to be aware of the differences between Christian organisations and cult groups operating on campuses.

    He said CU were looking for ways to differentiate themselves from cults and show that they were associated with the university.

    Mr Oldland advised Christians to be patient, consistent, and available to friends involved in SCJ, as the cult often isolated recruits from other communities to maintain control.

    He said SCJ recruiters cultivated manipulative friendships with young Christians to bind them to the group, making it harder for them to leave.

    Encouraging them to learn more about the cult and read the testimonies of ex-members was vital to empower them to see the red flags for themselves.

    https://tma.melbourneanglican.org.au/2024/06/university-students-report-approaches-from-cult-group-campus-workers/

    ReplyDelete
  26. Perry Bulwer16 September 2024 at 11:07

    Meet the Moonies: Inside the Cultish Religious Group Recruiting at the U of M

    Diminished but active, the Unification Church officiates mass weddings and recently became entangled in the assassination of a world leader. Its leaders are still hoping to turn Gophers into Moonies.

    by Spencer White, Racket August 28, 2024

    Walking across the University of Minnesota campus one morning this past February, I was stopped and asked a series of jarring questions.

    What is the cause of human suffering?

    Where does evil come from?

    Does god exist?

    What is the purpose of life?

    And, perhaps most troubling: How can we create true relationships?

    I was hardly awake. I’d barely made it through a Media Law lecture with my consciousness intact.

    Tomoko Taira, the woman who conducted this existential interview, told me the answer to all of these questions, as well as some bonus ones, lay within the teachings of the Unification Church. Otherwise known as the Moonies, this South Korea-born religious group was made famous by its associations with stadium-packing mass weddings and the 2022 assassination of Japan’s former prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

    So why would she be standing outside of Murphy Hall on a random winter morning, conversing with sleep-deprived degenerates such as myself?

    Turns out Moonies like Taira seek out new members not just in South Korea, but across dozens of countries, throughout greater Minnesota, and even on a college campus near you. Buckle up—in time you will fall down a rabbit hole of conspiracy, right-wing politics, fishing enterprises, and a cult expert whose name is homonymous with an American rap icon.

    Moonies: A Brief History

    A Korean man named Sun Myung Moon founded the Unification Church in 1954 based on his insistence that Jesus contacted him on Easter Sunday, 1936. He claimed he recognized Jesus from a vision he had when he was three, NPR reports. Moon died in 2012 at age 92, according to The Guardian. His wife, Hak Ja Han Moon, took over as head of the church following his death, according to Taira.

    Taira gifted me a book written by Hak Ja Han Moon. At the risk of losing some journalistic integrity, I will admit to not having read it; in my defense, it is really long and not even the core doctrine of the Moonie faith. To clear up some vocabulary before we get too deep into the weeds here: I will be using the names Unification Church and Moonies interchangeably, though some in the church view Moonie as a derogatory term. This is one belief system derived from the teachings of the aforementioned Moon (thus, Moonies), and much of his teaching revolves around the idea that all world religions should be united as one (thus, Unification).

    Taira cites inter-faith squabbling as a top issue among the world’s religions, a problem the Unification Church reportedly manages to avoid. She believes that, unlike with those other mainstream religions, Moonie beliefs are as verifiable as one plus one equals two.

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  27. Perry Bulwer16 September 2024 at 11:08

    To keep it relatively simple, the church and its followers believe that before he died Jesus was meant to be married, to undo the sins of Adam and Eve, and Sun Myung Moon was meant to continue this mission of total unification of all religions and governments through marriages, restoring the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Except for communists, who use brainwashing and lies to fight the church (we’ll come back to this). Basically Adam and Eve didn’t put a ring on it before they did it (in the Biblical sense), so humanity needs to avoid premarital sex generationally to right their wrongs. And Moon was a sort of, almost, Jesus-like figure sent on this mission by Christ himself via dream voicemail.

    “The key thing is to bring all religions together,” Taira says. “All races, all nationalities bring together under one god as your parent.”

