Unanswered Prayers: The Story of One Woman Leaving the International Church of Christ

A straight-A senior at Georgetown went to a Bible-study group. But the promise of heaven wound up turning her life into hell. [...]

A few years earlier, Jenny and her parents had packed her things at their Arlington home and moved her into a dorm at Georgetown University. On that late-summer day, the bridge had seemed a gateway to a bright future. By her senior year, Jenny was getting top marks and life brimmed with potential.

Now, home on a Christmas visit just months after her graduation, she was estranged from her family and all but enslaved by a religious group widely believed to be a cult. [...]

Her time in California revealed a frightening side of the religious group. Its leaders worked her long hours and condemned her for sins real and imagined. She had to suffer, they told her, just as Christ did.

As she stood at the rail on Key Bridge, she looked down at whitecaps that mirrored the turmoil inside her. From the teachings of the church, she knew suicide was a one-way ticket to hell. She didn’t want to go to hell. But she was living in hell already. [...]

Jenny begins the story of her life in a cult on a day at the beginning of her senior year at Georgetown, in September 1992. It’s her story, though her family, friends, and cult experts help her tell it.

On that day, Jenny walked into a class called “Performing Arts and Contemporary Society” and took one of two open seats. “Hi, I’m Chloe,” the girl next to her said, sticking out her hand. “What’s your name?”

When the teacher divided the class into groups, Chloe said, “Oh, my gosh, Jenny, we have to be in a group together.”

Such an outgoing personality made Jenny tentative. She had never met anyone like Chloe. As they got to know each other, Chloe took an interest in Jenny in a way no one else had—and challenged her. Once when Jenny was gossiping to others, Chloe said, “Jenny, how would you feel if they were talking about you like that?”

One day in second semester, Chloe invited Jenny to an international dinner hosted on campus by her church, the International Church of Christ. When the day came, Chloe called to say how excited she was that Jenny was coming. She had told friends about Jenny and couldn’t wait to introduce her. Tired and running late, Jenny considered not going but decided she couldn’t let Chloe down.

After dinner, most of the international students left, and a group of nine from the church sat down for Bible study. Chloe hadn’t told Jenny about this part of the evening, but she stayed for the lesson, which was about the Tower of Babel and how confusion follows anytime people take the place of God.

The lesson struck a chord in Jenny, and she agreed to meet one of the girls the next day to talk about the Bible. Only one thing seemed odd. Midway through the study, Jenny glanced at a notebook in the lap of one of the leaders, a girl named Ericka. She was startled to see her own name written on an otherwise blank page.

Before her meeting the next day, Jenny went home and found the Bible that had been used in her sister’s wedding. She flipped through it as if cramming for a final exam in a class she had never attended. At the girl’s apartment, she was surprised to find a group there, including Ericka.

Ericka, she discovered, had joined the International Church of Christ at Duke University, where she’d been a cheerleader. She’d moved to Washington to intern with the church.

Ericka asked Jenny to pray, and she fumbled through a prayer asking God to bless the homeless and feed children in China. From the beginning, Jenny thought the study was directed toward her. She felt the girls’ eyes on her, saw them writing down what she said.

Jenny met the girls again the next day for a study of discipleship. Ericka drew from Bible verses to explain that the only way to be a Christian was to become a disciple. She asked Jenny if she wanted to become a disciple, and Jenny said yes.

Other studies followed about salvation through baptism, Jesus’s violent death on the cross, the false teachings of other churches, and the International Church of Christ as the only true church.

A study called “Sin and Darkness” was the most intense. Ericka asked Jenny to confess in writing to all her sins. [...]

In the final study, called “Counting the Cost,” Ericka grilled Jenny to test whether her opinions conformed with the church’s. Her family, Ericka warned her, would say she was in a cult. Persecution was to be expected, she continued; just look at how Jesus suffered. [...]

But her classes, all-night Bible studies, little food, and the rigorous confession had taken a toll. The night before the big day, she developed bronchitis and a fever. She called Chloe to postpone, but Chloe questioned her devotion to God and the church. Jenny’s illness was a small thing, Chloe said, compared with how much Jesus had suffered on the cross.

