Jesus Army Dialogue

I have set up Jesus Army Dialogue, a group on Facebook. This is a joint effort between me and Sarah Hughes, a member of the JA I have been making friends with. We really hope that this can be a chance for both sides of the argument to see each others points of view, where previously we have been combative or defensive. We want to build trust, so as to encourage openness and achieve a measure of reconciliation and peace.

The time feels right.

John Campbell has confirmed that children were beaten by leaders, as well as by their own parents

Ali is back in touch and the air has cleared. He confirms that John "Perceptive" Campbell admitted that in the old days children were rodded by leaders. It is one claim that I had made and which had grieved Ali a great deal, as he is a father and can't imagine letting anyone touch his children.

I am not yet quite clear what John told Ali which led him to feel that I had misled him, but if John admitted even this much, I know that Ali will feel that his mission is justified.

I have told him that I do not believe that the fellowship has rodded children for a very long time, but my concern is that the rodding of children and spooning of babies and toddlers is a shameful part of the fellowship's past, which was discreetly buried when the JFC sought readmission to the Evangelical Alliance, and because of the subsequent denials of this and other things, those who were hurt by the policy feel that their pain isn't taken seriously.

Unless the fellowship is open about this past practice, its claims to have changed cannot really be said to be righteous.

Addendum

John Campbell has since denied that the conversation, as described in some detail by Ali, ever took place and asked me to remove the suggestion that he made any such concession. Since Ali's account opens his church up to criticism, it is hard to believe that, as a loyal member, he would have made up John's concession. But for the record, John denies that he gave it. It is clear from his response to me that John accepts that my take on events is entirely consistent with Ali's description and that pursuing the matter would be counter-productive.

The fact that Ali is a person capable of being leaned on to cease contact with me, despite his new-found mission, shows that he is a loyal member of his church, so any suggestion that he would have deliberately opened his church up to censure by making up his conversation with John Campbell is clearly improbable.

In response to the call for openness, the JA has closed the Facebook Group

In response to the call for openness, the JA has closed the Facebook Group in which one member spoke passionately about his intention to root out the fellowship's past abuses and bring healing to people hurt by the church...and thereby make the church a more beautiful Bride of Christ.

His mission was sincere.

Closing the Group, however, suggests that the JA are far from ready for such a revolution.

I have offended Ali, the member of the JA who feels inspired to root out abuse in the JA's past, by wording my last article rather badly so that it left what he sees as a false impression of his feelings. This was never my intention. Ali, so I apologise unreservedly.

The mistake came about because I conflated several people's feelings into one article and Ali has assumed that I am talking about him, when talking about another. It was Sarah who spoke of dirty secrets in the past and who felt that we should forgive, not Z. (click image to make bigger) Sarah did not use the phrase first. I had suggested that they existed and she was using the phrase back to me.

Both Ali and Sarah love God very much and love the JA and want to stay in it. But that doesn't mean that either of them are happy about the JA's past. Ali, I know, is passionately committed to bringing healing for people hurt by what he regards as abuses of authority. This is clearly a sincere position and even though he no longer trusts me and seems to have been convinced by John Campbell that much of what I said was lies, he is still dedicated to bringing healing, which is very much to his credit as a Christian man.

Sarah and Ali want to stay with the JA. But that doesn't mean they are happy to live with the fellowship's invidious past. They are going to do what they can to root it out and make the fellowship address it.

It doesn't bode well for the the future of openness that no sooner had Ali gone to John Campbell, than the JA closed down the Facebook Group.

Anticipating this, however, I have taken screenprints of all recent events on the Group and will publish them in due course, to ensure that they remain visible. Making them invisible has to be the point of closing the Group, after all. And that being the case, you do have to wonder how open the JA really are about addressing the past.

A new era - one of openness about a cultic past

With Noel's passing has come what appears to be a greater curiosity on the part of members about the fellowship's cultic past. Most current members....including any long term members who joined after the late 1980s... will often have difficulty recognising my description of the church and are therefore understandably irritated by my "propaganda", but several people have now talked to me (both on forums and in private) about the period before they were members and there appears to be an increasing readiness to believe that the fellowship has what one of them calls "dirty secrets".