    The church reached the U.S. by the 1970s and gained massive popularity through college recruitment, according to Rick Ross, 71, the founder and director of the New Jersey-based Cult Education Institute. (Yes, his name is Rick Ross, just like the famous drug lord and the even more famous rapper who stole his street valor.) After my time with Taira, Ross and I spoke at length about the church. Out of respect for his profession and general no-nonsense disposition, I never mentioned the name thing.

    Ross tells me about Moon’s brand of hustling, which largely involved recruiting college students as exploitable labor from which his religious empire could profit. Sun Myung Moon was a profit-minded self-professed prophet. He barrelled into the fishing industry in the ’80s and, at one point, owned one-third of the American fishing industry and 50% of all wholesale sushi in the U.S., according to Ross. He says the Moon family is now worth over $1 billion.

    In an interview with KCRW, journalist Karen Pinchin says the fishing biz began with Moon’s obsession with bluefin tuna. What started as a fairly rudimentary operation in dories became a mega-business with a large hold on the American fishing industry, one that persists today as True World Foods. In fact, the church-controlled seafood company even has a location in Eagan. If anyone wants some cultish tuna hotdish, you know where to source the ingredients.

    Beyond the fishing industry, Sun Myung Moon founded the Kirov Academy of Ballet and the right-wing Washington Times newspaper. His other business interests included jewelry, fur, construction, and a vast real estate portfolio that once contained Manhattan's New Yorker Hotel, per his New York Times obit; his 18-acre New York compound featured six pizza ovens and a noisy-sounding upstairs bowling alley. Ross says Sun Myung Moon acted as a blueprint for other new religious movements to follow—groups like the Falun Gong, who own the conservative Epoch Times news org and the Shen Yun dance troupe. He says this recruitment relies on front organizations with names that were intentionally misleading or hid their involvement with the church. One of these organizations is the College Association for the Research of Principles, CARP for short.

    If that name seems like a bunch of words strewn together to sound like they mean something, you’re half right. Moon’s book, 1966’s The Divine Principle, is studied by the Unification Church like any other holy text and provides the P in CARP.

    Recruiting New Moonies

    Taira’s official title within the church is outreach ministry leader. Her local faction of Moonies mainly operates out of the Minnesota Family Church, a gray and white industrial-looking building in Columbia Heights located amid car washes and a Culver’s.

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  28. Perry Bulwer16 September 2024 at 11:10

    Taira says she is on campus every Thursday to study with students involved with or interested in the church, usually at the Starbucks inside Coffman Memorial Union. On days when there’s nobody specific to meet with, she stands outside of campus buildings to talk to students about the church.

    Sometimes she sits alone; other times she’s accompanied by church members. Interested passersby include some potential recruits and also journalism majors working on Racket stories who can’t stop themselves from talking to strangers. Taira admits campus recruitment tends to be a slow grind. I met with her several times over the course of the spring semester, and only once did I encounter another student.

    Samuel Forlines, 21, a second-year student at the University of Minnesota, says he was first introduced to the church in the fall of 2022. He’s now acting treasurer for CARP’s University of Minnesota chapter. He says CARP has five official members and five other folks who regularly attend meetings. CARP provides students with three core principles—god, family, and peace—to address difficult questions of life and improve their lives overall, according to its website.

    Forlines says he grew up in Venezuela with his Catholic grandmother and atheist grandfather. That dichotomy increased his curiosity about god and religion.

    “I was raised in a Catholic environment, country,” Forlines says. “But myself, I just identify as Christian, but with questions.”

    Forlines says he has encountered plenty of criticism of the church, and he believes some of it is valid. However, Forlines adds that his experience with the Moonies has mostly been positive, allowing him to explore his faith in a relaxed environment. CARP reportedly maintains a laid-back social atmosphere—picnics, study sessions, and road trips to meet with other chapters.

    “They’re nice to me,” he says. “They care about me. They care about others.”

    Forlines says he did not agree with all of the beliefs of the church, specifically its treatment of the LGBTQ+ community and disdain for alcohol. Sun Myung Moon once likened homosexuals to “dung eating dogs,” and argued that drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and free sex are tools of Satan, which is honestly a pretty compelling sales pitch for Satanism.

