This podcast details the initiative we had to launch to confront an evil so winsomely established within a community of Christians being errantly led by its pastor down the proverbial gates to hell.
Listen to it HERE.
This is probably our most indepth look into the spiritual depravity of cultism we've ever had an opportunity to produce.It takes a long and hard look at why two "cutting edge" churches are just plain cutting cults.
This is a review of how Biblical agape is absent from the indoctrination of cultism, specifically in the toxic formation practiced by two Ohio Valley cults largely off the radar of countercult discernment, who have been enthusiastically abusing their recruits for a total of some seventy years. Our case studies will focus on Xenos Christian Fellowship (now called Dwell Community Church) and Gladstone Community (now called Madison Place Community Church), fulfilling Matthew 24:12.
A video presentation first broadcast at the EMNR conference entitled "Engage 2023: The Cost of Failed Discipleship.' WARNING - Explicit testimony of cult abuses may trigger cult survivors. View it HERE.
Rafael Martinez with Megan Cox
Spiritwatch Ministries
Post Office Box 2165
Hammond, IN, 46323
Thursday, January 17, 2024
Conrad Hilario and Kate Mizelle
Dwell Community Church
1340 Community Park Dr
Columbus, OH 43229
Dear Conrad and Kate:
It has been two years since our last communication regarding the testimonies we have presented to you about the abuses of a substantial number of people within your church community. We have long wanted to reconnect with you for further conversation on this very matter but our email connection came to a disappointing end.
At the time, we were affiliated with Everywoman Studios and no longer are. Yet our position then remains as it is now, that a disturbingly persistent subculture involving authoritarian and manipulative domination appears to be far more rampant within your movement then how you have represented it. Additional personal discussion with former members and leaders confirms this over the past 2 years, much of which I am certain you are quite aware of.
We would like to ask that you candidly respond to this additional evidence and do so in the same format as we previously dialogued with you, using online meetings to do so. We would use Google Meet, record them and make this recording available to you as soon as technically possible afterwards. The recording would be used publicly in our ongoing discussions about Dwell as you used the first recordings from 2021 for your own purposes.
There's far more, Conrad and Kate, then you thought you'd encounter by opening this discussion. We are not seeking damnation but discernment and have approached this not to scandalize but with sobriety. There are very clear problems within your movement that are well documented which you need to squarely address that dishonor the Gospel and militate against your belief that Dwell is an embodiment of New Testament Christian community.
And I as an activist against institutionalized abuse and Megan as a survivor of it have a real desire for frank discussion on this and are requesting that you - or anyone else in senior X/D leadership at your level - to respond to our invitation and actually do so.
We look forward to your response.
Rafael Martinez
Spiritwatch Ministries
******
USPS Tracking HERE.
Unlike the gregarious and extroverted Smith, who would go on to found a cultic religion all his own, Kijinski doesn't like to talk to reporters. Click on the link to find out why. Thank you, Cincinnati Magazine.
Lawrence Pile Pastor Bill Randles
1943-2022 1959-2022
We recently learned of the passing of these two giants of the faith who you likely never heard of.
Larry Pile was a researcher as well as a facilitator of recovery workshops at the Wellspring Retreat and Rehabilitation center in Albany Ohio and assisted hundreds of people onward toward their own healing and growth beyond the impact cultism had made upon them. He was a well known Bible teacher and wrote a book based upon the epistle of Paul to the Galatians for those suffering religious abuse to help in their recovery of spiritual stability.
Pastor Bill Randles a former Word of Faith pastor, renounced his association with that error and continued onward toward creating a pastoral response to the deceptive doctrines and bad practice that the Faith movement had inflicted upon his church and then began a serious retrenching of his ministry, toward exposing the the New Apostolic Reformation culture (NAR) which emerged in the past 40 years and was based on the profoundly warped Latter Rain error from two generations past.