There is some disagreement about whether bringing the secrets out into the light of day would be healthy. Clearly I think it would, and indeed I have said that without that openness, the church can't genuinely be said to have moved on, especially since the very leader(s) taking over control of the church were the very ones who advocated and enforced the now discredited policies.

What is very clear to me is that around the time of the expulsion from the Evangelical Alliance the elders realised a need to tone down and modify a lot of policies and quietly bury some other more controversial ones, especially as rehabilitation would require the cultivation of powerful friends, who might be a lot less friendly if they realised what had really been going on at Bugbrooke.

Until then their membership of the EA had been largely cosmetic. It gave them some kind of respectability at a time when there was widespread concern in the churches in the UK about their cultic practices. They could say, we are not a cult but a member of the largest body of Evangelicals in the country. The very fact that they were not in good fellowship with any of these churches gave the EA convenient grounds for dismissing the JA, rather than investigating the nastier controversies at a time when the JA refused to meet to discuss them with John Everett, myself and members of the council.

If new friends were to be cultivated, no longer would people who left be said to be damned, no longer would the JA call themselves the Kingdom of God or other Christians "worldly", no longer would children be rodded or Christmas banned, now children would receive presents and be allowed toys; rather than being shunned, members seeking to leave would be encouraged into looser styles of membership, etc

And if anyone who had been victims o fthe JA's dirty secrets spoke of them again, they would simply be denied and the suggestion would be that critics had simply made these things up out of a hatred for what Jesus was trying to accomplish.



But just a few days ago I urged someone who has been in fellowship for 21 years to just go and ask someone who had been around a lot longer whether children in the past had been punished with rods, and to his credit he admitted that he had lived obliviously in a "happy bubble" all these years. Now he is determined to ask questions. A number of people who have known the church a long time are asking serious questions and I have been asked what form of apology would satisfy me.

Noel's death brings an end of an era and with it the possibility of asking previously unconscienable questions. And there is the slightest chance that good, keen young Christians who love the JA they know will not be happy to live with dirty secrets that their elders and parents were prepared to bury. I dearly hope that they will believe, as I do, that a church can only really move on if it has been honest and open about its past.

censoring any suggestion that Noel was controlling

click image to make it legible

Simon Hall, (admin at the JA's Facebook page) misses the irony of today's activity. Having just pointed out that he was deleting any reference to Noel and having deleted a posting in which I pointed out that Noel had been regarded as infallible and that questioning him was said to be "not in the spirit", he went on to laugh at my suggestion that their lives are controlled.

Ironically, he left a posting in which I said that allowing anyone to post anything, in contrast to Brian's nasty little anti-JA forum, where he bans anyone who disgrees with him, was a good thing.

A completely bizarre consequence of Noel Stanton's death is that some are expressing a sense of desperation at the loss of his benign protection from extreme elders. One man tells me he has been in the JA for years and is gay. He feels that his sexuality is an abomination and appears not to hold it against the church that when he came out, his elder banned him from meetings. He believes that Noel could not only have helped him with his "problem", as the elders clearly can't, but would protect him from their harsh treatment. He believes that his only hope died with Noel.

This phenomenon is not new to me, of course. I remember getting a heavying from all the elders of my household (because I had caused a terrific scandal when a sister and I fell in love and had discussed our feelings) and then talking in terms of "splitting" (leaving the church) and getting a phonecall from Noel in which he asked if the elders had been too heavy, and in which he seemed to imply that he would get them to back off. Yet, it was quite clear from the content of the heavying that the elders were acting on instructions from Noel, who apart from anything else, set the tone and content of everything that went on. In those days the Elders met with Noel every Monday, then passed the latest edicts down that Tuesday at Agapé.

What my correspondent fails too see, perhaps because in grief we tend to canonise the recently-departed, is that if he was banned from meetings for being openly gay, the elder took his lead from Noel. Noel liked to play good cop to the elders' bad cops, but at the end of the day he was the law-maker.