    Despite these disagreements, Forlines says he appreciates the church’s openness to differing perspectives and backgrounds. Openness and acceptance aren’t necessarily what first comes to mind when hearing marginalized groups referred to as animals, but that’s just me.

    In my obsessive research into the Moonies, one element kept popping up again and again: the mass weddings. Forlines says he thinks they are odd, but if people want to keep up with the tradition, by all means. In 1982, when the church and its practices were near their peak, 4,000 followers of Moon were married in a mass wedding at Madison Square Garden. Taira says Moon himself used to pair couples for these mass weddings, sometimes by simply pointing at two random people in a crowd of prospective brides and grooms, but now if any arrangements happen they’re determined by the families. I suspect that, considering the faith’s membership continues to decline from its peak of 3 million in the ’80s, rules had to be loosened. Who in 2024 wants god to tell them who they can get steamy with?

    Taira, who was raised by a Buddhist father and Christian mother, joined the church in 1983 while living in Japan. She says she struggled with religion growing up, and that a fellow teacher in Japan was the first person to introduce her to the church. Taira spent three and a half years in Albania doing missionary work before she was sent to the U.S. She arrived in Minnesota to spread the word of the church in 2000, and now lives here with her family.

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  29. Perry Bulwer16 September 2024 at 11:12

    Why Minnesota? Because a lottery decided it was so. When she got to the U.S. with the rest of her foreign recruiters, a raffle decided who went where—or, in Taira’s words, god decided. Twenty-four years later, Taira remains in Minnesota doing what she can for the church, including recruitment efforts and regular donations. Taira says she and her family donated $100,000 before she came to America in 2000 and $10,000 per year since—or, by my back-of-napkin math, about $340,000 over roughly 40 years. She was almost apologetic when she told me these numbers, as if $340K is a modest sum.

    Seemingly ridiculous donations are really where everything starts with the Moonies. And they led to the murder of Shinzo Abe.

    Politics and Controversy

    Abe was assassinated on July 8, 2022, by a man who became disillusioned with the Unification Church after $675,000 in donations bankrupted his family. Abe and much of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan had ties to the Unification Church; an investigation by the Japanese government concluded that the church pressured members to make large donations in violation of the 1951 Religious Corporations Act.

    While Taira says the church’s primary goal is spreading peace through religious unification, Abe was often criticized as a warmonger due to his restructuring of the Japanese military during his time as prime minister. Abe was not a member of the church, but he and his grandfather both had ties to it, largely related to hardline Moonie stances on communism.

    The Unification Church still opposes communist ideology, specifically the Chinese Communist Party, according to Taira. She says communist infiltrators in Japan attempted to abduct and brainwash members of the Unification Church while the communist-infiltrated press tried to vilify the church in its reporting. Taira sent me several articles and videos on this topic from an online publication called Bitter Winter, a self-proclaimed religious freedom advocacy group in China. The core argument? That the criticisms of the church are no more than attempts from communist ne’er do-wells to destroy religion, the pro-capitalist Unification Church in particular.

    Speaking of commies: The Moonies were around during the Cold War, and they weren’t exactly paragons of diplomacy. Sun Myung Moon funded former Nazi Klaus Barbie, known as the “Butcher of Lyon,” along with several cartels and paramilitary organizations in a coup against the Bolivian government in 1980. That decade the church also backed the Contras, a right-wing Nicaraguan rebel group that also received illegally sourced funding from the Reagan administration.

    Moon’s political meddling didn’t stop in South America. Not even close.

    Sun Myung Moon met former Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and was one of the largest donors to Bush’s presidential library in Texas, Ross observes. Sun Myung Moon made immense profits during the Reagan administration, according to The Guardian. In 1978, a congressional subcommittee investigated Sun Myung Moon and described the church in stark terms, effectively, as a multinational military organization attempting to form a unified world government intended to abolish the separation of church and state. This investigation was dropped when Reagan was elected president in 1980, despite the best efforts of Minnesota voters.

    Weird timing, eh?

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  30. Perry Bulwer16 September 2024 at 11:13

    According to Taira, this political involvement was for the best.

    “So [we] need to wake this nation again to be god's nation,” she says. “And this, America, can help other nations as brothers and sisters.”