Jenny woke up that night in a sweat. The question came like a bullet: “What the hell am I doing?” She considered leaving the group and cutting all ties, even changing her phone number. She drifted back to sleep, and when she woke up she wasn’t sure what to do.

The group had taught her to pray if she had doubts, so she picked up her Bible. While she was curled in her sweat-damp sheets, in the midst of her passionate petition to God, her fever broke.

Jenny took it as a sign. Her baptism ceremony was held in the bathroom of a church member’s house in DC’s Cleveland Park. She stepped into a bathtub of scalding water. Todd, another church intern, said he’d made it hot because she was sick. Trembling with nervousness, Jenny stood by as the tub was drained and filled again. She stepped into the water, crossed her arms, and closed her eyes. Todd lowered her until she was immersed. She rose dripping wet to the sound of clapping. Inside, she felt unchanged.

Jenny’s parents noticed a change in their daughter during the family’s trip to Florida. She seemed consumed by some secret. All weekend there were phone calls. Jenny stayed in corners and behind closed doors, talking in whispers for hours. Her church friends, worried that her faith would slip, called to quiz her about her conversations with her parents and her Bible reading.

Her mother, Jean, noticed Jenny clutching a book, its pages striped by a yellow highlighter. Jean knew her daughter was a spiritual girl who felt emotions deeply, but Jenny had never carried a Bible. When Jean asked what she was reading, Jenny stormed out of the room. When the time came to return to Washington the following weekend, Jenny and her parents were hardly speaking.

Weeks later, Jenny’s aunt sent Jean an article about the church she’d seen in Good Housekeeping. It called the International Church of Christ a cult.

Jean contacted a cult-awareness group mentioned in the article and was sent ten pounds of information about her daughter’s new church. Founded by Kip McKean, a charismatic young pastor who’d come to faith in 1972 as a student at the University of Florida, the International Church of Christ was one of the fastest-growing Christian movements of the 1980s and ’90s.

McKean had started his ministry as a college pastor with the Churches of Christ. Unlike the United Church of Christ, a mainline denomination founded in 1957 in the Reformed tradition, the Church of Christ traces its roots to the restoration movements of the late 1800s, which sought to strip worship of its accumulated pomp and get back to its New Testament basics.

But appalled with what he perceived as that denomination’s lack of zeal and holiness—and because of church leaders’ increased scrutiny of his teachings and practices—McKean and the church split in 1977. Two years later, he took over a struggling congregation in Boston and before long was drawing thousands to services at the Boston Garden with his compelling sermons.

By the early 1990s, McKean’s International Church of Christ had more than 130,000 members, with branches in cities around the world including London, Nairobi, Chicago, and Washington. In 1995, about three years after Jenny met Chloe, the Washington Post reported that the church’s services occasionally filled DAR Constitution Hall.

The church recruited on college campuses, reaching out chiefly to lonely or depressed students, according to its critics. In intensive Bible studies, leaders warned that all but members of their church would go to hell. Recruits were required to prepare “sin lists,” which critics say the church used to manipulate and control its members.

McKean organized the church around a rigid system of “discipleship.” Every member had a “prayer partner,” an older and more spiritually mature individual he or she was expected to emulate and submit to. Members could date only other church members and only those whom their prayer partner approved.

The information Jenny’s mother received made clear that the church left many spiritually and emotionally battered people in its wake. Ex-members told tales of harassment and manipulation. Leaders set quotas for recruiting new members and punished those who missed the mark. Dozens of colleges banned the church from campus, but it continued its work via student-run organizations with secular names.

Following advice from the cult-awareness group, Jenny’s mother didn’t confront her daughter directly. She and Mike assumed Jenny’s interest in the cult was born of rebellion. Their daughter was hardheaded. As a kindergartner, she had refused to wear pants on a cold day, preferring a pink dress and ignoring threats of a spanking. In the same way, she had refused to give up her art-history major, despite Mike’s concern about its usefulness. [...]