Jesus Army homophobia has its origins in Noel Stanton's own attitude towards human sexuality and his uncompromising attitude towards what he regarded as sexual sin, straight or gay...which led to an over-emphasis on celibacy, even for married couples (who were urged to have sex for procreation only...avoiding any sex which was inspired by "lust"). At a recent meeting, a friend who was present tells me, a man "confessed" to having been gay and claimed to have been "healed" of it by God, and this profession was met with rapturous approval.

The JA are very keen to appear inclusive but the only gays who are really tolerated are those who have sought to bury their sexuality in baptism and step out of the waters cleansed, to live lives as celibates. Homosexuals are only really accepted if they see what they are as abhorrent to God.

I feel desperately sorry for homosexuals in the JA who in order to be considered acceptable stay in the closet in a state of self-loathing or come out of it and then seek to be healed of what my correspondent calls "his problem". But the ironic tragedy is that this abominable situation was of Noel Stanton's making; he would not have been this man's salvation but is responsible for the fact that he sees himself as unclean.

Now that Noel is dead, this man is distraught that he will not be there to save him, either from his problem or from an over-zealous eldership. The eldership, meanwhile, are just being true to their deceased founder's vision of the Kingdom of God.

A loss second only to the death of Jesus

Noel Stanton died yesterday.

I have been trying to think how I feel about it because I know that I will be asked, and honestly I can't say I feel anything much at all. Noel doesn't feel like more than an acquaintance I knew a very long time ago.

However, in stark contrast, a JA member who has been in the fellowship for about fifteen years and who has been writing to me for a couple of months told me last night that Noel's loss to humanity is second only to Jesus.

If you mean "spiritual" abuse (whatever that is meant to be), say so. Calling it just "abuse" seems deliberately misleading

I have always believed, as a critic of the Jesus Army, that if I was to have an impact on JA members they had to be able to recognise the truth in things that I said, even if they might never be able to admit it either to themselves or to me. Recognising the truth would make it possible for them to consider the points I raised, which I felt arose from those mutually accepted facts.

To do that I have attempted over the years not to use vocabulary which puts a negative spin on things that happened in the JA. For instance, I never use the word brainwash or ever claim to have been forced to do anything against my will. I try to avoid casting in a negative light anything which I would, at the time, have accepted as reasonable. Maybe I am lucky in that the objections I have to the fellowship are to things which I militated against as a member; I am fortunate that I did not suffer as badly as some others. I never experienced anything which I did not think was well intentioned, if misguided.

Some however claim to have been abused in the JA, and from what I do know of the JA, I have no doubt that they have indeed been very badly treated, but have taken issue recently with the use of the word abuse, particularly when it has been made clear that they were not harmed physically or sexually. This is an issue which has exercised me recently, as I have been involved in a very public spat with someone who speaks freely of having been abused as a child (pre-JA) and of having subsequently been abused in the JA, though I know from private correspondence that whatever she experienced in the JA was not sexual in nature.

I take issue with people using words like "abuse" when criticising the JA (especially when in the same posts they refer to sexual abuse in her past) because the casual and unqualified use of the word seems calculated to smear the JA, as readers will be left with the impression that child abuse etc is what is implied. What makes me most angry about this is that such people know that readers will automatically assume that they are referring to sexual or physical abuse and they deliberately leave it vague so that the JA will suffer the greatest measure of suspicion as a result.

It is disingenuous of them to say that all abuse is abuse (as if a harsh word is as severe as rape) and that they are not explicitly saying that the abuse is sexual. It is downright misleading if they later concede that the abuse was "spiritual", given that it is on a secular forum and that most people do not recognise the existence of spiritual abuse anyway.....let alone automatically infer it. If they mean bullying, maybe that is the word they should use and not abuse at all.

One has attempted to say that I am in some way defending the abuse which she says goes on in the JA or that I am accusing her of lying. This reminds me of the time that I did indeed defend Noel Stanton from the allegation that he protected paedophiles; that too was an allegation designed to cause the JA maximum damage without being founded on any evidence at all, and that too led to me being accused of defending "abuse" in the JA. It is the kind of unsophisticated sophistry you tend to get from the shrill people on some forums.

