A Tour of the Fringes

In dealing with the abuse of power within modern American evangelicalism, it has been helpful to break the analysis down into categories. Thus we dealt first with evangelicals and political power. Now that we are dealing with evangelicals and ecclesiastical power, I propose a further subdivision, namely, a division between obvious “fringe” groups, commonly classified as cults, versus power abuse in churches and church organizations that are typically regarded as “mainstream.” This post begins a tour of a few typical fringe churches, leaders, and organizations. We will start with my old abusive church, described in my blog posts titled, “What My Old Church Was Like.” But whereas those posts were personal in nature, this post will have a more forensic and analytical tone. I do hope, however, that writing this post won't lead to bad dreams (I'm not joking!) or to the urge to use a few choice four letter words. It's been over five years since I left that messed-up church. One other thing: if anyone reading this is an ex-member of that church, please forgive me if I accidentally irritate old wounds. That is not my intention.

George and Betty Geftakys are a small-time religious husband-and-wife con artist duo with a storied past, although you'll get a less-than-accurate version of that story from their mouths. They now live in an upscale retirement facility in Southern California's Inland Empire, their expenses financed by proceeds from gifts and offerings which they swindled out of their followers over a period of at least twenty-five years. George is now pushing 80 years of age, but began his “career” long ago as a Baptist pastor, according to his own account, after enlisting in the military as a teenager during World War II. George considered himself to be successful as a pastor; yet he states that a morning came during which God began to speak to him and to show him that the pattern of church government in which he was involved was wrong, and that God was calling him to “New Testament simplicity.” He says that when he began preaching the things he was seeing in Ephesians regarding God's pattern for the Church, the elders and deacons of his church graciously suggested that he should leave the church and find a place that expressed the pattern that George had discovered.

Thus during the late '50's (?) and the 1960's, George and Betty began meeting with a number of “assemblies” affiliated with the Plymouth Brethren movement. George has often related how he met “dear brethren in the Lord” in these assemblies, and how he “stood courageously” against certain “false teachers.” But there came a time during the 60's in which, as George began to see that the Brethren assemblies were “losing their vision,” God called him to a “season of fervent prayer and fasting,” that the Lord might show him His purposes for him. So it was that “God called George to begin a new work.”

This “new work” was the founding of a large chain of “assemblies” modeled after the Plymouth Brethren pattern, although George denied any connection between his Assemblies and the Brethren. The founding of these groups began in the late 1960's and early 70's, and continued without interruption until 2002, when a number of ex-members discovered that one of George's sons had been a wife-beater during the entire duration of his marriage, and that George himself had actually been excommunicated from his former Brethren assembly for adultery. They posted their findings, including restraining orders obtained against the wife-beating son, on a website to which they invited all current members of the Geftakys assemblies. Once this website became widely known, other things came to light, such as the embezzlement of large amounts of money from the offering known as “the Lord's Treasury,” the assertion by one source that George had four Social Security numbers, and the adultery George practiced while he presided over his assemblies – adultery which consisted of his ordering young women to serve as his secretaries, while secretly forcing himself on them. It is quite likely that George's sexual shenanigans were the reason he was obliged to leave the Baptist church he pastored at the beginning of his “career.” Also, those who are still alive from the time of George's stay with the Plymouth Brethren can attest that George had other problems, including a lack of social skills which expressed itself as a strong drive to dominate people.

The Assemblies of George Geftakys advertised themselves by such things as college campus “outreach” groups, “Gospel tent campaigns” in various cities, “mission and training teams” sent out to start new assemblies, and “gospel marches” on city streets. But in 1992 they got a bit of publicity they weren't looking for, because that was the year that Churches that Abuse was published. Churches that Abuse was, among other things, a much abridged catalogue of several cultic and damaging churches, among which the Assemblies were also mentioned. When Churches was first published, we who were in the Assemblies were all warned that it was “an attack by the Devil to stir up persecution and discredit the Lord's servant.” But having read the book, I now think it very accurately called a spade a spade. And anyway, crooks almost always deny that they did the crime when they are first fingered. By the way, you can also find out more about George and Betty Geftakys from the Rick A. Ross Institute for the Study of Destructive Cults, Controversial Groups and Movements (www.rickross.com), and from the “Assembly Reflections” website (www.geftakysassembly.com). If you go to the Rick Ross website, just type “Geftakys” in the search box.

Some mention of the Plymouth Brethren is in order, since they were the source of much of George's teaching and practice. In the early 1800's a number of people in the United Kingdom became disaffected with certain practices in the Church of England, and began simple “house church” style meetings instead. They became known as the “Brethren.” Most of their groups had no strong leadership or dominant figures, and only a primitive organizational form. But that all changed when a young clergyman named John Nelson Darby joined one of these groups. He was an extremely well-educated man, as well as an overpowering, domineering man, and he quickly made a rigid, restrictive, tightly governed organizational machine out of the majority of these groups, which had formerly been simple gatherings of believers who just wanted to meet each Sunday for mutual encouragement.

Darby also taught and wrote extensively. From the groups he founded, as well as the ideas contained in his writings, certain groups have arisen which are cultic in the extreme, radically shunning the outside world, micromanaging their members' lives to within a “gnat's eyebrow,” and governed by leaders who are rabidly willing to sue the living daylights out of anyone who dares accuse these groups of being cultic. One such group, founded by an Asian man in the 1950's, used to sue Christian book publishers whose books cast the group in an unfavorable light. The lawsuits always demanded obscene amounts of money (the last suit was for $300 million). The lawyers for this group typically relied on a strategy of bleeding the opposition dry through rounds and rounds of endless depositions, thus forcing the publishing companies to settle or go bankrupt. However, this group lost its most recent lawsuit. Groups based on the Plymouth Brethren have also been the target of a scathing lampoon by Garrison Keillor of A Prairie Home Companion. It seems that Mr. Keillor had to suffer through a Plymouth Brethren upbringing as a child. However, no one has dared to sue him for speaking out.

