WHILE SHEPHERDS WATCH: The Central London Church of Christ


London was a big and very impersonal place for Julie Yorke when
she first started work there.  She'd just got her degree at Oxford
and moved in with her boyfriend Tony, whom she'd known for eight
years - since they were at school together.  Yet when Tony wasn't
around Julie missed the friendliness and companionship of student
life, and coming from the north of England she missed the casual
warmth which strangers show foir each other away from the capital.
So when the couple living next door to their flat in Wimbledon
started chatting across the garden fence, and invited them around
for supper, she was delighted to go.  They seemed a caring,
Christian couple, ideal new friends for her and Tony.

Unfortunately the couple next door were leaders in the Central
London Church of Christ, the fastest-growing cult in Britain
today.  And within a few months they and the Church separated
Tony and Julie, tried to keep them apart, and attempted to take
over their whole lives.  It was a nightmare that Tony and Julie,
now married, can look back on with some degree of equanimity,
because they survived and so did their relationship with each
other.  But they know it was a close-run thing.

The Central London Church of Christ is a 'daughter church' of
the Boston Church of Christ, which was founded in 1979 by a keen
young evangelist called Kip McKean.  McKean, the son of a US Navy
admiral, had been converted by Charles 'Chuck' Lucas, who was the
leader of the Crossroads Church of Christ in Gainesville, Florida.
Lucas had developed and refined a technique of converting and
holding onto recruits for his Church, known as 'discipling'.  His
influence on McKean and other evangelists was seminal - so much so
that the words 'Crossroads', 'Crossroadsism', 'Crossroads movement'
or 'Crossroads philosophy' have been used to describe the 
high-pressure, discipling-based, fast-growing Church of Christ
movement.  [Not all Churches of Christ are part of McKean's 
movement - there are some traditional Baptist-inspired Churches
of that name which have existed for centuries.  These are not
cultic or dangerous; McKean's Church and its seventy-plus offspring
congregations are.]

Discipling means that each new recruit is put under the one-to-one
supervision of a discipler, an established member of the congregation
who will guide his or her every movement.  One of the most 
fundamental teachings is that obedience is Christ-like and of 
paramount importance; once the convert has submitted to this he or
she becomes malleable in the hands of the leaders.  Everyone has a
discipler: new recruits are discipled by ordinary members; ordinary
members are discipled by Bible study leaders, who are in turn 
discipled by elders; elders are discipled by evangelists and so on
upwards, until eventually the small top group are discipled by
Kip McKean.  He is, perhaps, the only member of the organization
who is answerable to nobody.  The structure is very similar to a
pyramid-selling operation.

By the simple expedient of keeping very close tabs on every member,
the Church is able to pressure the interested into joining, ensuring
their full commitment and preventing any backsliding among 
established members.  The result is an authoritarian regime in which
members are encouraged to model themselves closely on their 
disicplers, who in turn are modelled on *their* disicplers and so
on.  Behaviour, opinions and decisions are all closely monitored and
regulated by the Church.  The diary of events and study that a member
undertakes is exhausting and leaves little time for association
outside the congregation.  Apart from Sunday meetings, members are
expected to attend 'house church' meetings every Wednesday, 
worshipping in small groups in the homes of members.  They have at
least one social evening a week, Bible study time - on a daily basis -
as well as recruiting new members on the streets.

McKean's original motivation was altruistic and evangelistic: he
believed he was helping those who followed him to Christ.  He may
still believe that, although he has had plenty of opportunity to
evaluate the damage done to members of his congregations.  He and his
wife Elena and a group of other young, enthusiastic Christians left
Chuck Lucas and joined a church in Lexington, a suburb of Boston.
Half the existing congregation left, unhappy with the discipling
approach, but their numbers were not missed because McKean quickly
attracted a growing number of converts; in fact, the growth rate of
the Church is staggering, with as many as a thousand converts being
baptised per year.  The congregation in Boston soon outgrew the
building they had rented and established a pattern that would be
followed in their 'daughter' churches throughout the world, of
renting large public buildings (cinemas, theatres, sports arenas
and so on) for Sunday morning worship.