Of course I do not support abuse of any kind. And I am not actually defending the JA, as such. I am defending a principle. Describing bullying of adults as being on a par with the abuse of children is foolish and appears to degrade the seriousness of child abuse. Further, misleading language makes it hard to reach people we want to help in the JA.

As I am a member of a profession which has to deal not only with children suffering from real abuse, but also with children and their parents who use the paranoia around abuse to make malicious allegations against teachers, TAs, social workers etc in order to punish them for doing their jobs, I take this kind of thing very seriously. You almost never hear of conscientious children making malicious allegations of abuse; it will almost always be disruptive kids who can't get their own way, who strike back by accusing adults in school of something - because they want to hurt them. This has devastating consequences for these dedicated professionals, many of whose careers are permanently ruined, even the lucky few who are eventually exonerated. So, when I see people using words like abuse, people who know that readers will assume that sexual abuse is implied and readers who have probably never even heard of "spiritual" abuse, it makes my blood boil.

If genuine abuse takes place in the JA, social services and the police need to be brought in immediately. Anyone who talks of abuse in the JA but who has not alerted the authorities must be assumed to be muck-raking in order to cause maximum damage.

Anyone who says they are accusing the JA of abuse in order to help the victims of abuse is just not being honest. The way to stop abuse if you know it is going on is to call in the authorties and really get something done, especially post Baby P, when child services etc will be falling over backwards to be seen to be doing everything possible to protect children.

If however, you are not talking about child sexual abuse, it is morally reprehensible not to make that perfectly clear. Almost nobody has ever heard of spititual abuse, whatever the heck that is, but if that is what this person means, that is what she should say....and as nobody knows what it is, she should spell it out....not leave it entirely vague.

Language is powerful stuff. It must be handled carefully.

Why? Because if we want the members of the JA reading it to feel that someone is arguing their corner (with the possibility that people will be emboldened to leave) they have to be able to recognise what we say as representative. I am pretty confident that most would say that they are having a rough time of it, prehaps even a truly horrendous time, but very much doubt that they will think, "I am being abused".

If you can do no more good, go flying!

Clearly the JA will not answer for the past, not publically anyway. But as those who remember the past carefully avoid the public spotlight and are defended by people who weren't even around back then, and who have had the past carefully guarded even from them, perhaps nobody should be susprised.

And if those zealots defending the JA don't know of its past offenses and are genuinely indignant about the criticisms they are defending their church from, does that not perhaps suggest that the church has changed? I'd like to think so.

I think that my unfortunate recent experience of the JA was down to the house elder, who had joined his house church to the JA, being so determined to be a hardliner in order to impress the centralist elders; hard-liners of the original, unreformed JA. His need to be seen to be the big man cost the JA's new reputation. But it can perhaps be seen as exceptional behaviour?

It would always cause me concern that new elders recognise the hard-line centralists as the people to impress and that the leaders who date back to the JA's more cultic days are still in charge...principally Noel Stanton and Mick "Temperate" Haines(Noel's Timothy).....but right now I don't feel there is a lot of point being a critic.

In the past I always saw to it that what I wrote could be recognised as the truth by ordinary members, who would be challenged to think, "Yes, I see where Peter Eveleigh is coming from. I don't agree, but I need to think about how to answer that criticism, because if I can't, maybe he has a point."

But when current JA's first response to anything I say is one of disbelief and is coupled to a sense that I must be lying out of some sense of bitterness which has lasted twenty-plus years, I have no chance of being a force for good. The remodelling of the JA has clearly been very effective but with the pre-reform elders still in charge, I am afraid that some way down the line the young or new members will discover that actually the warnings I have been given were justified. Fortunately for them, there are lots of support groups, etc, and though they won't see it now, having forums like the Sheffield one will give them a way of making contacts. And if that is all that so-called "discussion" forum has become, well that is not such a bad thing.

So, for now anyway, I am going flying.