    Taira thinks it’s important to return the U.S. to the light of god, particularly in terms of American politics.

    “Because right and the left is like brothers,” she says. “Brothers need parents to unite. The parent is god.”

    But Is It a Cult?

    Back to our beloved baller/cult researcher Rick Ross, who has testified as an expert on destructive authoritarian groups—or cults—in 13 states.

    Ross does not use the word “cult” lightly. He says that for a group to be considered a cult, they must have a totalitarian leader, utilize coercive persuasion to control their members, and inflict harm on their members or others through this control.

    At a 2004 Washington, D.C., banquet, Moon stated that globe-spanning leaders had, “declared to all heaven and earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity’s savior, messiah, returning lord, and true parent.” He added that Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and (curiously) Marx had, “found strength in my teachings, mended their ways, and [were] reborn as new persons.”

    So, yeah…

    “In my opinion,” Ross concludes, “The Unification Church is a destructive authoritarian organization, and I see it as a personality cult.”

    The Unification Church laid the groundwork for right-wing religious cults to infiltrate American politics, according to Ross. He says it started with the Washington Times, Reagan, and Bush, and continues with the Epoch Times and former President Donald Trump.

    Now, deep into the trenches of this group and their history, you may be wondering: Why should I give a shit? There aren’t even that many of them around these days!

    I’ll tell you why. A) It’s a crazy story and you learned more about America’s troubling history during the Cold War; B) This organization is—while less dominant—still around and allegedly victimizing people in our backyard.

    Because they are protected as a religious organization, there isn’t much that can be done about the Moonies.

    In my conversations with Forlines and Taira, both of whom were extremely pleasant to interact with, they had almost nothing negative to say about the church. Forlines says he had never given any money to the church and didn’t follow their overall beliefs.

    While an organization allowing dissent in the expression of religious beliefs would seem to be a good thing, an organization that keeps its own beliefs intentionally vague to bring people in and exploit their struggles with religious identity is another thing entirely.

    There you have it: There’s an (alleged!) cult recruiting near the Gopher football stadium that funded anti-communist violence and far-right politicians. Don’t join it. Or do. I’m not your dad.

    to see the links and videos embedded in this article go to:

    https://racketmn.com/meet-the-moonies-inside-the-cultish-religious-group-recruiting-at-the-u-of-m

    ReplyDelete
  31. Perry Bulwer26 October 2024 at 14:41

    Anti-cult group plans to protest College Station church, claiming ‘deceptive recruitment’ practices

    By Anna Maynard, KBTX October 11, 2024

    COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KBTX) - A protest is planned for outside Christland Church in College Station on Saturday morning.

    Organized by a group called “Families Against Cults on Campus,” the protest stems from claims that the church is still recruiting students on the Texas A&M campus despite losing its status as a registered student organization.

    It stems from an article published in April 2023 by The Battalion, where church attendees alleged mistreatment and abuse.

    The group leading the protest said the church participates in deceptive recruitment practices and is unsafe for students.

    Sightings of a vehicle sporting messages against the church were reported Friday. These messages claim Christland Church participates in isolation, financial exploitation, and control.

    A Texas A&M University spokesperson confirmed with KBTX Christland is still not a recognized student organization.

    to see the links and video embedded in this article go to:

    https://www.kbtx.com/2024/10/12/anti-cult-group-plans-protest-college-station-church-claiming-deceptive-recruitment-practices/

    ReplyDelete
  32. Perry Bulwer26 October 2024 at 14:44

    Protest brings allegations of mental, sexual abuse inside network churches

    Christland Church in College Station is part of a network of ‘church-planting’ churches that includes Joshua Church in Austin and numerous others across the country.

    By Morgan Riddell, KBTX October 12, 2024

    BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) - Leaders of a protest seen outside of a College Station church Saturday morning, say they’re hoping to shed light on what they call a cult.

    Christland Church is part of a network of ‘church-planting’ churches that includes Joshua Church in Austin and numerous others nationwide. According to the church website, the church’s beliefs revolve around the Bible, friendship, and shared purpose.

