The neutral observer's perspective on the wiki article

Given Wikipedia's emphasis on the "neutral" point of view, it was interesting to get the POV of someone who had never come across the JA before a day or so ago, and then only a reference in someone's blog, which made him curious and made him consult wikipedia. Calling himself Gramby, he commented on the discussion page that the article seemed to have been sanitised, to be no more than a "fluff" piece promoting the JA. Reading the negotiations had in turn led him to the conclusion that John Campbell was vetting all the content of the article and using the wikipedia rules to stop sincere editors having a voice.

His comments put me on the spot a bit because I have a potentially invidious relationship with John, where, in the interests of the stability of the article, we communicate with each other and attempt to co-moderate the page. It is a questionable compromise and I am starting to question my role in it.

I may have let myself be too easily bullied by wikipedia zealots with a better handle than me on wikipedia's rules, into giving too much ground. That would not have happened if I had taken the trouble to read the wiki rules with sufficient care. From Gramby's comments I have realised that I have probably yielded too easily on the subject of verifiable sources, which need not be exclusively academic but can include respected news media. I used very few media sources, giving up my right to cite many others. Tabloids, for instance, may be less desirable than broadsheets, but they are still verifiable sources.

For the last couple of days John Campbell has been uncontactable and I would be reluctant to move until I have given him the chance to comment on Gramby's observations, but I do think Gramby is right and that editors must be assumed to be in good faith when they attempt to make changes to an article which we all know is a compromise which very largely covers up those aspects, past and present, which embarrass the JA. There has been a tendency for editors who have made changes without clearing them with others (in discussion) to be treated as vandals and disruptive elements. Reference has even been made to "potential disruption" or "vandalism" in the edit summaries. Why should any editor clear anything with me or John first? I would even question the right to include an insistence that edits be discussed first.

Negotiation and building relationships with people whose interests are contrary to your own is a very tricky business and involves "give and take" and it seems that I may have given rather too much. It may be time for me to be less of a school prefect on wikipedia and to hope that others will be enboldened to make some brave edits.

I apologise to anyone who has been frustrated in their efforts to make edits, if I have come across as a patsy, seemingly defending the JA's position by defending the stability of the article. If you read the history of the negotiated re-write, you may get a perspective on why I felt it was necessary to attempt to maintain a status quo. I hope you will get a sense of just how hard I fought to include facts which would shed a more revealing light on the JA, but which ultimately could be excluded using the perverse wiki rules of evidence.

Please appreciate that there is a lot in what is now in place which can be read between the lines, or which is very subtle and which would have been totally excluded if compromise had not been possible. My rationale has been in all this, that it is all very well being bold in what you put in, but there is not much point if it then gets immediately removed (reverted). Achieving a compromise that all can live with will mean that the edit will be allowed to stand.

JA membership is a stumbling-block for the faithful

It may seem a funny thing for an atheist to say, but re-reading the last posting made me realise that membership of the JA is a stumbling-block for people who believe.

When I was there we used to say that Christians outside who had not met us would be under grace, but that anyone who met us and did not answer the calling to the kingdom (which we thought was inevitable because we were THE kingdom) would be under judgement.

The irony of this twisted way of looking at things is that in a sense quite the opposite is true. Here and on JAW we have talked about people who leave the JA and lose their faith. I have suggested that the reason for it is not that leavers are bad people or even wilfully rejecting God, but simply that the JA way of couching the faith creates a natural intellectual and psychological block for anyone who leaves.

Christians I met over the years who asked why I had lost my faith all conclude that after experiencing the JA it was perhaps inevitable that I'd be sickened by Christianity. As it happens, I was a Christian afterwards for about 5 years. But in a sense they are right I think: the JA brand of Christianity is a stumblingblock to faith in Christ or trust in other Christians.

Perhaps the JA were right after all; those who had not met them WERE under grace.

Without membership, the belief system has no meaning

The dilemma was simpler in my day - either I would be damned when I left or God would turn out to be bigger than the JA, which ultimately was the gamble I took.

These days, less stress is placed on God's judgement if you leave and more on the inevitable backsliding into apostasy which must follow if you choose to break your covenant with the church -a covenant which is meant to be irrevocable.

This is a change of emphasis, though in practice the language used is pretty similar. In my time the emphasis was placed on God taking his covering away; now it is placed on you taking your soul from under God's covering.

