Brisbane Christian Fellowship | Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear

Way back in 2010, I wrote a blog post about the Brisbane Christian Fellowship, a pernicious group of power-hungry, quasi-religious zealots headed by ‘supreme leader’, Vic Hall.

From time to time I get emails from people who have managed to extract themselves from the BCF, due, in part, to reading Helen Pomeroy’s brave testimony about her experience – an experience that nearly killed her.

At the time, Helen was involved in the Streetcar Forum which I’m pleased to see is still up and answering questions for survivors of Hall’s Christian Fellowship cults.

BCF has a ‘sister’ organisation, the MCF – Melbourne Christian Fellowship – also under the auspices of Mr Hall. I recently heard from Paul Kovaks (a pseudonym) who left the cult in 2016. Paul has started a WordPress Blog, MCFExposed, also with the aim of informing and supporting those who are within the grip, or trying to escape from, the psychological and spiritual abuse inflicted by Hall and his group of elders.

Paul says:

“The carnage of destruction from Vic’s messenger word is horrific in scale and nature. People locked up. Families separated. Financial ruins. Children lost. Divorces justified. Men! Women! Wake up. “

It’s important to say that both Helen (at least when I knew her many years ago) and Paul did not abandon their Christian faith – they simply came to realise that the kind of ‘faith’ being peddled by Hall and his cronies was a perverted and abusive form of psychological slavery, completely at odds with the doctrine of the Christian Bible.

I am not a Christian. I don’t believe in God or Hell or eternal damnation and I live a happy, contented and ethical life. People in cults are led to believe that if they do not follow the doctrine of their religious leader, they may as well be atheists for they have abandoned God. This is clearly untrue. People who leave cults can decide to abandon their faith (and, I guarantee, they will not suffer for doing so), but, more often, they retain their faith in God and come to realise that their sincere desire to please God was cruelly exploited by men (and sometimes women) with no authority from the Creator.

For those of us without faith, our aim in exposing cults is not to encourage people to walk away from their religious beliefs, but to walk away from an organization which is preaching a corrupted version of those beliefs and which is causing them pain and psychological damage. As an atheist, I am not in the business of de-converting anyone. And, when people of faith like Helen and Paul tell me their stories, my only aim is to help amplify their voice, not argue with them about religion.

With no authority, other than that which they claim for themselves, Hall and Co. demand that their followers abandon their own hopes, dreams, wishes and personal judgement. They demand that followers forego (what they see as) their personal relationship with Christ, and to have that relationship wholly mediated through the authority of the elders.

Roger Williams, another MCF escapee writes on his blog:

“Most of the time throughout my years in attendance it was publicly and privately expressed and implied that these people as leaders, were the voice and messenger of God, and that to disobey that voice and messenger was to disobey God Himself.”

Williams speaks of:

“A perverted concept of unity, which in reality translated itself into almost total and unquestioned obedience to the leadership. “

That is not a religion – it’s a cult.

According to Paul, those who do not obey the elders are told they are marked for Hell. That is a frightening prospect for someone who believes in such things and whose mental health has been worn down with years of religious/psychological abuse from church ‘authorities’.

No religion should be based on fear. When people fear the consequences of not obeying their leaders, they fear their leaders. When they fear their leaders, they fear each other – they dare not confide their doubts to others lest all hell (literally) breaks loose. And as everyone stays silent, the leaders gain more and more power, and the victims become more and more isolated, worn down and fearful. It is a vicious circle.

Williams says:

“I frequently discerned in my spirit that I was being analyzed as I spoke privately with 2 or 3 of the local Sunbury leaders. Rarely in my 7 years there, did it feel like we were having a normal conversation expressing the freedom and liberty of the Holy Spirit, as according to 2 Corinthians 3:17. It was as though they were trying to hunt out sin in my life!”

