The News Beats

Members Recast: Judas Iscariots and No-Talents

Most Life Groups are not Christian fellowships.  They are groups of people managed for their resources by church leadership teams.  The unsaved are often encouraged to join these groups where salvation is secondary, if it is that high on the list at all.  The membership drives are conducted for any and all so long as they’ll be manageable for resources.  That is the impetus behind community outreach projects, and the reason an emphasis is on the surrounding community instead of focusing on the body of Christ, the Church, as a separate entity.  That sort of divisiveness would preclude growth as defined in corporate business models.

In Life Groups, members are confronted with Christianity-by-the-numbers, or with formulas for Christian living, designed by the leadership.  The leadership’s goals for growth and perpetuity of the organization are more attuned to self-preservation than they are to edification of the saints.  It follows for leaders to assess group members as potential capital. They are to be utilized for their labor, in volunteering; for their facilities, using homes; and for their money, collected in tithes, offerings, and sales for church products and productions.  There are several tactics employed to obtain these resources, and Life Groups provide an opportunity to work over members more personally in an intimate setting until they conform to the vision.

Many churches publish their Life Group resources online making it possible to obtain examples of human capital management in rather sordid detail.  Shepherd of the Hills Church in Porter Ranch, California applies a particularly shameful example of coercion for raising finances from group members in its Life Group curriculum the “ABC’s of Financial Success.” In one lesson from the program Judas Iscariot is psychologically examined in such a way as to make it possible to negatively profile some members of the group.  After guided reading in the gospel of John, chapter twelve, group members are asked to share what they think went though Judas’ mind at the pouring of the ointment from the alabaster box onto Jesus.

We know what Judas said because it is recorded.  Judas protested that the ointment should have been sold, and the money given to the poor (John 12: 5).  The group members are prompted for their answer this way:

Often time [sic] we think of Judas just as an evil traitor but we must remember that he was not always thinking of betraying Jesus.  He left everything he had to follow Jesus and as far as we know he followed faithfully until his betrayal.  Based upon this information…share your answer.¹

The surface lesson might be that the love of money can cause one to miss sight of what is most important, but there is an obvious attempt at subliminal stimulation here that is atrocious.

The ulterior design of this prompting seems to be in persuading individuals to presume themselves candidates as likely as Judas to betray Christ.  The unraveling of their faith made possible by their retaining any reservation in turning over their finances in the percentages prescribed by the church, Satan was sure to enter into them effecting their eternal damnation.  The way in which these scriptures are handled in this exercise reveals both a gross manipulation of people, and the facts.

As far as we know, Judas was not faithfully following Jesus up until the betrayal.  The text tells us very plainly that Judas cared not for the poor, a fact others might have suspected and that John already knew, and an attitude opposite what one would expect from a person who had faith in Christ.  Furthermore, the same text reveals Judas was the one in the group who carried money purse, and it is clearly pointed out that “he was a thief” (John 12:6).  For how long Judas had been stealing we are not told, but he already had been stealing by this point, and had probably been doing so for a long time.   Contrary to what’s being implied, there was no sudden incident of a born-again Christian coveting a fortune affixed at his numerical breaking point and losing his salvation on account of it.

In another exercise, Life Group members are guided in reading the parable of the talents in Matthew, chapter twenty-five.   The facilitator is supplied with leader notes that correctly interpret what the parable represents, and the identities of the persons in the parable; except for one tragic error.  The leader notes bunch all the servants in the parable into one category, and instruct the facilitator to proclaim: “The servants represent us.”² A cursory examination of the details of the parable shows clearly that the one-talent servant was not one of us, that is he could not be considered a true Christian, but was in fact a professor only. In spite of this, group members are asked “Which one of the servants do you most relate to? Why?”³  Here again, the underlying motive for blurring the lines between the saved and the lost can be traced to raising capital.

The parable runs from verse 14 to verse 30, but the guided reading stops at verse 26, and this seems to be purposely guided so as to obscure, for the moment, the unsaved character of that one-talent servant, and his doom. The end of the parable reads:

Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents. For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. (Mat 25:28-30)

The fact that the parable is short, and human nature is inquisitive, means that it is a safe bet to assume that many readers will, on their own, find out the fate of the one-talent servant.  By not covering it in the group, leaders can avoid fielding the salvation issue, and can instead let the implication stand that this fate awaits those who refuse to tithe to the church.