As McKean's success grew, so his techniques became more 
authoritarian and - typical of a cult - exclusive.  He and his
followers now believe that they are the only 'Christians' in the
world, and this is used as a powerful lever against any members
who show signs of wavering.

The Central London Church of Christ was spawned in 1982, and since
then two more churches, in Birmingham and Manchester, have been
opened as 'daughters' of the London one - so again the pyramid
structure is in place.  Further churches are planned for Edinburgh
and Dublin.

The Central London one was established by Americans trained in
Boston, some of whom are still working in Britain, alongside British
leaders.  Douglas Arthur, an American, lives in London and is 
responsible for the 'Commonwealth Ministries', which include the
three British ones, Australia, Hong Kong, and Bangalore in India.  He
disciples Fred Scott, who is the leader of the London church.  
Although they and other Church leaders are not, on paper, paid more
than a subsistence wage, they are provided with nice flats or houses,
they run good cars, and they boost their earnings with 'expenses'
payments.  As long ago as 1986 Douglas Arthur was being paid 1240ukp
per month in expenses, on top of his 500ukp a month salary.  None
the less, although they can achieve a good standard of living from
the Church, making money is unlikely to be the primary motivation,
as the sums involved are tiny compared to those available to the
Rajneesh or Moon or Scientology organizations.

Power is a more likely motivation: the Church leaders are uniformly
young men who acquire absolute power over the lives of the members
under them.  Women can never aspire to the hierarchy of the Church,
although they can become powerful over other women: discipling is
done on a same-sex basis.  But women are not allowed to speak in
church - they can't preach or say prayers.  Nor are they given as
full a doctrinal teaching as men: husbands are expected to 'lead'
their wives in the ways of the Church.

The Church's money is raised from the members and from carefully
disguised charity appeals.  For instance, a record-breaking shoeshine
in Covent Garden was billed as raising money for Africa, under the
slogan 'Christian Youth Shining for Africa', but what the charitable
people who offered their shoes for a polish did not know was that
the money was to set up a new church in Lagos, Nigeria.  No direct
lies had been told, but the impression given was that the event was
helping with famine and drought relief on the stricken continent.

Members are asked to pledge themselves to donating 10 per cent of
their income, and they are constantly exhorted to contribute
generously to other special appeals.  But the profile of the 
membership - the Central London Church of Christ attracts many
students and young people who have not had time to establish
themselves in their careers - means that the coffers are not awash
with vast sums.  Enough, though: the Church has had to pay
150,000ukp in back taxes to the Inland Revenue.  Among the young
recruits are a significant handful of professional people - doctors,
lawyers, vets - all being groomed for positions in the leadership.

Students have always been targeted by the church as potential
recruits, and it has now been banned from canvassing on the campuses
of several London colleges, as well as the universities of 
Manchester, Birmingham and Aston.  But others have yet to wake up to 
the threat: Liverpool University was happy to take a large payment
for allowing the Church to use its facilities during the 1989
summer vacation.  The loneliness of students away from home, perhaps
for the first time, makes them vulnerable; and the fact that the
Central London Church of Christ is, doctrinally at least, not far
removed from established and credible Christian teaching, makes it
seem a safe 'non-cultic' organization - at least until the colleges
wake up to the danger of its presence and started alerting students.
But not all students hear or heed the warnings, and the Church offers
a very appealing package to anyone insecure and unhappy.  It takes
all decision-making out of the hands of the individuals, gives them a
programme by which to live, a full diary of engagements, and endless
chivvying to keep them toeing the Church line.

Each of the colleges and universities where the Church has established
its presence can provide examples of the detrimental effect membership
has on students.  There are instances of young people pulling out of
their degree courses - one young man dropped out just two weeks before
his finals, and three weeks after joining the Church.  Others have
ended up with lower degrees than they should have achieved, and yet
others have had nervous breakdowns.  The toll is high.  And although
experts have noticed that, unlike the situation in some cults, members
of the Central Church of Christ often leave of their own volition after
two or three years ('burned out' is one phrase used to describe it),
their lives may be permanently blighted by the educational failure and
the gap in their curriculum vitae when they present themselves to
future employers.  One young woman, with a medical degree, has been
unable to do the hospital training needed to qualify her to practise as
a doctor because of her involvement with the Church and the nervous
breakdown it precipitated; she will find this difficult to explain when
she is well enough to resume her ambition to work as a doctor.

