Controlling Relationships In The Church

Most of us have heard the horror stories over the years about the broken relationships caused by Armstrongism.  When you entered the church you were expected to leave the world behind, associate with fellow believers and mark as 'Satan's own' the rest of humanity.  We have seen the families in the church ripped apart by its divorce and remarriage doctrines.  By parents refusing medical treatment for children causing deaths. The mindless rantings of Rod Meredith that lead one of his parishioners to go on a shooting rampage during church services. And more recently with Gerald Flurry's asinine rantings prohibiting PCG members of having any contact with parents, children, brothers, sisters, and relatives who had left a COG.

Looking back I can see that one of the most effective ways our church controlled people was by controlling their relationships. If a leader could convince the followers that loyalty to the group was actually loyalty to God, then that leader had the ability to control everything about the followers from something as big as personal relationships to something as small as whether or not they shaved.
One way relationships were controlled was by encouraging members to rat on each other. Of course, this was masked in Scriptural language like, “exhort one another to love and good works.” But what it really meant was that there was no confidentiality. This made for guarded friendships, at best. It was simply impossible to build deep, meaningful friendships when I wasn’t sure if my “friend” was going to report on me to my grandparents.
All this violation of personal boundaries was justified by our belief that we were literally responsible for each other’s souls. If we failed to “stand up for God” in the lives of our brethren (aka, get involved in their personal business), we would answer for that at the judgment seat of Christ.
Fear of God, fear of man, fear of eternal repercussions dictated and motivated much of our relational interactions.

From Friendships In High Demand Cultish Groups

Spanky Training His Heir Apparent?

Has Rod seen the writing on the wall? Has all of his failed prophecies and predictions started to wear him down? Rod has brought in his son Jim to be his right hand man and to start training him.

Is LCG soon to go the way of GTA's little sect?  When you check out GTAEA's web site you would never know GTA had died unless you did some fishing around on the site.  Mark Armstrong is not a good speaker so all they can do is replay over and over old GTA programs. Necromancy seems to be alive and well in the various splinter cults of Armstrongism.

Given Jim's track record from when he was in Pasadena growing up, LCG is in for a bumpy road!  Will the obsession for fake prophecy, sex and queers continue on?  Time will tell.

How do spiritual leaders benefit from being abusive?

Here is an interesting little blurb from a web site called My Savvy Sisters

Her comments below describe perfectly the various leaders of the 700 some splinter cults of Armstrongism.

My Savvy Sisters: How do spiritual leaders benefit from being abusive?

Interesting question! The benefits vary from group to group, and leader to leader. It depends on the end goal of the group and the leaders themselves. Some groups are driven by money, and others by power. Some religious groups also exploit sex as well. Other groups serve to meet the psychological needs of the leader.

The primary group leader of a group generally fits a typical narcissistic profile, what some have termed the Machiavellian Personality after the famed Prince Machiavelli. With only casual contact with such an individual, one would never suspect that they had anything less than the highest moral character, but this is just on the surface. In addition to being very charismatic, charming and keenly shrewd, they never show humility, they believe that ethics apply only to the weak (so they are exempt from moral standards which serves their exaggerated sense of entitlement), and they prefer to be feared (prefer an authoritarian style of control). Despite their capacity for arrogance, they can feign compassion and humility impeccably when it suits their objectives, yet they have a very limited capacity for showing true empathy to others. Those who tend toward this profile demand a great deal of attention and praise, and they thrive on the power others surrender to them.

Your question also speaks to a dynamic found within spiritually abusive groups themselves. The sub-status of a type of “middle management leader” that is bestowed on followers within spiritually abusive groups provides “true believers” with status, prestige, and the rewards of approval and worth. Groups promote an external basis of worth, discouraging individuals to derive confidence and well-being from within themselves. The profoundly powerful sense of reward comes with these positions in middle management within the system, and members lust after them because it offsets the discomfort of the shame-oriented control measures used in such groups to control members.