"Minister of the Gospel", an apologist for the JA, a woman who could not hold office in the JA and who does so now in another church, is reluctant to criticise the JA. Her message, as an ex-JA woman, is very much the JA's own: if you fall away from God, then your heart was not right with Him. And that, of course, is common sense....(even for an atheist looking in).

My problem is with the notion that anyone's heart COULD be right with God in a group which preaches a personal relationship with God but which controls everything members think about God, and where the covering system acts as a barrier between an individual and God.

Looked at from a secular point of view for a minute, JA membership defines a person's life. What he or she believes is conditioned by membership. A JA member's relationship with God is lived through a JA filter. When you are told that to leave the JA is to break your irrevocable contract to which God called you, an intellectual crisis is surely inevitable.

How does a leaver get past that level of guilt to a point where they can accept that God is not displeased with them? How can they get to a point where they feel God approves of them without having to go back into the JA? The irony is that any "faith" that CAN survive that kind of crisis may have been a faith lived secretly and hidden from the covering elders - a faith lived in rebellion, effectively, against the covenant!

If the majority of members who leave stop being Christians, the JA will see this as proof that covenant breakers are judged by God (and use it to warn others against leaving); other Christians may self-righteously judge these people, who need their help, by saying that their hearts were not true.

But what may be more true, ultimately, is that the JA is not about faith at all, but about membership. When you stop being a member, the rest of it simply has no meaning. The five leavers whose lives I have been a part of in small measure recently have not become terrible sinners.....they have just become normal, more balanced. God has not become an enemy, just irrelevant. They have got their lives back.

Thinking on my feet - this is badly written and needs editing

People no longer fear becoming backslidden if they leave the JA, says "Minister of the Gospel"; if they backslide, it is no longer the JA's fault, but because a person's heart is, as she put it, out of kilter with God.

This isn't an unusual thing for a Christian to say; loss of faith is always blamed on the individual: you weren't healed because you didn't believe enough, etc. It is an aspect of Christianity that I find so nauseating. Minister of the Gospel is herself a church leader, though as a woman, she had to leave the JA to become one, but as a church leader it is important not to be seen to be critical of other leaders. So the JA gets off the hook if people who leave lose their faith.



This is a philosophy which does not accept that there is a human aspect to what people believe and fear. And when, for however many years, you have had to submit your own thinking and spiritual insight to the scrutiny of elders and adjust it when it was out of line with the received view; when you have spent years under the discipline of the church - and your so-called "personal relationship with God" has first been moulded by people who believe that they ARE the kingdom of God and that God would never call anyone to break a lifetime covenant with their particular church.....

isn't it inevitable that someone who leaves believes himself to be a "covenant breaker", is filled with guilts and doubts and fears. You would have to have a pretty extraordinary psyche (or not have been an entirely committed member in the first place) not to feel out of kilter with God when you leave.

Is this your fault? Do you deserve to feel a loss of God's grace or covering? Is this not the time, perhaps more than ever before, when a Christian needs to know that God is still with him or her? These are questions which Christians have to answer; I don't because I don't believe in God. They must square their belief system with the desperation felt by people who leave the JA as Christians but lose faith. They cannot blame God, so it is easiest to blame the individual.

To my mind nobody can reasonably be expected to leave a church which makes leaving as close as possible to the unforgiveable sin and not expect people to feel out of kilter with their God....or with their unreconstructed belief system. Loss of faith is almost inevitable. Those who leave and keep their faith, as I did (at a time when unforgiveable sin and lost salvation was far more explicitly taught), do so out of a sense of sheer bloody minded determination not to lose it; less froma love of God than from a determination not to prove Noel right. I continued to profess Christ for about 5 years until it became quite clear to me that Christianity is a human construct.

I believe that people who lose their "kilter with God" do so because the JA has constructed a pseudo-reality where you can only have God if you take the rest of the package. That is what makes them a cult. They are not just like any other evangelical church in that sense. When you leave the JA you ARE leaving God, not because you want to but because the JA have constructed their reality that way. Not only do they feel themselves to be THE kingdom of God, but they feel they actually OWN God.

Who is responsible if we lived for years in the fear of lost salvation?