    According to a former member of Christland Church, Catherine Hunter, her family has been torn apart because of beliefs taught at the church, a lack of mental health awareness, and abuse.

    “Obey your leaders is said over and over again inside this church right behind me. I was raised to think, it’s okay to question, and ask questions. That’s how you learn. It doesn’t make you an enemy,” she said.

    Hunter said she chose to conduct the protest during a conference that brought members and leaders from other network churches, including Joshua Church in Austin, to Aggieland. This is where former member Geneva Moore said she experienced the abuse firsthand.

    “Joshua Church is the headquarters and hub of the network. So Steve Morgan is the Lead Pastor there as well as a lot of the network leadership team,” Moore said.

    Morgan is one of many former members who have spoken out against and named in allegations of abuse. In a 2023 Battalion article, decades of abuse are highlighted starting with an arrest in 1987 when Morgan was charged with criminal sodomy against a minor. This charge was later dropped according to the publication but Hunter says it’s alarming.

    “A 15-year-old boy that he was in charge of at a youth camp. He was the camp pastor of this Camp. He was not another young boy. He was a grown man,” Hunter said.

    The article also alleges cycles of abuse including mental and sexual abuse at the network churches. Moore says the mental abuse is finally what got her out of the church.

    “The treatment that I received at Joshua Church led to a suicide attempt. I’ve actually emailed the Pastors about that when I left detailing the ways that they harmed me, the ways that they manipulated things behind the scenes, the ways that they told my friends to stay away from me. That I was dark, that I wasn’t self-sufficient, that I wasn’t obeying your leaders.”

    Hunter says this is what led to her family being torn apart too and hopes others don’t become victims.

    “Unfortunately, inside this network of churches, they don’t believe in medication mental health awareness,” she said.

    During the protest, KBTX spoke with church leaders who were on site, they did not have a comment.

    This website called Leaving the Network, claiming to be former church leaders and members, aims to give people resources to find their way out of the church and share stories of abuse.

    Christland Church is not recognized as a registered student organization at Texas A&M. Hunter shared concerns that the group is still very actively recruiting students around campus.

    to see the links and video embedded in this article go to:

    https://www.kbtx.com/2024/10/12/protest-brings-allegations-mental-sexual-abuse-inside-network-churches/

    ReplyDelete
  33. Perry Bulwer30 October 2024 at 14:04

    A Christian ‘doomsday cult’ is targeting Australian university campuses. Now former members want them stopped

    Former members of the Shincheonji church allege the group uses ‘coercive’ tactics such as sleep deprivation and verbal abuse – and they want the government to act

    by Melissa Davey, The Guardian October 15, 2024

    Bree* doesn’t know how much longer she can continue living with her sister, Anna*, who she says has been involved for several years with Australian branches of the Shincheonji church – described by former members as a cult.

    Bree says her sister wakes up at 6am and goes straight to church activities, often not returning home until after midnight, exhausted. She describes Anna as constantly on her phone, texting other church members, including members she says she has freshly recruited.

    “Often she comes home so burnt-out,” Bree says. “She’s so tired that she’s doing stuff like burning food … She’s been in a collision with other vehicles in two incidents. She is so wiped out and exhausted.”

    Shincheonji originated in South Korea, but the church has locations throughout the world including in major Australian cities and some regional locations. The church is registered as a not-for-profit charity, making it eligible for tax exemptions.

    Members believe they are destined for heaven, with everyone else doomed to eternal hell. Membership allows access to secret knowledge of the kingdom of heaven and the one true interpretation of the Bible, members believe.

    The Australian branch of Shincheonji did not respond to questions from Guardian Australia, but international chapters have previously denied that the church is a cult. On its global website, the church describes itself as “a temple of god... The Lord of Shincheonji is Jesus Christ who was slain”.

    Like many Shincheonji recruits, Anna was targeted while at university, Bree says. Several Australian universities have recently expressed concern about church members pretending to be students in order to recruit. In some cases, church members are using rooms on campus to run recruitment sessions described as youth events, without revealing links to the group.

    Bree doesn’t know exactly when Anna dropped out of university to dedicate more hours to the church. She says she is broke, often asking Bree to borrow money. Bree finds Anna’s erratic behaviour and coming and going at all hours difficult to endure.

