RELIANT MISSION
Behind The Pretense
This is a repost of a response here to a Former Reliant Missionary. This group is doing the smoke and mirrors thing again (as is their history) so they may disguise their massive trail of spiritual abuse evidence that follows them. Please be warned.
I have found the name and "mission" of RELIANT MISSION quite ironic. Their deceptive history is anything but reliant. When I was part of this organization in its later beginnings we never saw any accounting of what happened with our money given to the church for many years! No one publicly questioned it. Only when the bad reputation of the group grew quite widespread did they attempt to publish their "so-called" activities. Even then, it was a whitewash job. Abuses were very much dismissed. Only after I left did I learn that the founder used our finances to start his own pet projects to exult his image and the image of his "ministry". We were used to create, promote, distribute, and verbally PUFF UP GCx's image. Though we didn't know it, we were just like slaves working hard to build pyramids to their honor. Nearly every project was a waste of our time and labor because they failed pitifully. There always seemed to be a significant exaggeration of the facts. The promotion of this group nearly always seemed to be right on the edge of fabrication.
"You gladly put up with fools... In fact, you even put up with anyone who enslaves you or exploits you or takes advantage of you or puts on airs or slaps you in the face."
2 Corinthians 11:19,20
"Those people are zealous to win you over, but for no good. What they want is to alienate you from us, so that you may have zeal for them."
Galatians 4:17
Let's just say that the finances in that group seemed of little benefit to those in the actual church. In fact, some were reproved for giving to faithful people in our church who were living in poverty. (Though it was anonymous, the elders did find out.) Though this was over and above their tithe, they were still told it should go to the elders. Some were reproved for giving money to their own parents. Now, mind you, the ratio of people to elders then was 10-25 to 1! And, there were three elders! That was NOT good use of our money.
There were other money-making investment schemes which deceptively sucked in members and family and friends of members to generate high dollars. People lost hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars and were never compensated a thing that I know of. Some were twistedly persuaded to give up their retirements. The insensitivity to their own people is audacious!
The biggest PR move in my time was to try to start 50 new churches all at once by selecting two men for each city and sending them (and their families) out with only a thousand dollars and "commissioning" them to start a church. These "missionaries" received no known support from their home church after that and were visited little if ever by those in leadership! I'm not sure that any of those really succeeded. They are bent on building up their IMAGE, but not their people.
Thus, I find it contemptuous that the GCx organization set up such a group and called it RELIANT Mission!