Under these circumstances, people – people who are supposed to have been made in the image of God – are reduced to little more than vegetative, tithe-paying, cattle. As Paul says on his MCFExposed blog:

“Today I consider MCF to be the ‘Satanic Church of the Vegetative State‘ because nobody there is allowed to do . . anything. Zero initiative allowed. It’s full on Satanic. A waste of human life.”

I thank Paul for contacting me about his escape from the Melbourne Christian Fellowship and his blog. He is trying to get traffic to his blog so that people associated with the MCF will be able to find it through a Google search.

You can find it here:

MCFExposed

Chrys Stevenson

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.

Blaise Pascal French mathematician, physicist (1623 – 1662)

For it is humility – the complete abasement of our own assessments and thought processes – that opens the way to freedom.

Tim Maurice, Highlands Christian Fellowship – June 2008

You may choose to look the other way but you can never again say you did not know.

William Wilberforce, 1789

Helen Pomery is a typical, upper-middle class woman – the absolute epitome of a well-to-do doctor’s wife. Tonight, well-dressed, immaculately made-up and hair carefully coiffed she stands in front of an audience of seventy people in the meeting room of a slightly shabby Brisbane pub.

“I was married for 30 years,” she explains. “My husband was a doctor – a gynaecologist and an obstetrician. I was his practice manager. I can’t prove it to you, but we had a normal, happy marriage. We had three children. We had a close and loving family. My husband was a good man.”

Helen’s nightmare began after they moved from South Australia to Maryborough in the 1990s and began attending a normal looking church, full of normal looking, middle-class people. Some time after, the couple moved to Brisbane after Helen’s husband expressed a wish to become more involved in his leadership work with the church – which is based at Samford, in Brisbane, but has satellite churches throughout the country.

“There were no alarm bells,” says Helen. “The church presents so well – it doesn’t look like a cult. No-one knowingly joins a cult.”

What Helen wasn’t told when she innocently joined the Brisbane Christian Fellowship (BCF) was that her husband would be persuaded to transfer his loyalty from his family to the church hierarchy and that she would be required to submit, unquestioningly, to him. If this chain of command was not honoured, they were told, their entire family would suffer eternal damnation. The responsibility of keeping his family under the submission of the Church falls to the husband. Helen was not to know when she joined the BCF, beguiled by smiling, welcoming people and ‘wonderful music’, that the Church leaders would later subject her family to an ‘acid test’, setting husband against wife and parent against child, to ensure that their loyalty lay, not with each other, but with the Church and its supreme leader, Vic Hall.

“The dynamic wears you down,” Helen explains. “They screw with your mind. They practice poisoning in small doses.”

During her 15 years with the BCF, Helen was forced to submit, without question, to her husband and the male elders of the church and she was punished arbitrarily when they deemed that she was not ‘on board’. She was routinely instructed to produce written confessions to trumped up charges of disloyalty and threatened with various forms of exclusion if she did not comply. She was told that she must not think for herself. The Church, she says, calls for the ‘complete abasement of thought processes’. Her role in the ‘divinely appointed’ order was to act only under the instructions of her husband, and his, to act only under the instructions of Vic Hall and the other church elders.

The BCF teaches that ‘an unsubmitted woman walks into insanity and then she walks into death’. Worn down, psychologically abused, and on the brink of suicide, Helen wrote in her journal, “The men want me to come to an end of myself – do they want me dead?”

“My life at that time was sheer survival,” she says. But what was the price of self-preservation? To fail to submit, she was told, was to condemn her entire family to eternal damnation. Meekly invalidating herself, giving up her free will, her intelligence, her autonomy was, she was led to believe, the ultimate act of selfless love.

Cruelly, her misery was exacerbated by the fact that, “The more I was victimised, the more my husband was esteemed.”

Helen’s second daughter was the first to be excommunicated from the BCF and estranged from the family. At 26 years old she wanted to date a man from outside the church. Her father, in concert with Hall and the church elders, refused his permission. She insisted on being free to make her own decision, and was evicted. Helen was told she was to have no further contact with her daughter – ever.

