"Where Are We Going?" Back Online with Season 2, Episode 0 Help Wanted: Jeremiahs In Short Supply

We're back online and intend on staying there until Jesus comes. Our weekly podcast is back and you can hear it on our RSS.com site by clicking here.

Our listeners understand what this podcast is about. It’s our desire to provide for you a solidly Biblical perspective on our times and the trouble we’re all finding in them. We tackle a subject that relates to the challenges to discerning what’s going on around us and take about 15-20 minutes to address them.
In one of our last season’s podcasts, we examined the stability of human society itself and what the Bible says about it. It’s no secret that our world has entered a shadowy time of uncertainty that really quite unlike any other time in recent history. Listening to a national commentator's take on the troubles of our nation is a reality check worth hearing.

Check it out and tell your friends, family, enemies, inlaws and all persons inbetween!

Getting Away With Not Quite Murder: A Child Sexual Abuse Story Remembered

This is an all too common affair among the sons of Adam: when child sexual abuse allegations corroborated by witnesses of the depravity can be admitted to by the perpetrator in a court of law but still be dismissed, be ignored by the police and unadmitted to at Christian church where the abuse occurred at. It's all too common and it should be remembered how an escape from any apparent accountability there occurs. In the last days where evil is cloaked as good, this is to be expected and fulfills once again the cutting indictment of Scripture against such wrongdoing. 

What is singularly horrific is when the perpetrator is a school teacher who volunteers at Christian camps and is alone with children whom are groomed by them to accept the sexual abuse as a manifestation of "God's love." The church was the North Side Gospel Center in Chicago (now defunct) and Camp Awana in Fredonia, Wisconsin (in a bizarre twist of irony, the well known Awana children's church educational program was started in the basement of the church in Chicago). As far as we know, the teacher, one Cherie Carlson was not confronted by the middle school, nor law enforcement. Beyond a statement that the church would cooperate in the investigation, nothing else is know if Carlson received any punitive sanction whatsoever.

You can watch the 2013 investigative video produced by WMAQ in Chicago here about this grotesque incident where Carlson had been seen sexually fondling a girl in the 1990s by a third individual in the camp cabin it occurred. Later that year, the girl who is now a mother sought to sue her directly. Carlson was a middle school teacher at Cooper Middle School in Buffalo Grove, Illinois at the time of this controversy several years in the past but was able to walk back and deflect the accusations which surfaced in a civil but not a criminal court.

To underscore her confidence in her ability to move forward, she would go on and be reinstated back to her job at the school the following year in 2014, opening up a YouTube account (which is now devoid of video content but still is active) not long after the accusation of wrong doing surfaced to support her middle school activities. To this day, Carlson remains employed there.

And later in 2017 Carlson would wiggle completely out of accountability solely because of her appeal to the statute of limitations and not a litigated defensive denial of wrongdoing in that civil court. She didn't deny and all but admitted that the sexual abuse had occurred but she had failed to report it in time and this slipshod defense worked. The lawsuit was dismissed and the appeal affirmed it. You can read about the warped opinions offered by an appellate court in Illinois that allowed Carlson to move on with her life, leaving the victim Jane Due in the dust of injustice.

And if you think this is an isolated instance of a complete breakdown in the efforts to make such perpetrators accountable, meet some links that will beg to differ by the Net.

That's the American way. But Cherie, God saw it all. I hope you repented and made restitution to your victim .. or victims. 



 

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

We're reasonably certain that this individual at a 2018 rally is glad that in his past, his parents were binary. 

Yes, we're aware of the confusion of genders and the need for a gainsaying society to make room for such personal choices and the future of our planet seems brighter with it. 

But the perpetuation of humanity kind of, well, NEEDS the traditional understanding of male and female to work out in that old school way.  In vitro birth and same sex gendering can't quite make that difference. 
 

The Segue In Zion: The Shadowy Leadership Change at Remnant Fellowship

The slow fade of Elizabeth Hannah, daughter of Gwen Shamblin Lara, from the life of Remnant Fellowship was not entirely unexpected.

She simply was not ready to assume a role that her mother had obsessively carried for over two decades. When the tragic accident on Memorial Day weekend 2021 took place that took the lives of Gwen and her coterie of leaders, through the shock, horror and grief that swept Remnant members one big question loomed above all else: who would lead them?  The unthinkable had been thrust upon the Remnant faithful in the most terrible way possible and so much rampant worry about the survival of the group seemed to focus on that very question.

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.