A poster on JAW who calls herself Minister of the Gospel has suggested that we, not Noel Stanton, are responsible for believing that we would be damned if we left the Jesus Fellowship/JA because, she asserts, Noel never actually taught it. My recollections of what Noel actually taught are quite different but I take her point that this almost universally held fear was less taught than it was culturally held to be true. If we weren't actually taught it as doctrine, we certainly were not taught anything else.

If we all believed it and regularly repeated it to each other, using it to keep people on track and in fellowship; used it as a way of cajoling and bullying each other and preventing people from leaving, is it reasonable to absolve Noel Stanton of responsibility for this heresy?

It suited the eldership for us to live for years in fear of "leaving the kingdom", "leaving Zion". Any true man or woman of God leading a church would have disabused us of a doctrinal misconception which kept Christians living in fear.

"Minister of the Gospel" says that God will judge Noel's heart, which she implies was good because he was taking a strong line to make people committed to the Kingdom. But if there is a God worthy of the name, surely He will see a heart which put the building of an institution above the spiritual welfare of its members.

Can a church built on deceit and fear be Godly?

Is its "central-zion" model of control killing the JA?

In the 9 months since I helped someone leave the JA (and he stayed with me over the summer), a further 4 people have left the same household and contacted me and another two have left it to be part of another one, where they can be confident of less friction with the house leader. The leader they are leaving, whose style of "shepherding" most closely follows the more traditional, hardline, central zion model is a zealot for Noel's style because he attached his church group to the JA only in recent years, and presumably wants to make a good impression.

So the household with which I was in contact a year ago now only has three adults and a child; only one adult is not actually a member of the elder's family. This household now has fewer members than when it joined the JA wholesale about five years ago, suggesting that, far from the JA regime bringing more people to Christ and nurturing them, it is stifling and oppressive....and certainly this has been the experience of all 7 of the people who opted to leave this household in the last year.

The two adult non-community members, a husband and wife, who ironically bought the house for the elder's house-church, originally (before it became subsumed into the JA), have opted to be associated with another one in another city, where the model of shepherding has a more laissez faire reputation; or "slack and compromising", as the elder they are leaving characterises it. It may have been his judgementalism which confirmed this couple in their belief that this would be a more appealing place to worship.

The irony which will be lost on the declining household is that the "slack and compromising" one has a thriving congregation. It's elder, Ian, was in the church when I was a member twenty-something years ago and is a lovely chap, who I know to be a solid Christian with a large family, all of whom are enthusiastic Christians, while the more intense elder's children who are old enough to have left home have done so, and while devoted children, are not associated with the church in any way.

The JA will usually tell anyone who alludes to the church's unsavoury past that things have changed, that the church has outlived its earlier experiments in community, where many mistakes were made, but where the church is now mature, more sensitive. But all 5 of my contacts tell me just the same sorts of stories about bullying and control as were typical in my time. What I think is most interesting though, is that their experiences were at the hands of someone who did not join until nearly two decades after I left, while the more liberal households are those that are considered backslidden...and are led by people who were around in my time. As an outsider, it was strange to be told by the intense elder that this other household was backslidden. It seemed that there was no sense of faithfulness to fellow members of the Jesus Army....even when talking to me, a known critic of the JA.

It was inevitable, surely, that Noel and the leadership of the JA would not be able to maintain the intense level of control which the fellowship had in the early days. This is not a fellowship which has grown anything like as large as its PR suggests, not when it counts almost any type of association as membership (with its many levels of commitment). In fact, one of the first signs of its number manipulations dates back to my time, when Noel, our Prophet, prophesied that the church, which then had about 100 Servant Groups (church-growing cells), would have twice as many groups within a year. Frantic effort and lots of naming and claiming went on...but the church did not grow, so that we were forced to make the prophesy come true by dividing every cell group in two. Where previously I had been part of a thriving group, I found myself the leader of just three of us in our cell - myself and two sisters.

The most noticeable difference in the fellowship from my time is the shrinking emphasis on "community" which had always been what made us distinct from the rest of Christendom, so much so that we were dismissive of Christians who did not live in community, which we held to be God's model. Community (and its structures) was what made it possible to control people. Numerically, there are no more people in community now than there were in my time and a schism in styles of shepherding, even within this number, has been made clear to me in the last year.