    But she feels if Anna moves out, she may lose her for good, given the Shincheonji church discourages contact with outsiders and even encourages members to live together in sharehouses.

    “I don’t know if I can live with her any more, but she needs family to fall back on if she ever decides to leave,” Bree says. “I love her very much, and I hope she leaves this group soon, for the sake of her mental and physical health.”

    The Australian Catholic University (ACU) deputy vice-chancellor, Prof Julie Cogin, says last semester she was alerted that the number of approaches by Shincheonji recruiters at the Melbourne campus were increasing.

    “Followers have approached students with a harmless-sounding request for directions, about doing a survey or going for a coffee,” she says.

    “Initial approaches are often made in our campus libraries or cafes, often from someone who isn’t an ACU student, who then encourages them to attend activities away from campus, sometimes referred to as ‘Bible studies’ but without any details provided.

    “What appears to be an innocent outreach of friendship can become manipulative, drawing people away from their family, friends and trusted networks, developing into demands for huge commitments of time and even money.”

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  34. Perry Bulwer30 October 2024 at 14:05

    One former church member and recruiter told Guardian Australia: “They love first-year students, they call them ‘freshies’.

    “And when the universities have their open day for all these first-year students, recruiters come on to campus, and they go around, looking at all the campus clubs for recruits.”

    Figures presented to Brisbane members at a leadership meeting in August 2024, seen by Guardian Australia, revealed about 700 members in Sydney, 350 in Brisbane, 1,200 in Melbourne, 210 in Adelaide and 400 in Perth.

    According to former members and recruitment material seen by Guardian Australia, their tactics involve approaching people in cafes, in the city, on dating apps or on university campuses and inviting them to social events.

    A spokesperson for the University of Western Australia said the university is “currently investigating claims that a Korean Christian group has been targeting students on its campus, including the unauthorised use of campus facilities”.

    The recruitment process also involves trawling through the recruit’s social media accounts and ensuring constant contact, check-ins and catchups to a degree that socialising with anyone other than church leaders becomes difficult, even expressly forbidden, recruitment materials show.

    Videos show new recruits being instructed to turn off the location on their phones so their parents cannot track them. They are told this is necessary to avoid “persecution” by people who don’t believe. According to former members, the name Shincheonji is only revealed after recruits attend months of Bible study sessions and pass a lengthy 300-question exam to prove they have fully adopted the church’s beliefs.

    Former members spoke of pressure among senior church members to donate money to the church, with one former member and university student describing donating his entire savings – at least $8,000.

    These and other tactics are why Bree and former members of the church who spoke to Guardian Australia say they want the federal attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, to introduce legislation to make it a criminal offence for religious groups and other organisations to exert coercive control over members.

    Cogin says while the ACU “respects all people’s right to their beliefs and freedoms”, the university is “concerned about any organisation that seeks to coerce and control its members and is secretive about its existence and motivations”.

    “The university sent an email to staff and students in May alerting them to the activities of Shincheonji, encouraging them to be vigilant,” she says.

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  35. Perry Bulwer30 October 2024 at 14:06

    Students were advised to protect their physical and emotional safety from unwanted approaches, including being careful about revealing too much personal information.

    New South Wales was the first jurisdiction to introduce laws that make coercive control a standalone criminal offence, but these only apply within the context of intimate partner relationships. Queensland will follow in 2025. Other states have outlawed elements of coercive control, again only in the context of domestic relationships.

    Former Shincheonji member Diane Nguyen filed a petition to parliament in September, calling on the government to legislate against coercive control by organisations.

    “No group or individual should be allowed to use deceptive, manipulative or coercive methods that restricts a person’s ability to make informed decisions about their beliefs,” the petition states, describing Schinjeonji as a “pseudo-Christian cult” that recruits members through “non-denominational Bible studies” and takes months to disclose its real identity.

    It goes on to make a number of allegations about the group based on claims from former members, including that they were subjected to sleep deprivation and “discipline” involving verbal and emotional abuse.

    “Australian law must change to make coercive control methods illegal by any group,” it states.