Both men were gentle, yet uncompromising proclaimers of sound analysis of truth from pastoral perspectives and helped untold numbers of those ripped off by spiritual abuse for decades. I knew of Larry and had only met Bill once but they came highly recommened and the work they gave themselves to speaks for itself. Visit our YouTube and Vimeo channels in the next few weeks as we upload three talks Pastor Bill gave on the spiritual deception the NAR has left behind. For an excellent article by Larry detailing the dangers of the shepherding movement, a vile system of cultic control hatched by Charismatic extremists within it which intensified the lure and damage of the proto-NAR churches then in existence, click here.
We will truly sincerely miss their discernment, their love of truth and their care for those ripped off by abusive. They were good men who ran the race and kept the faith. Godspeed and condolences to the Pile and Randles families. Please click on their obituaries above for more information and if you'd like to extend any personal condolences.
The Twelve Tribes might be guilty of being a maddeningly enduring and abusive communal cult with roots all the way to Tennessee and beyond.
This seemed answered in the June memorial service for the crash victims. Elizabeth affirmed she and her brother were “well equipped and fully ready” but “bound and determined to keep the Remnant legacy alive” There was never any real reason for concern that Remnant would just fall apart as the machine Gwen had created had too much momentum keeping it moving. Elizabeth affirmed that she had a massive leadership structure as well as church members who would carry it on. “If you are asking if the Remnant Fellowship will continue on, the answer is yes.”
But despite her passionate affirmative, both brother and sister largely have vanished from any meaningful public view or interaction. Despite one or two carefully curated appearances of Elizabeth only, both have completely disappeared. The Remnant church sanctuary that used to be filled with a throng of members leaning on Gwen’s every word have yet to see her teach or preach a single service. During a recent "feast" day observed by Remnant, we heard many people comment on how half filled their sanctuary was, how contrived and motion-going the activity there was and how thunderstruck the observers, who were RF members, at how empty the place seemed .. events that under Gwen's charisma attracted far more of the faithful. As it stands, an order of service at Remnant now exists that is quite literally little more than a video watch party of pre-recorded sermons by Gwen accompanied by carefully crafted live exhortations by leadership figures to rally the Remnant faithful to keep on keeping on.
So the absence of any public appearance by her or her brother or any direction clearly has become a serious concern. In her latest phoned-in exhortation in late fall of 2021, her chief concern was that no one in Remnant was to assume she was quitting. In that rambling call, which was well attended and was an event that obviously had been announced, she once again thanked everyone for understanding her need to take “a break” and that she would eventually return. She claimed that she was at the church every day from 4 am to midnight to help its day to day operation in its offices. Her quavering recital of a tired old contemporary cliche meant to dismiss any opposition surely found a receptive audience: "haters are going to hate!" It also signalled the hardline Remnant has taken in completely ignoring or engaging the information being shared that critically examines it with a completely evasive proverb meant to frame the controversy as pure persecution.
But Elizabeth gave no other explanation for her continued and intentional absence from church services. She did say that one of her conditions for return was that a media onslaught resulting in photography of her and her children needed to die down.
I understand the need for anyone to suffer the kind of loss that Elizabeth has experienced is a crushing blow for anyone. She lost a truly beloved husband and a mother who had directed her entire life. Keep in mind she is now a fortysomething mother of four children and it’s understandable how this whole sorrowful tragedy is weighing terribly upon her. Yet despite her assurances in June at the memorial to her mother and the victims, she was NOT “well equipped and fully ready” to press ahead. There was a brittle fragility behind her tough verbiage that was plainly heard that persists to this day as she exhibits a real hesitancy of even being seen as a leader, unable to handle scrutiny from the outside world. The official response of the cult to its discomfiture via HBO was a classic circling of rhetorical wagons and a mustering of bravado that rings hollower and hollower as time passes (we'll be reviewing that here soon).
With such uncertainty, I think the question can now be fairly asked “Since the Remnant Fellowship is going to continue on, then who is going to lead it?” We have some thoughts on those as well .. Stay tuned.