“It’s not like coping with a loved-one’s death,” says Helen, who lost her father at around the same time. “Death is normal.”

“To be asked to treat my daughter ‘as if’ she were dead, but knowing that she wasn’t, was torture – nobody understands the horror of being trapped inside a cult.”

Now Helen’s marriage is over. She was evicted from her family home and left destitute and alone for the ‘sin’ of phoning her daughter to tell her she loved her. When Helen confessed to her ‘crime’, she was given seven days to leave the house, excommunicated from her church, and prevented from seeing, or having contact with her two children and three grandchildren still trapped inside the cult.

As her husband informed her of this decision, he assured her, “I have never loved you more than I love you now.”

“He meant it,” Helen explains. “He was convinced that the only way to save his family was to force us to submit.” The church rules by fear. Fear is the ultimate tool of control.

It has taken nine years, a stint in a USA deprogramming centre and long-term, on-going psychological counselling for Helen to reach the point where she is tonight – standing up and telling her story to a room full of strangers.

Helen now works with the Queensland Cult Information and Family Support network. Since meeting with other cult survivors she has realized that her story is not unique.

“We have all lived through the same nightmare,” she says. “The names of the victims, the institutions and their ideologies may differ but they all operate the same way.”

And there are thousands of victims here in Australia. At the recent Cult Information and Family Support (CIFS) conference, survivors from more than twenty different cults were represented. Not all cults are religious, but many are. And what should outrage ordinary Australians is that our government supports this abuse through tax exemptions and grants.

Indeed, the BCF is widely known as an abusive cult. It has long since been exposed by its victims, on television, in a book, and on an internet forum where survivors tell their stories. According to Helen, the BCF offers no charitable or welfare services or any other kind of community benefit. And yet, their multi-million dollar income and property holdings are untaxed, simply because they are a ‘religious institution’ and, in accordance with a four hundred year old law, the state deems that the ‘advancement of religion’ is a charitable act in, and of, itself. Further, our government supplies the BCF with grants to operate a ‘Bible School’ which reportedly runs only four ‘classes’ a year – has any government officer asked what is taught at this ‘institution’ or do they just blithely hand the money over, no questions asked?

And, what is the response of our esteemed politicians to this blatant abuse of tax-payer’s largesse, not to mention the psychological abuse of women and children within the cult? They tell Helen they can’t get involved because they have to honour the ‘separation of church and state’ and people’s ‘freedom of religion’.

As Helen says, “Nobody chooses to join a cult.” It is not a free choice. The people who join such organizations are the victims of a ‘bait and switch’. They may enter the ‘shop front’ of their own free will, but they don’t know that, ultimately, their ‘free will’ is the price of admission. Being drawn into a cult and being kept there by coercive persuasion and mind-control techniques has nothing to do with ‘freedom of religion’ – it is state-sponsored slavery, abuse and imprisonment.

The fact that our politicians turn a blind-eye to this abuse and pretend that there is nothing they can do is both despicable and inexcusable.

The French Government, does not subsidise any religion, either with grants or exemptions, so that they are not implicated in allowing religious cults to fleece their members, tax-free. The British Government has recently introduced a ‘public benefit’ test for religious institutions seeking tax exemptions. Why is this not being done in Australia?

Further, in 2001, the French Government instituted laws to guard against cultic abuse. The French anti-cult law established the new crime of mental manipulation, defined as any activity or activities undertaken with the goal or the effect to create or to exploit the state of mental or physical dependence of people who are participating in the group’s activities and to infringe upon their human rights and fundamental liberties; to exert repeated pressures in order to create or exploit this state of dependence and to drive the person, against their will or not, to act (or abstain from acting) in a way which is heavily prejudicial to them. Importantly, the French law allows for the criminal culpability and dissolution of a corporation or association whose members or leaders have been found engaging in such activities.