The one-talent servant buried his talent in the ground thus showing that he did not have Christ.  Those who have not Christ will lose even the life that they have.  There is no defense for such scandalous mistreatment of persons and misapplication of scriptures.  Nowhere in the leader notes is there any instruction or caution for ensuring the salvation issue in a group member’s life who identifies himself as the one-talent man upon examining this parable.  So it cannot be said that by identifying all the servants as “us” in the parable the church was merely acknowledging the saved and unsaved mixture of their Life Groups; else it is horribly negligent in the care for souls, and in the proclamation of the gospel. The reason for the church identifying all the servants of the parable in the same group is to use fear of cursing to motivate group members to give money.

Notes:

^1. Shepherd of the Hills Church, “Bondage,” ABC’s of Financial Success. (Leader Notes) http://www.4lifegroups.org/leaders/leader-notes/abc-s-of-financial-success-leader-notes/bondage. (accessed January 14, 2020).

^{2 -3.} Shepherd, “Funding,” ABC’s of Financial Success. (Leader Notes) http://www.4lifegroups.org/leaders/leader-notes/abc-s-of-financial-success-leader-notes/funding. (accessed January 14, 2020).

MORE ARTICLES ON LIFE GROUPS

Christians today are largely unaware of the communists tactics for taking over individuals and controlling populations.  They should make themselves aware because these are now being used successfully in churches to take them over, change their mission, and steal their wealth.  For a complete expose on the communist process of brainwashing the reader is encouraged to read the seminal work on the subject by the author who first printed the term “brainwashing” in the English language.   In Edward Hunter’s Brainwashing: The story of men defied it, Hunter not only reveals the process, but what has proven to be the best and most effective strategies for surviving and defeating it.  Although the threat of communism is thought to be a relic of the past that has been largely discredited, and today nonexistent, it has never been more important to understand its powerful tools and its success in enslaving  men in a false religion.

The “communist theologians”¹ are at work today in American churches and have taken most of them over without firing a single shot. The mechanism used are small groups that can collectively be referred to as Life Groups.  Understanding how church Life Groups are being used to extinguish Christianity can be demonstrated by examining one aspect of Communist proselytizing.  This one is the process for producing confessed sinners who can receive absolution from their crimes by “reform” and “rebirth” into the Communist religion.²  It is a strategy for producing offenders though a process of forced self-criticism, and confessions of the supposed crimes that surface in them, in small group settings which are all facilitated, or led, to achieve the desired result.  With the exception of changes made herein of enumerating the clauses, some bolding, and elaboration in brackets; the following is a paragraph from Hunter:

The communists have made confession the medium for their principal propaganda drive among their own subject peoples.
1. They first determine the conclusion they wish to put across,
2. then they select the details which add up to this fake hypothesis.
3. Their problem then boils down to finding people with experience approximating these details as closely as possible.
4. By befogging the minds [by facilitators leading group members in individual response-confessions through mundane, vague, and trivial agenda points to fatigue mental acuity], they endeavor to convince them that they fill the bill!³

Number three is the reason why Life Groups are segregated by age and often by sex when enough congregants are available.  All these will have similar experiences, or conditions, and have approximating details, or circumstances, to draw from.  These can be capitalized on to more easily lead small groups to predetermined positions of agreement for obtaining desired, although undisclosed, results.  The results are the desired responses the leadership wants from the congregants on varying items that present in the life of maintaining the organization and the leadership, but these are secondary to the actual purpose of the Life Group programs.  The main purpose of the process is the process; it keeps the whole groups in submission and under control of the leadership. This is why a key component of Life Groups is individual confessions of failures and short comings; to confess means to submit. The tactic for instigating confessions takes on the form of a debriefing analysis under the guise of searching for a better way a member could have performed a task, or responded to an incident in their personal life.  Certainly, members must self-criticize themselves before they can suggest an improvement.

Usually, the targeted results revealed to the Life Group members are the completion of community service and beautification projects.  These are supposed to comprise some physical evangelistic witness of the church’s compassion for the community.  While the leadership does, indeed, hope to draw more members to feed off by these public relations exercises, the service projects are themselves part of the communist strategy of enforcing the concept of submission.  People are prodded into to ‘doing life together’ in such groups to achieve the eradication of the individual mind, development of the symbiotic thought process of conformity; and to deprive the individuals of as much of their leisure time as possible to preclude an individual mind from reemerging.