The Central London Church of Christ has proved adept at concealing
its identity to confound the critics: a Historical Literature Society
at the London School of Economics turned out to be a Bible study class
for the Church, and in north London there have been objections to it
using the name 'The North London Christian Fellowship'.  In one London
secondary school a Church leader, with a child at the school, offered to
help run the Christian Union, but luckily the authorities made enquiries
about the man and rejected his offer.  He can only have been hoping
to recruit: the Central London Church of Christ does not recognize
anyone except its own members as Christians, and is particularly scornful
of the teachings of the Church of England.

To become a member of the Central Church of Christ candidates have
to repent their sins, recognize that the Church is the only route to
salvation, accept the doctrine of obedience, and then be baptised by
full immersion in a tank of water.  The Church does not accept the 
baptism of children: members believe that all sin is man-made (no
original sin) and that only someone mature enough to repent their
sins can be baptised.  They believe that baptism into their Church is
the only way to God, and they teach that anyone who leaves will go to
hell.  In order to 'repent', candidates have to accept total obedience
to their disciplers - even when they believe the person giving them
orders is at best misguided or at worst vicious and vindictive.

'When we are under authority we are to submit and obey those who are
over us even when they are not very Christ-like,' says the Boston
Bulletin, a newsletter from the church in Boston which is distributed
to members in Britain.  It continues:

 'It is definitely true that there will be abuse of authority and we
  must learn to deal with it... Just as in the times of the New
  Testament, there will be people who are hurt and killed by abusive
  authorities, but God is still in control: if they were right with
  Him they will be ultimately rescrued to the supreme security - home
  with God.  In questions of spiritual leaders abusing their authority...
  it is not an option to rebel against their authority.'

In other words, doing what you are told, however much you may disagree
with it, is the way to God, and submission is a virtue in itself.  They
cite as an example that Jesus submitted to Pointious Pilate - this
shows, they claim, that God uses abusive authority.  Obedience becomes
the sine qua non.  With the pyramid structure of authority, this means
that leaders of individual churches (and ultimately Kip McKean) have
enormous power over the lives of members.  They control whom members
can date, whom they marry, how they live, where they live, how they
spend their money.  Their control is total.

During their Bible study classes members make their own notes.  The
notes of one young ex-member show just how ingrained the notion of 
obedience is: under the heading 'OBEY' he wrote 'Salvation, Challenges,
Hope'.  Under 'DISOBEY' he wrote 'Hell, Unhappiness, Despair, No hope,
No self-confidence'.  In fact, the reverse is true: by giving total
obedience, all self-confidence and hope are sapped away.  One
secretary in America could not type a letter for her employer without
a phone call to her discipler to get permission.  Obviously, some
disciplers are tougher than others: they cross-question their 'sheep'
rigorously about whether he or she has studied the Bible that day
(Bible study is a daily necessity); whether he or she has talked to
any outsider about the route to salvation that day (members are supposed
to proselytise at every available opportunity).  And if they are ill,
they are supposed to 'rise above it' and still attend Church meetings.

In some of the American churches, members fill in 'accountabilty sheets'
detailing everything they have done, including how many times they have
slept with their wives.  So far these sheets have not been used in
Britain, although members fill in charts of what they do with their
time.

But the elaborate dating system used in America is enforced in the UK.
Members are only allowed to go out with other members, and then only
on Saturday evenings.  They are not encouraged to go out as a couple,
but on a double date.  They are not allowed to date the same person
in consecutive weeks because of the 'four week rule': if a boy or girl
really like each other they are allowed to date every four weeks, each
seeing other dates in between.  When they have followed this system for
a time they are allowed to ask permission to 'go steady'.  If they get
permission they can see each other every Saturday evening, and they
are allowed one fifteen-minute phone call during the week.  After
twelve months they can ask to be engaged, and three months later they
may marry.