The schism makes it possible for some people, rather than leaving altogether, to find households where leadership styles are far less cultic and where the lifestyle is far more normal, some would say "worldly"...while others would just say that it more closely imitates more mainstream evangelical house churches. I predict, and the recent experiences of the local JA household bear this out, that the hard-line JA will die out and those who stay at all will do so in clusters of Christians, the type of which Noel always charaterised (when it happened elsewhere) as having "the form without the power". Perhaps, given the fact that such clusters appear to thrive, while Noel's model is under threat of extinction, Noel should give some thought to what he means by "power" and whether it is really such a good thing?

The form without the power? What form, what power?

2008, the way ahead following a year of vindication

2008, I hope, will be a year in which the Jesus Army plays very little part in my life. It is now over a year since I went back to Bugbrooke and heard it from the horse's mouth that our whistle-blowing back in the 1980s had been "unhelpful" rather than untruthful (para 10). And the re-write of the wikipedia article has revealed that the expulsion from the EA led to a great deal of re-thinking on community policy, it led to greater openness to wider christendom and to a quiet burying of more controversial doctrine; loss of salvation awaiting anyone who leaves is no longer taught, though last year Tschaka, speaking for the JA, said that it had been spoken of more freely in the past. I feel that the events of the last few years have more than vindicated all our efforts, so that not only have I felt considerably healed, but the church, too, has changed a great deal.

My house-guest this last summer revealed that the JA is not entirely different from what I knew, it's true, but the fact is that the worst anyone who leaves need suffer is a measure of rejection and guilt, where my generation suffered post traumatic stress and the fear of being damned. I wouldn't recommend anyone joining the JA, but I wouldn't get involved in dissuading them from it either, and I am certainly not qualified to say whether it is a good thing or not.

As I said shortly after I went to stay with the JA last year, those community-shaped holes which have stayed with me over the years could never be filled, even if I wanted them to be, by what exists of the community now. It is a community in decline. And many of its old stalwarts are being neglected, overlooked, unloved and unsupported in the JA's rush to recruit ever more people. It is not a community that appeals anymore; and not least of all because most of my old friends there have themselves since left. It is very liberating knowing that even if I had some burst of insanity and wanted to go back to the Bugbrooke I knew, I would find it gone; it no longer tempts me, even from a humanist/communal point of view.

The Wikipedia article is finished and I am now very reluctant to get too involved in the rather invidious business of guarding it from change, partly because I regard wiki's rules of evidence quite suspect, given that it allows the subject of an article to say anything it wants about itself, while silencing those best qualified to know what really goes on there, on the grounds that we, but not they, are biased. It seems to me that if the JA can have their own websites linked to the article, it ought to be right for the JA Watch site to also be linked. But no, wikipedia's anti-bias rules are partial on this. It shouldn't be my job now to help the JA use wikipedia rules to exclude the dissenting voice, or to deny researchers access to an archive of more than twenty years of material, much of which shines a light on aspects of the JA which they would prefer to bury. Then again, wikipedia is just one source of information and I am very happy that it says enough to give readers reason for caution.

I have gained a cautious respect for the JA's PR man, John Campbell, which I hope is mutual. Clearly he doesn't like me and will obviously resent having been forced to negotiate with me, given my history as a critic who caused them a great deal of discomfort in the past. He may well feel rather uncomfortable with the idea that some contact will have to be maintained in the years ahead. But I think this is healthy. The best thing about the JA's last couple of decades has been its realisation that it needs to be accountable to "the world" and that arrogant refusals to deal with other Christians or with other outsiders was deeply damaging to their reputation in the past.

It is even rather amusing, given the radical JFC I was a part of, watching some of their members' rather desperate efforts for the JFC to appear no less ordinary now than the most bog standard C of E church (see mentions in History and in Beliefs), though these parts have since been removed, largely at my urging, as I felt that they represented an attempt to look respectable on the back of a church of which they have been contemptuous.

I feel healed and vindicated by recent events. The JA have not only privately acknowledged the veracity of the claims I made in the 1980s but their subsequent actions can be regarded as an acknowledgement that change had to come. We have not been apologised to for having been the victims of over-zealous heavy shepherding in the JFC's early experiments in community, true, but that would call for greater humility than is possible in a church which is still doing its best to re-package itself, and to deny and bury some of the more controversial past beliefs and practices.

Wiki JA article - a delicate balance

Here's the version of the article that John, Rumiton and I created and people have already started editing it. I'd hoped that once it was done I could be hands-off but the first edit was from an old friend, Tony, and having to "revert" it (in order to comply with the tag asking for new material to be discussed first) has already caused resentment. I hate being in this role.