The Geftakys assemblies definitely fit the list of danger signals found in Churches that Abuse and at the Rick Ross website (www.rickross.com/warningsigns.html) concerning aberrant groups. But it is helpful also to consider the patterns of power abuse which were present in the Assemblies.

First, the thing that drew so many of us into the Assemblies, and which held us there, was the hunger many of us had for a “deeper spiritual experience,” and the message from George and his deputies that they had what we needed. George communicated this in many ways: talking much about the visions and revelations which he had “received from the Lord,” the “insights” which God gave him, the miraculous signs which had accompanied him on his missionary journeys, etc. Though the Bible warns against this kind of boasting (Colossians 2:18), we fell for it.

But the second thing that George did was to discredit any other source of spiritual knowledge or insight beside himself. Thus it was that in the early days of his assemblies, when he held regularly scheduled Bible studies, he would not allow anyone but himself to preach on certain Bible passages, such as the Prophets or Revelation, since no one yet “had as much stature and maturity as he.” Later, he did allow his most trusted lieutenants to preach on these passages. But reading of devotional books written by people other than himself was strongly discouraged in general, unless cleared by the leadership, since most other authors “did not have the vision of the House of God.”

Also, the followers in his groups were taught to “seek counsel” from the leaders for almost every major life decision, including whom to marry and what career to have. This pressure to clear every decision with the leaders had another corollary: the subtle communication of the idea that unless one was being discipled and groomed for positions of greater responsibility within the group, one wasn't really “getting on with the Lord.” This had the effect of training most of us to be like typical Haley Joel Osment movie characters: lost little children looking for adult shoulders to lean on, while being told that the only worthy shoulders were those of the leaders.

George elevated himself above all the members of his group, going so far as to call himself “the head steward of the work,” along with other crackerjack titles, and frequently stating that “...you're not my peers!” during his “sermons.” Moreover, he alone chose those who assisted him in leadership; input from the followers was usually not solicited. Therefore, there was no way of holding him or his deputies accountable for anything (at least, until the Internet;-)).

George also preached and taught a version of the Christian life that was so rigorously perfectionist that almost none of his hearers believed that they would ever be able to attain such perfection. Some of his ex-followers have gone to great lengths (and used many reams of paper in the process) in an attempt to refute George's teachings by comparing them to the writings of great Church historical figures such as Augustine or John Calvin, or by performing exhaustive, highly technical exegesis of obscure Bible passages. For a long time I have thought such efforts to be a waste of time, since it seems obvious to me that the reason why George preached such a perfectionist message was not theological, but so that he could by one more means establish himself alone as the top dog in our little dogpile. All I care about is the fact that George turned out to be a liar (oh! how I want to say something much stronger!), and that his teaching drove some people to suicide. As far as George's theology, I am no more interested in analyzing it than I am in performing a rigorous toxicological analysis of the potato salad that has just sickened a hundred people at a church picnic. It's better to just toss the whole mess and get on with life. While my theology nowadays is a work-in-progress, it is my work, and no one else's.

But there were two particular effects of George's teaching and practice. First, because we were all taught to believe that one wasn't “getting on with the Lord” unless one was rising through the ranks to greater positions of leadership, an intense competition was generated in our midst for those positions of leadership. Secondly, because George preached such a rigorously perfectionist, legalist version of Christianity, and because he held himself up as the one man who could live such a life, everyone who was vying for leadership positions was trained to be legalistic and demanding in his dealings with his fellows.

This manifested itself in three areas: ministry, child-rearing and the marriage relationship. Those who were granted positions of authority frequently tried to prove their worthiness by being as hard as possible on those whom they led. This led to a lot of stressed-out members of communal “training homes” whose lives were traumatized by the “head stewards” who ran the homes. It also led to a living hell for many wives and children of ambitious men who desperately wanted to “grow in stature.” These men were counseled on the proper techniques of “domestic management” by George's wife Betty, whose teachings were actually an attempt to legitimize the deviant home life practiced by George and his sons. It is important to note that as a justification and backup for her teachings, Betty used books by authors who were quite in vogue in mainstream evangelical circles not very long ago: books by Gary and Ann Marie Ezzo, and by Gary Ezzo and Dr. Robert Bucknam (Babywise, Parent-Wise Solutions, November 2001; Growing Kids God's Way, Biblical Ethics for Parenting, January 2001), as well as books by J. Richard Fugate (What the Bible Says About Child Rearing, Aletheia Publishers, 1980 ). The premise of these books is that the evidence of godly leadership in the home is that a man rules his family well, as is stated in 1 Timothy. However, the “rule” outlined in these books is, I think, a far cry from the kind of “rule” God actually wants. “Godly home rule” as practiced by a typical Geftakys assembly family, involved a husband who trained his wife and children that they were merely his servants, and who drove them unceasingly to perform his perfectionist, legalistic demands.

Future posts will examine the abuse of power in ministry, child-rearing and marriage, as practiced in a fringe cultic church. I will also perform a more detailed examination of some of the supposedly “mainstream” teachings by “mainstream” evangelical authors which have been used to justify some “fringe” practices in this area. And I shall examine a typical list of “warning signs” concerning unsafe religious groups and see how they fit with some of the more well-known fringe churches.

But I will also tell personal stories. Therefore, the next post will describe a woman who had been raised in an abusive church background, and whom I met about a year after I left the Geftakys assemblies. She is illustrative of the damage that is done to people who are born into such groups.