The effect of all this control on the personality of members is
staggering.  It is, if nothing else, proof of the sincerity, and
perhaps naivety, of the Church leaders that in 1985 the Boston mother
church invited an independent expert to produce a study of their
work.  He did personality tests on nine hundred members of the
congregation, at the same time running parallel 'control' tests on
members of other non-discipling evangelical Churches, as well as
members of mainstream denominations.  The test used, a standard one
accepted by psychologists worldwide and based on work originally
done by Jung, showed that there was a massive swing in personality
type among members of the Boston congregation, with less than 5
per cent showing no change at all.

In normal, well-balanced people personality type does not change.
Although the people themselves may change, their basic type (of 
which the introvert-extrovert axis is one of four standard
measures) should remain constant throughout life.  With the control
group from the other Churches there were very few variations.  But
with the Boston Church of Christ members the changes were enormous,
with the percentage of extroverts rising from 33 per cent to 94 per 
cent among the males, and from 38 per cent to 95 per cent among the
females.  There were similar changes in the other personality 
categories.  Although no category is 'wrong' or less worthy than
another, the worrying factor is the change, which psychologists
regard as unhealthy, and the fact that all members of the church
ultimately cluster in one or two of the sixteen basic types (in the
general population they would be spread evenly among all sixteen).
The only other guinea pigs who exhibited a similar amount of change
were members of other cults: Scientology, Hare Krishna, Maranatha,
Children of God and the Unification Church.  As with the Boston
church members, these all changed to become one or two uniform
types.  The strain of this unnatural personality change is what
leads to breakdowns, and explains why so many ex-cult members
(not just ex-Central Church of Christ) have severe problems with
fragmented personalities.

Luckily for Tony and Julie Yorke, they were not in the movement
long enough to suffer severe damage.  But even after a year out,
Julie admits she has not completely adjusted to her old life.

It was Julie who first became involved with the Church, and by her
own admission it was she who dragged Tony along.  Although he, too,
became committed and they were both baptised, neither of them quite
absorbed all the strictures imposed on them, and they retained
enough independence to be able to question when things started to
go wrong.  Living next door to two members of the Church made it
inevitable that the Yorkes would be approached: all members of the
Church are supposed to evangelise every day.

'We couldn't avoid meeting them - in the garden we could see them,
and as our two front doors abut each other's we met on the doorstep.
They were a friendly Canadian couple who were staying in the flat
that is now occupied by the South Zone leaders for the Central
London Church of Christ.  We had supper with them, met some of their
friends, and I was invited to a bible discussion.  I didn't go, and
they rang to say they had missed me.  I thought it was just an open
invitation, so I was surprised my absence had been noticed, but 
because of the call I felt that I had been rude to my new friends.
To make amends I went to a mid-week house church meeting.

'Everyone was very friendly: they hug you, want to know all about
you, ask what you do for a living.  They were very keen that I should
get Tony along to join in, and to please me he came.  After a meeting
they would take us into a room to study the Bible, seperately.  There
was always two of them to each of us, one of them doing an agressive
hard sell and the other being nice and friendly.  I'd had a vaguely
Christian upbringing, but I didn't know the Bible and they were
able to blind me with quotations from it.  It is only now, in 
retrospect, that I realise they twisted the quotations and took
them out of context, to suit their own ends.

'But at first it felt marvellous.  I thought it was the answer to 
everything.  I felt that they all loved me, and would support me.
They use fear and guilt to make you want to get baptised: fear of
the consequences, guilt about missing the opportunity to serve God.'

Tony, a journalist, and Julie, a speechwriter for a large 
organization, are neither gullible nor impressionable.  But they were
both sucked into the Church - and accepted it when they were told
that they had to live apart.  They were not married at the time, but 
living together in a flat they were jointly buying.

'We were told that we could not live together.  Tony had to move out
before we were baptised.  The Church moved a girl, my discipler, in
with me to help me with the mortgage, and Tony moved into a 
three-bedroomed flat in Putney sharing with between eight and fifteen
"brothers".

'I found it difficult living with the girl who moved in.  She had been
in the Church for five years and was very committed to it.  It was not
an easy relationship - we clashed over trivial things like the cleaning
and the shopping.  She even made me feel guilty about "excluding" her
from the household chores.