If such laws and protections can be enacted in other Western countries, they can be enacted here. The defence that the state must allow ‘freedom of religion’ is a smokescreen for cowardice. These religious institutions are about money and power – not religion – and religious institutions which actively seek to deny freedom of will and action to their adherents should not be protected by laws enacted to safeguard such freedoms.

Currently, the Australian federal and state governments not only fail to protect the interests of cult victims, they negligently enable cults like the BCF, the Exclusive Brethren and Scientology through tax-exemptions and grants.

In her quest to have the BCF’s abuses stopped, Helen Pomery has written letters to all politicians – state, federal and senators – three or four times, with minimal response. Not only are they not interested in taking action, they seem intent on preventing action from being taken! Just last month, Senator Nick Xenophon’s request for a Senate inquiry into the tax status of the Church of Scientology, following numerous claims of cultic abuse, was defeated by both major parties. Xenophon has since vowed to continue his campaign and return to the Senate with a re-worded motion which may include a push for police to take criminal action against cults and allow for the prosecution of cult leaders whose actions cause psychological harm to their adherents.

Recently, a small glimmer of hope has been offered by Queensland Senator Sue Boyce, who would not support a ‘public benefit’ test for religious organizations but has forwarded a letter to the Federal Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, asking him to consider introducing legislation against psychological abuse. CIFS Queensland has drafted a petition [downloadable here as a word document] aiming to persuade the Attorney-General that such legislation would receive popular support.

Generally, however, our politicians remain apathetic to and disinterested in the fate of Australians innocently entrapped in abusive cults. Helen despairs that despite the personal testimonies of hundreds of people, the CIFS is still only achieving small, incremental changes. But she will keep fighting – for herself, her family, and for the many others who have suffered as she has. As Helen says, “I bear witness to the reality and the power of coercive persuasion and mind control, because I live with its impact every day of my life.”

Chrys Stevenson

Comments on this post are moderated but will be approved and published as soon as possible.

For an account of what cult survivors go through, please read Helen and David’s stories on this blog or on the campaign website – David’s Story;Helen’s Story.

Support for Victims and Survivors of the BCF & Similar Cults

2023 update: There is a new group, the Olive Leaf Network – https://oliveleaf.network/ – to support people leaving closed cults like BCF. You can read more about them in this article – https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/486996/former-exclusive-brethren-church-member-sets-up-support-network-to-help-other-leavers

Streetcar Forum – a place for people who have left or are looking to leave EB or RFI type organisations and need support. With nearly 100 families from CF Groups around the Country, what is being said can no longer be ignored. If you chose to leave a CF you will have a voice and support here.

Cult Information and Family Support – a network for families, friends, former members and concerned individuals working together towards a common goal, to provide support and develop awareness for those affected by high demand groups or cultic relationships

Further Action

1. Send a link to this story to your local, state and federal political representatives and ask if they have taken any action whatsoever to support people in Helen’s situation and, if not, why not?

2. Disseminate Helen’s and David’s stories as widely as possible – either by writing about them yourself or linking to this page. If you are writing about this subject, please link to the Streetcar forum and CIFS so that people within the BCF (or similar organizations), or planning to join it, can read the truth and seek support.

3. Write to Nick Xenophon and support his efforts to make cults legally accountable for their actions.

Senator.Xenophon@aph.gov.au

Senator Nick Xenophon, Level 2, 31 Ebenezer Place, Adelaide 5000

4. If you are willing to collect signatures for the petition to the Attorney-General, please download this petition form and return the signed form/s to: CIFS, PO Box 4002, St Lucia South Q 4067.

You may also wish to print up Senator Sue Boyce’s letter to the Attorney General as supporting information for your signatories. (Please note, the letter has two pages, click the thumbnail under the first page for page two, or see here.)

5. Write to your political representatives (state, federal and senate) asking them to:

a) support any future motions regarding an inquiry into organizations like Scientology, the Exclusive Brethren and the BCF

b) support a ‘public benefit’ test for religious exemptions or, ideally

c) call for the removal of all ‘as of right’ exemptions for religious institutions.