To ensure that the collective remains intact, Life Group facilitators at Real Life Church in Valencia California are instructed to focus on “application and accountability”  which fosters a tedious and time consuming process.⁴  Facilitators are to “fearlessly challenge the people” in their groups “to come up with specific ways they can act on what the group is focusing on,” and even to encourage them to “break into accountability partners for a few weeks at a time” to ensure they adhere to their tasks.⁵  Nothing is left to chance or the Spirit, or goes unmonitored.  Accountability partners are even assigned for prayer time during the week, and group members must use Bible verses to design and commit to action items  with the clear inference that their progress will be reported on to the leadership by the accountability partners.⁶ Ideally, a Life Group member will be too mentally and physically fatigued by the process to reflect and evaluate with outside information, such as the Bible, to ever get a thought or desire of breaking free from the organization. The leadership remains the leadership, with power, prestige, and salaries.

The name the Chinese Communists have for their service learning groups is the Daily Life Committee.⁷  Because the Communist government controls civil law, they can mandate daily attendance for maximum control.  All implementations of these control groups outside communists countries usually begins with weekly or even bi-monthly schedules before being ratcheted for more frequent attendance.  The Los Angeles Unified School District began their professional development meetings several years ago with approximately one meeting per month, and many sites utilized the control group model of facilitated small-group consensus. Today, those meetings are held weekly, and are mandatory.  Life Groups typically start out meeting once a week.  Part of the reason for the surge in megachurches developing satellite campuses is for the facilitation of more frequent Life Group meetings by making them logistically feasible.

The church Life Groups follow the basic pattern of the Chinese Daily Life Committees which have sign-ups for committees on recreation, sanitation, food, and study.⁸  The pretense of the concept of servant-leader, which leads Life Group members to imagine some autonomy, is maintained by giving Life Groups a predetermined list of likely community service projects as examples; with the encouragement of identifying their own community project.  In reality, this relives the leadership of duties by assigning more of the volunteer work onto the Life Groups.

Actual boundary conditions for Life Groups are tightly controlled and regulated.  For instance, in most of these Life Group programs conduct is strictly prescribed and includes pre-scripted answers to possible questions group members may encounter while performing their work, and almost always they are prohibited from any actual evangelizing.⁹  Christian evangelizing is not to be the goal of these groups because it is no longer the goal of the churches they belong to.  True evangelizing would require group members to learn more scripture and thus more doctrine, and those who were as yet unconverted would either convert, or depart, and the converted would grow stronger in the faith.  All of these results would be detrimental to the leadership.

If your church has instituted Life Groups and is encouraging you to join, they may only be innocent efforts to encourage fellowship and support. This case, however, would be one of the very few exceptions, and probably would soon succumb to the Communist paradigm.  One reason for this is that the curriculum which direct these groups is often turned to for resources, and these implement a program of brainwashing and control.  When the table is set for Satan, he usually shows up. We are warned that in the last days perilous times would come; times that would sap the strength from many.  The implementation of Life Groups is the utilization of a process to create a new organism having a form of godliness, but denying, that is disavowing by contradiction, the actual power thereof (2Tim 3:1-5).  We are also told this would be a device of traitors to the faith, and that from such we are to turn away.  What Christians need to understand is that Communism is not a philosophy or theory of government so much as it is diabolical process by which the Devil sets up his anti-church body. It has assisted him in ushering in the Apostasy.

Notes:

^1. Edward Hunter, Brainwashing: The story of men who defied it, (New York: Pyramid Books, 1958; San Francisco: American Libraries, 2006), 240. http://www.archive.org/details/brainwashingstor00huntrich/ (accessed August 8, 2009). Citations are to the American Libraries (online) edition.

^2. Ibid, 237.

^3. Ibid, 242 (bolding, enumerating, bracketed added).

^4. Real Life Church, “Session Guidelines For Facilitators And Co-Facilitators,”

http://www.reallifechurch.org/FAITHNETWORK_UserFileStore/fileCabinet/ministries/d34af287-7b8a-41d8-b4bf-84b420d6eaa7/SessionGuidelinesforFacilitatorsandCoF.pdf (accessed August 9, 2009).

^5. Real Life Church, “Session Guidelines for Facilitators and Co-Facilitators”

^6. Real Life Church, “What a Typical Life Group Looks Like,” http://www.reallifechurch.org/FAITHNETWORK_UserFileStore/fileCabinet/ministries/d34af287-7b8a-41d8-b4bf-84b420d6eaa7/WhataTypicalLGLooksLike.pdf (accessed August 9, 2009).

^7. Edward Hunter, Brainwashing, 179.

^8. Ibid, 179.