    The criminalisation of coercive control is primarily a matter for state and territory governments, a spokesperson for Dreyfus said.

    Nguyen says she feels despair for those who continue to be recruited and those still inside. She describes the group as a “doomsday cult”.

    “I feel like some members… couldn’t make it out,” she says. “All their friends are in there, and even if they got out, they have no one on the outside to help.”

    Dr Gillie Jenkinson, a psychotherapist and counsellor who has written a book about coercive control used by cults and how to escape it, says members of cults often feel guilt upon leaving, especially if they helped to recruit others.

    “There is often sadness for those who are left behind,” she says.

    Based in the UK, Jenkinson was in Australia in September to run workshops for former cult members, and says she has worked with a number of former members of Shincheonji and their families.

    “I am passionate about seeing the law changed – in any country – to include coercive control in groups and not just intimate relationships,” she says.

    * Names have been changed

    to see the links and photos embedded in this article go to:

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/15/shincheonji-church-doomsday-cult-universities-australia-ntwnfb

    ReplyDelete
  36. Perry Bulwer30 October 2024 at 14:13

    Inside the bizarre recruitment tactics of the Shincheonji ‘doomsday’ church

    Former members describe the group as a cult. Training videos and documents, seen by the Guardian, expose its recruitment methods in Australia

    by Melissa Davey, Medical editor The Guardian October 16, 2024

    A Korean religious sect that has been labelled a cult by former members is attempting to expand its influence in Australia by targeting young, impressionable people in cafes, on dating apps and on university campuses.

    The recruitment drive has led universities to issue warnings to students about the Shincheonji church, as members pose as students and use campus facilities to lure people to Bible study without revealing links to the group.

    Guardian Australia has seen training videos and documents that outline the church’s bizarre recruitment methods, which include calling recruits “fruit” and recruiters “leaves”, and which former members claim amount to coercive control.

    Diane Nguyen, a former member of Shincheonji who is calling on the federal government to legislate against coercive control by organisations, describes the group as a “doomsday cult”. She says she feels despair for those who continue to be recruited and those still inside.

    The Australian branch of Shincheonji did not respond to questions from Guardian Australia, but international chapters have previously denied that the church is a cult. On its global website, the church describes itself as “a temple of God … The Lord of Shincheonji is Jesus Christ who was slain”.

    Identifying potential recruits

    Church recruiters target universities, churches of other denominations and busy city locations where they approach people on their own, or people wearing religious symbols.

    A former Melbourne church member, who only wanted to be identified as “Boa”, said he was targeted through a dating app. He said he met up with a woman he matched with, who brought one of her friends along.

    “These two, behind the scenes, were both already members of the church, and I at the time was completely unaware of this,” he says.

    “I thought they were just having conversations with me, but now I realise like 90% of the questions were trying to see if I met the criteria for Shincheonji recruitment.

    “I unfortunately fell for it.”

    Recruiters ask questions to identify factors that might exclude someone, such as having no interest in religion, being LGBTQ+, doing a PhD, being on a temporary visa, or being in debt. PhD students are thought to be too busy to attend recruitment events.

    Factors that might make someone a good target include being lonely, religious or open to religion, or newly moved to Australia and on the path to permanent residency.

    These were all outlined in a training video for senior church leader recruiters, seen by Guardian Australia. The video tells recruiters to research potential recruits including their culture and interests and to pretend to share those interests.

    “Give a lot of compliments, especially at the beginning,” a senior church member says in the video. Several former members spoken to by Guardian Australia described being “love-bombed” – complimented and told they were special – only to later be criticised if they missed anything in an exhausting schedule of Bible study sessions and church events.

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  37. Perry Bulwer30 October 2024 at 14:15

    During this phase potential recruits are invited to gatherings, often on university campuses, that are not advertised as Shincheonji events. Dozens of posts on online forums include claims by people who say they went to such events but were surprised when they turned into Bible study sessions. During the events recruiters casually mention Bible study, even pulling out a Bible and inviting the potential recruits to a Bible study session at one of their churches, former members said.

    Constant contact

    Church leader education videos run recruiters step by step through how to keep recruits coming back to Bible study.