McKean defined discipling as helping members become more like Jesus, but ex-members and critics said the process involved public scorn as a way to humiliate vulnerable members, to keep them humble. [...]

For Jenny, the wedding felt like a divorce. She was reminded of how much she missed her family—at the rehearsal dinner, they told stories that she wasn’t a part of, laughed at jokes she didn’t get. A romantic, she had dreamed of marrying someone she passionately loved. Now she was marrying a ministry. [...]

Her pride made her competitive—the study groups she organized grew more than any other in the church—but it also made her vulnerable. Paul puffed her up in services, touting her work as a model. In private, he and Denise blasted Jenny for her arrogance, forcing her to confess her pride on her knees until she broke down. [...]

With each new responsibility, Jenny worked harder and faced more scrutiny and abuse from Paul. Several times, weary from late-night Bible studies, she pulled her car onto the side of the road and slept. Once she awoke to a police officer tapping on the window. During daily prayer walks, she talked to God and fought to keep her love for her flock at the heart of her work. Even if the church was flawed, she said to herself, she would do good.

But doubts plagued her. She was afraid of Paul and Denise. Now 30, Jenny also was afraid of leaving the only life she had known since graduating from college and joining the “real world.” She was afraid, too, of the repercussions of admitting she’d been wrong. [...]

For years, Paul and Denise had criticized virtually everything she’d done. If something was wrong, they blamed hidden sin in Jenny’s life. She wasn’t praying hard enough or doing enough witnessing.

Now for the first time, she understood that Paul and Denise, her self-appointed models of virtue, were sinners, too. She said it out loud: “What Paul and Denise did was wrong.” And with those words, a piece of the old Jenny—the smart, rebellious Jenny—awoke in her. [...]

In the parking lot, her tears flowed. One of the church elder’s wives chased after her and climbed into the car with her, trying to calm her. But Jenny exploded. For the first time she called the church a cult.

“I’m sick of the abuse!” she screamed. The elder’s wife asked Jenny to pray. Finally Jenny told her, “Get out of my car now.” [...]

In the month that followed, church leaders tried to get Jenny to confess she’d been wrong. In the end, they promised her three months’ severance pay if she signed an agreement that she wouldn’t sue. Jenny signed without even reading the document. [...]

In January 2006, a year after returning home, Jenny entered Wellspring, a cult-recovery center in Ohio. The first time she met with a counselor, she couldn’t get a word out through her sobs. But in time the tears gave way to confession and revelation. In her two weeks at Wellspring, she found people who understood what had happened to her.

One night she sat a restaurant and put her feelings on paper. “I was a cult member,” she wrote. “I was a cult leader. I am a cult survivor. I was victimized and hurt terribly in the group. I hurt others in the group in the same way. What was done to me was inhumane and wrong. What I did to others was inhumane and wrong. I will never forget the faces, the eyes of those I hurt.”

Her declaration ended in hope: “No, no, no, they did not win. . . . My freedom has been restored. . . . I escaped. Wounded but free.” [...]

In 2002, Kip McKean resigned as leader of the International Church of Christ following criticism of his leadership style and personal character by pastors within the ministry.

In the resignation letter, McKean wrote: “My most significant sin is arrogance—thinking I am always right, not listening to the counsel of my brothers, and not seeking discipling for my life, ministry and family. I have not followed Jesus’ example of humility in leadership.” In the letter, he thanked Paul and Denise Graham for advising him during his darkest days.

Within a year, McKean took over a church in Portland, Oregon, a move that has split the International Church of Christ. Among those who have broken from McKean is Paul Graham. He and Denise started a private school in California as well as a sports program for kids and received an award for their civic contributions.

In the past year, Jenny has counseled five members of the California church who have since left the ministry. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever go to church again. She has tried to read the Bible, but all she can hear is Paul’s loud voice. When she prays, it’s to a God she says she knows nothing about.

Except for Kip McKean, pseudonyms have been used for cult members.

This is a summary extract from the full article as it appeared on Washingtonian Magazine, July 2008
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