From sitting exactly where Tony is now, I know how hurtful it is to be edited and how you can feel "censored" or ganged up on.

I'd like not to keep too tight and jealous a rein on the article, but having carefully negotiated its delicate balance, I am worried that a swing one way or the other (doesn't matter which) could totally destabilise it and leave us back where we were before. The article may be nobody's ideal, but as it stands, from my point of view, it acknowledges the JA's controversial past, and some present controversy and it leaves the reader to decide for themselves about what it may be like now.

Working WITH John Campbell

The long slog is nearly over and only today did I learn that once it is over the article will not be locked, as I presumed, but will continue to evolve....and John and I will be responsible for defending the "stabilised" article; protecting the integrity of this thing we have created.

Academically, that is a rather fine thing. If it wasn't so contentious and vulnerable an article, I'd celebrate the fact that others can edit it, but after all we have been through, it worries me. There are so many interested parties and all of them conflict.

There is however an aspect of this that may be a force for good: John and I will have to work together, rather than against each other. It would surprise him to read that the idea pleases me. His concession in accepting my proposed sentence: "Allegations that the JA had too authoritarian a style of leadership and that members were under pressure to commit to life-long celibacy, together with the fact that corporal punishment of children (rodding) was practised, and that community members were required to hand over their material possessions, left them vulnerable to the accusation that they were a cult" was such an act of good faith that I feel like, on the JA's behalf, he has accepted that legitimate concerns might have been expressed in the 1980s. In a way that's all it has ever been about for me.

I am not unduly concerned about the current JA. I don't know it well enough. I probably wouldn't recommend it, but it does seem that some of my greatest concerns are no longer current policy, and that being the case, I feel free now to let the whole thing go.

My only worry is whether I can happily allow the article to evolve now without trying to control it too tightly. For it not to conflict with the agreed re-write, I will have to trust John, and that in itself could be a very good thing. That is due in no small part to Rumiton, who got us here.

To be a New Man you must repent the Old

John Campbell's main thrust seems to be that much of the criticism of the JA is out of date; it does not apply to the present-day JA.That is a thesis that I have been open to in the last couple of years of contact with them. And it was on that basis that I felt comfortable going to stay with them during a Men's Weekend last year. Recent events, with a member asking for help to leave and coming to stay with me have altered my perception, sadly, but all the same, the JA is in many respects different now to the JFC I knew.

What John is trying to do is present the current JA without alluding to its past, and really who can blame him. If they have changed and if the criticisms no longer apply, then they are no longer relevant.

But there is a biblical principle (if not a fundamental human one) here: You cannot be a "new man" (apologies to sisters, ahem) unless you have confessed your sins, repented of them and sought to be right with those you have harmed.The JA may be NEW, but we who were hurt by earlier policies have not been apologised to.

No substantial acknowledgement has been made that significant mistakes were made in the ways we were treated.

Why is this so?

Because the JA want to appear NEW without admitting their past sins. They continue to deny that they ever did any of the things we were/are angry about, while quietly stopping them. And what makes this worse, is that while they continue to deny their past policies ever existed, they continue to denigrate those of us who highlighted them.

A nominal, vague admission of mistakes having been made is trotted out ever so often only to placate present-day critics, but if you press them about them, they can't actually think of any, and wounds go unhealed.

Why I think I must soldier on with this infuriating wiki re-write process and risk looking like a proud whinger with a twenty year old chip on my shoulder is that the JA are attempting to re-write history and that history is OUR history. They want to deny our legitimate concerns by pretending that the things that hurt us never existed....that it was our failure to fit in, our lack of spirituality, our pride, etc which meant that we were never really part of them. The fact is that some of those they dismiss so easily now were there for many years and were very much part of them, very much dedicated, loving people who put their faith and trust in people who broke faith with them.

....................................



I think there is also a wiki principle to be challenged here, which is that because we were victims of the JA (and are "bitter") we cannot be rational, credible witnesses. The advantage of having a neutral person to write the article, Rumiton, who I am warming to now that I see him as a man rather than an "elder" (in effect), is that I can leave it to him to neutralise anything that is less than neutral in my own tone, when he has had the chance to read anything which is, frankly, my point of view. All evidence is socially constructed; of course it is! Any attempt to assert otherwise is disingenuous bull. But that does not make our POV a lie.