Excerpts from 2015 Newspaper Article on Spiritually Abusive Organization

These are very interesting excerpts from a 2015 Newspaper Article Regarding a Spiritual Abusive Church Organization which closely represent the abuses in the GCx Church organization. I have tried to include only what is pertinent. It is a long article so you may want to skim just the emphasized similarities. All bold emphasis is mine. The link to the full article can be found at the bottom.

"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...

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.”..

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....

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...

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."...

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.”...

FINANCES AND CONTROL

...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.”...

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...

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....

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.

He says Faith Christian’s 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...

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.”...

Former members say Faith Christian's practices are deeply rooted in the controversial “discipleship movement,” which was embraced by Maranatha but has fallen out of favor in many evangelical circles.

New members are paired with a minister who shepherds them in their journey to Christ, they say. But Doug Pacheco, a former church member in Marantha's Tucson church, said that to disobey or question church leaders equated disobedience to God, and was considered a form of rebellion. He left the church in 1990.

“The leaders generally use scriptures and try to substitute a person’s devotion to God and turn it to devotion to the church and its leaders,” he says.

Maranatha's authoritarianism and lack of financial accountability was sharply criticized in a 1984 report by a committee of Christian scholars. (To read a summary of the report, visit icsahome.com, the International Cultic Studies Association, and type "maranatha" into the search box in the top right-hand corner.)

When Marantha shuttered its doors, its president Bob Weiner told Christianity Today that the committee's report was biased, and wasn't the reason the church shut down.

"Ninety-nine percent of what we did was right," he said. "It was the 1 percent that got reported."

Many of the report's criticisms echo the stories from ex-members of Faith Christian in Tucson:

* Parents — Christian and non-Christian — said their children became evasive, distant or hostile after involvement with Maranatha.

* Parents feared retribution or worsened estrangement from their children if their concerns were made public.

* Members were discouraged from dating.

* Those who questioned church leaders were said to have a "spirit of rebellion."

* Church leaders claimed to receive a "word from the Lord" in the form of personal revelation, which seemed to undermine the authority of the Bible and create "the potential for elevation of personal 'revelation' to a place equal to, if not superior to, the Word of God."

"Less than total commitment to the goals of the leadership was sometimes interpreted as spiritual weakness or the result of 'demonic' influence,' " the report said.

The summary of the committee's report concludes that, until Maranatha changes its practices, "we would not recommend this organization to anyone."

Faith Christian's affiliates

Here are the names of the affiliates founded by Faith Christian members and the universities where they recruit:

New Life Christian Church in Flagstaff (Northern Arizona University)

Grace Christian Church in Fort Collins (Colorado State University)

New Covenant Christian Church in Albuquerque (University of New Mexico)

Cornerstone Christian Church in Tampa (University of South Florida)

Resurrection Church in Boulder (University of Colorado)

Palmerston North Victory Christian Church, in Palmerston North, New Zealand (Massey University)

Two other branches — Hope Christian Church in Tempe, which recruits at Arizona State University, and Living Hope Christian Church in Las Cruces, which recruits at New Mexico State University — are run by former Faith Christian pastors but are not listed on its website.

Hope Christian Pastor Brian Smith, who was formerly with Faith Christian, says his church is "built on a different philosophy" than Faith Christian and that the two are not affiliated."

Here is the link to the full article:

http://tucson.com/news/local/star-investigation-tucson-ministry-a-cult-former-followers-say/article_8824efc5-f210-5041-8088-a654585e4673.html