'We were all supposed to get up early and read the Bible for 
three-quarters of an hour: she was watching me to make sure I did it.
She also kept me up late every night: she stayed up until about 2am,
and the telephone was constantly ringing for her, day and night.  It
took a while for me to realise that everything I told her was passed
on upwards through the Church, even things I said in confidence.  There
is no such thing as "in confidence".

'There was very little free time in my week: on Sunday mornings we
went to church, in a rented hall or cinema, and it was an emotional
affair, with song leaders on stage whipping up the crowd, clapping,
shouting, near-hysteria.  There would be usually four preachers, and
each would build up the next one to come on by telling us what a
great guy he was.  The atmosphere was really charged.  On Sunday
evening we had a family discussion group; Monday evening there was
nothing laid on, but I was expected to go out evangelising; on Tuesday
evenings after work I had a Bible study class; on Wednesday a house
church meeting; on Thursday I was teaching the gospel to others; on
Friday the single girls in the Church went out together to the
pictures.  We were each expected to do fifteen hours of evangelising
in a week.

'I hated going door-to-door or stopping people in the street, and I
was always trying to put it off.  I was made to feel guilty about it.
I was told I was selfish, my faith wasn't strong enough, there were
poor sinners out there who I should be trying to save from hell, and I
would be going to hell with them if I didn't do it.

'On Saturday I was allowed to see Tony.  They tried to insist that we
only see each other every four weeks, and in the meantime that we 
date other people.  We refused.  And we were also in trouble for getting
a video and staying at the flat together: we were supposed to go out
with other couples.  Sometimes Tony would sneak over in the week, too,
and we used to talk on the phone from our offices.  Couples are not
allowed to kiss unless they are going steady, and sex outside marriage
is absolutely banned.'

Even thinking about members of the opposite sex has to be confessed as
'impure thoughts', and in the flat where Tony lived in Putney one of 
the other young men there had some photographs of a girl he liked
confiscated.  'He was told it was unfair to the other sisters to
just think about one girl,' said Tony.  'They boast about splitting
couples up - I know of one man who was separated from his common-law
wife and three children.  They were perfectly happy until the Church
broke them up, and the members have a very ambivalent attitude about
the necessity to support children.  Unless the wife or girlfriend
also joins the Church, they say that member has no duty to support
her and her children, because all ties have ceased.'

Tony and Julie refused to be parted.  'The restrictions made us
determined to marry straightaway, as soon as we could.  But we 
were told that we should not make decisions like that ourselves;
we should have asked permission.  The Church did not recognize our
past life at all - it was as though the years we had been together
did not count.  They said we had to grow spiritually, and to do
that we had to live apart and learn to love God first.'

For over a month the Church refused to recognize that Tony and Julie
had become engaged.  The leader of the London church, Fred Scott, told
Tony to take his engagement ring back from Julie and ask her to marry
him again in a couple of months' time.  Tony did not refuse point-blank,
but after thinking about it and talking to Julie decided not to do as
he was told.  The Church, concerned that they were going to lose two
able new recruits, appointed a couple to counsel them, and after two
or three weeks of discussions aceepted that they were engaged.  'We
were told not to make rash moves or decisions in the future - that
every step in our lives needed to be discussed and permissions given.'

The Church was prepared to bend the rules again for Tony and Julie,
and allowed them longer than usual to arrange their wedding - probably
because they are the sort of young professionals who lend a very
credible image to the Church.  'The rule is that you get married
three months after engagement, but my parents wanted to organize the
whole thing properly, and we needed six months.  The Church agreed.
The normal practice is for members to have a civil ceremony followed
by a service in a church that is hired from another denomination.'

The Yorkes also bent the rule on pledging their income to the Church.
They refused to make any agreement about how much they would give.
'Everyone was always urged to be "sacrificial".  We gave between
20 and 30 pounds a week normally, although there were always extra
appeals.'  Tony, who was obviously singled out as potential leadership
material, became friendly with Fred Scott, the leader of the London
church, to whom he found himself regularly lending money at the rate
of 5 or 10 pounds as time.

Tony and Julie were studying with the Church for four months before
they were baptised, by total immersion, wearing old clothes and curled
into a foetal position, in a bathtub in a shed in the garden next door.