In short, there's a reason Jesus called the leaders of such places - including Gwen Shamblin and her tribe of sycophantic leadership - ravening wolves in sheep's clothing in Matthew 7:15. You've heard the expression perhaps .. and it's this proverb you need to keep in mind when Remnant is misidentified as a church. It is an accursed cult (Galatians 1:8) foisting itself off as a church to deceive many .. just as Jesus also said in Matthew 24 as well. We should expect to find more of this arising in the days to come and RF is a poster chile of what spiritual deception looks like.
In public church settings, private interaction, and every place that deference to spiritual authority is actively given by trusting followers, not every exercise of this profoundly impactful influence is proper. In fact, it is routinely found that abusive church leadership exerts its most damaging and destructive impact in these kinds of settings. People look up to those who appear to them to be spiritual giants for mentoring, pastoral care and inspirational guidance and find themselves in a horrific quagmire of psychological and personal coercion leading them to obey and submit blindly to demands made on them which cost them dearly in so many ways
The stance of these leaders was not much different from leaders in some contemporary cults who exercise total control over their adherents. Under the cloak of supreme holiness and sanctification is hidden a terrifying pattern of abuse. There can be not only beatings and physical abuse but mind control, deprivation, vituperation, intimidation, public shaming and humiliation.
As one expert noted of such a group:
The breaking down, forcing people to do behaviors that are denigrating. The language, the control of behavior, that if you’re not doing what the group wants, you’re violating God’s will. It’s certainly abusive personality control.
Like Satan, the leaders (ancient or modern) may appear as shining angels of light, but there is an appalling exercise of absolute authority (2 Corinthians 11:14). As is so often true in cases of abusive mind control, the victims can no longer acknowledge the abuse or nor are they able to defend themselves. Whether the abuse is in a religious community or a family, victims can become pathologically conditioned into acceptance, as a director of a battered women’s project notes:
Victims of domestic violence are in an altered state. Up seems down. It’s important to understand that if someone is a victim all these years, it’s sort of like she’s been brainwashed. You are in essence a prisoner.
A woman at the shelter added, “They break you down. You feel less than human. They isolate you. They say, ‘No one cares about you. Only I love you.’ And you start to believe it. Then it builds to the physical. It’s worse for people with higher social status. Society puts more pressure on them. It’s more embarrassing."
Read more of this outstanding exposition of Scriptural truth and how it speaks to modern spiritual corruption today that energizes religious abuse everywhere.
The story behind the photo above is unnerving and gruesome. It looks innocuously pious enough. There's a lot going on there which masked an abusive ministry in action. That's the problem indeed. It looks so normal. Highly disturbing images are at the article linked here. Viewer's discretion advised.
This video is from the workshop our ministry produced, a March 2008 workshop held at the Kansas City Conference on Biblical Discernment held at the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Lord, forgive us for being so delayed by so much.
This was webbed as an article series quite a few years ago. But we finally found the time this past year to get it released and properly edited to include the slides and video of the workshop which we felt needed to be included so as to help illustrate our contention that the Pentecostal and Charismatic concept of Christian leadership by a "five fold ministry" has been largely invalidated by contemporary trends within it that lend themselves to heresy, false teaching and spiritual abuse. This is easily one of the greatest sources of spiritual deception hidden in plain sight.
Even though it is somewhat dated, the essential information found that shows how the five fold ministry, in some circles, actually has become quite cultic is still quite valid. We hope the video which you can find here is both a warning and an exhortation to correction of its errors. We are sorry the audio was not as good as we could have replicated, but we did the best we could.
Just in the last few months, we've found time to be able to finally, finally remastering our old videos of our past discernment conference workshops as well as that of others from far too many years ago. Here is one such rework, finally completed, from our old TVBSA conference held at the First Assembly of God in Janesville, Wisconsin. This is my contribution to the controversial yet altogether needed discipline of spiritual discernment, a workshop on the essentials of Biblical discernment.
Click here for our Vimeo channel version and get your Bible and notepad out to take notes. This is the clearest presentation on this subject we've ever been able to offer and no stone is left unturned. It's a summary of a life time of my study on this and I'm thankful to finally get this - and other videos - out to the masses. We will be featuring other ones as time goes by.