    Recruiters should call their recruits the night before and again on the day of the Bible study class to ensure attendance, recruiters are told. They should meet the recruit at their home and accompany them to class.

    They need to sit next to their recruit during Bible study to prevent interactions with other recruits who may ask difficult questions. Church leaders must pretend to be new to the church as well in order to build rapport.

    “You say: ‘I’m like you. I never saw the Bible before,’” recruiters are told in the video.

    A former senior leader in the Perth branch of Shincheonji, Matthew Thomas, claims that during this period he was trained to identify if recruits “had a broken family, if they had a history of mental health problems, if they took antidepressants … did they ever live in poverty, did they ever have abusive relationships”.

    “I would want to find out their childhood traumas as quickly as possible,” Thomas, who left the church in January after an intervention by his parents, says.

    “If you’re able to get someone to that level of conversation, where they feel comfortable enough to share those kind of things with you, it just deepens trust.”

    This would allow him to empathise with recruits and offer them support, increasing their reliance on the church.

    ‘Fruit-to-fruit contact is dangerous’

    Church leaders are told in training materials to accompany their recruit as much as possible, including to the toilet, while at church buildings to ensure they don’t interact with other new members, or try to leave.

    “Do not let fruits leave the centre to go home alone, but accompany them to their transport and see them off, to minimise fruit-to-fruit contact,” a leader tells recruiters in one video. Offer to drive them home, or to get food with them after class, she says.

    “Fruit-to-fruit contact is dangerous. Stick with the fruit. Be close. Close close.”

    Leaders are told that only senior church members should be influencing and directly contacting recruits.

    In one recruitment video, a church leader describes a former member as a “serpent” and “scary”, because he “didn’t just quietly fall away” when he left the church. He tried to get other church members to leave by “secretly approaching fruits that were alone and didn’t have any leaves with them, and secretly handing them pieces of paper which contained his number on it”.

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  38. Perry Bulwer30 October 2024 at 14:16

    This is why recruiters must provide regular reports to the church about their recruits, including any resistance to the church’s teachings, along with any interests, hobbies and information about their lives that can be used to retain them, Thomas says.

    A training document from the Sydney branch tells leaders that if their recruits challenge the church or if they “receive a slanderous message by text or call, immediately report it to the church”.

    Sleep deprivation and exhaustion

    In a September sermon delivered to church members in Melbourne and recorded on video, a church leader tells recruits that if they can’t handle the intense schedule of sermons and events, “you need to go back to the education centre”.

    The education centre refers to the initial eight to 10-month Bible study course the newest recruits attend, at the end of which, according to former members, they must pass an exam with hundreds of questions and obtain perfect marks to become an official Shincheonji member. Only if they pass is the name of the church, Shincheonji, revealed, Thomas says.

    Thomas claims his involvement in the church left him broke, exhausted and unable to see reason. He and other former members spoke of dedicating more than 60 hours a week to it.

    Between giving sermons, recruiting, undertaking required education and keeping a vigilant eye on his recruits, Thomas says he at times only got a few hours of sleep a night and constantly had sermon passages running through his head.

    If he was late to sermons or education sessions, or seemed tired, he claims he was belittled and chastised by other leaders for being lazy and uncommitted. He described feeling depressed and overwhelmed.

    “I was obviously so sleep-deprived,” he says. He got into three car accidents within a couple of years due to passing out from exhaustion at the wheel.

    Thomas says once he realised he had been a victim of what he describes as a form of brainwashing and coercive control, he immediately messaged every member of the church he had recruited – more than 70 people, he estimates – and tried to get them to out.

    It was a move that he says rapidly saw him blocked by members as word quickly spread.

    Thomas says: “The level of guilt I feel for bringing all of these students in is huge. I’m 100% a perpetrator.

    “I just felt so angry … sometimes I don’t even know who to feel angry at. All the leaders that had kind of implemented all the mind control on to me – I think are even more brainwashed than I was.”

    to see the links embedded in this article go to:

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/17/how-the-shincheonji-doomsday-church-targets-and-recruits-people-in-australia-ntwnfb

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)