But only three months after they joined, disillusionment set in.  Tony,
as a journalist, offered his services to do promotional work on a
sponsored swim the Church was organizing, with half the proceeds due to
go to a cancer charity and the other half to the Church.  He was
specifically told not to allow national newspapers to have the press
release he prepared, but copies did find their way into the hands of
Fleet Street journalists.  The swim was due to take place at Charing
Cross Hospital, but when the hospital authorities were alerted by a
reporter from the Mail on Sunday to the fact that the London Church
of Christ was a dangerous cult, permission to use the hospital pool
was withdrawn.  Several star names who had promised their support
also pulled out.  A follow-up article about the group in the Mail
on Sunday was the first time that either Julie or Tony had seen the
Church described as a cult.

At this time Tony was having problems at work, because he was spending
too much of his time working for the Church.  Julie's close colleagues
knew she was involved with a Church, but did not know too many details
and assumed it was a mainstream denomination.  A friend of Tony's made
some enquiries for him, and came back with the information that the
Central London Church of Christ was regarded not just as a cult, but as
a dangerous cult.  The friend had consulted Graham Baldwin, Chaplain
to London University, who has been campaigning for some time against
the group, after first encountering it among students, and is an
expert in its structure and methods.

'We decided to go and see Graham', said Tony, 'but only to refute his
arguments.  We were convinced it was all lies, that Satan was working
through the newspapers.  I wanted to take the matter to the Press
Council, but the Church leaders refused, which sowed the seed of doubts
and persuaded us to see Graham Baldwin.'

When the negative side of the Church was presented to them, Tony and
Julie tried to discuss it with the leaders.  But instead of a
constructive exchange of information, they were badgered and bullied
for having gone outside the Church for advice.  They continued to
meet Graham Baldwin, and eventually, while Julie was away at a
business conference, Tony moved back into the Wimbledon flat and
told Julie's discipler to get out.  Their time as members of the
London Church of Christ was over - only three months after their
baptism.

There were still problems to resolve.  The discipler refused to
collect her belongings, and threatened to call the police when
Tony said he would dump them on the street.  Members of the Church
called round to see them, and the leaders who lived next door
continued to be friendly.  'I think they thought we would come
back in after we were married - that we had "fallen into sin" by
living together again and once that was sorted out we would return',
says Julie.

Julie still gets upset when she sees members of the Church on the
street, and when they hold baptisms in the garden next door.  'At
first I was uncontrollably angry and bitter that I had been sucked
in by them, and when I met them I felt worse.  I was very critical
of myself.  Even now, although I know rationally they are wrong,
I get panicky about it at times.  They hold baptisms in the garden
next door, the singing is noisy and Tony has to tell them to be
quiet.

'Their teachings dwell on death a lot, and now I find that it preys
on my mind.  They are quite callous: when the "Marchioness" riverboat
sank and a lot of young people were drowned, one of the them said
that it happened because those who died had been asked to come into
the Church and had refused, and God was taking his revenge.  They teach
that God directs every minute of your life, so if any small thing goes
wrong it is because God is punishing you for your sins.

'Even now that we have been out for over a year, it seems strange making
my own decisions about things.  I know that if they had managed to
split Tony and me up, I would still be in, and he probably would, too.
They believe that a man is the dominant part of a relationship, so Tony
would have been able to lay down the law to me.'

The Yorkes believe that their experience has in many ways been positive.
They married earlier than they were otherwise intending to, but it has
worked out well.  'And we care more about other people than we did when
we went in,' says Tony.  'Julie and I are now helping other people to
leave.  Not all the Church teachings are bad.  They teach you that you
should always have a sober estimation of yourself, and I think we both
now know more fully what flaws there are in our characters.

'I feel that if we could get involved, anyone could.  Looking back,
I'm astonished that it happened to me.  Our strength was that we had
each other: they would tell us for talking together about Church matters,
because we were only supposed to talk to our disciplers.'

The Yorkes believe that the seven months that they were involved with
the Central London Church of Christ will never be completely erased
from their lives.  'But if we can stop just one more person getting
involved, or persuade one to leave, it will not have been wasted.'