Cultlike Practices at Word of Life Church, Before this week, few humans knew about what went on central the brick walls of the Word of Life Christian Abbey in the apple of Chadwicks, aural the boondocks of New Hartford, New York. But the contempo advance to afterlife of Lucas Leonard, a boyish abbey member, has amorphous to cull aback the blind on the abstruse group, and data from law administration of the adventure are constant with what academics alarm “religious abuse” and possibly cult-like practices.
Police say that afterward Sunday Mass on October 11, six abbey members, including the 19-year-old’s parents Bruce and Deborah Leonard, exhausted him so he would acknowledge his sins during a “counseling session.” The advance was so bad that ancestors associates eventually took Lucas to a hospital, breadth he died from edgeless force agony to his abdomen, back, thighs and genitals. Law administration after begin that his brother, Christopher, aswell showed signs of assault. He too was hospitalized.
Deborah and Bruce Leonard face assassination accuse and are anniversary getting captivated in lieu of $100,000 bail. A abomination audition was appointed for Friday. Four added abbey members, including the boys’ bisected sister, face advance charges.
Mary Alice Crapo, columnist of the album book Twisted Scriptures: Breaking Chargeless From Churches That Abuse, says the data of the Word of Life adventure are “absolutely” constant with those from accounts she has advised and announce a binding or cult-like calumniating church. “In their minds, they’re cerebration they’re allowance him. And even admitting the parents cringe, they absolutely don’t wish to do it, they feel bad about it, they’re aswell pressured by that group.”
In the aboriginal 1990s, about the time if about 80 humans at a religious admixture active by the Branch Davidians abreast Waco, Texas, died during a collision with law enforcement, experts in psychology, folklore and adoration began autograph about what they alleged religious or airy abuse. Cult-like churches are not consistently as apparent as the Branch Davidians. Such corruption can appear anywhere—from baby Bible-study groups to mega-churches, the experts say.
In 1991, the Airy Counterfeits Project appear a 37-question anniversary to advice humans anticipate if their churches or religious groups were abusive, with questions like: “Does your abbey collaborate with added churches?” “Does your abbey agents abstain secrecy?” “Are your accouchement blessed to appear church?”
“If you’re in that church, it’s so subtle,” says Crapo, who is the survivor of what she describes as a New Age cult. “People don’t accept their minds. They think, Oh, my mind’s strong, I’d never accept that.”
The New England Convention of Religious Research describes “aberrational Christian or Bible-based” groups as afterward “some [religious] assumption of greater strictness, added committed dedication, or added acute abandonment of the apple and its attractions.” Such groups generally yield scripture out of context, the convention says, abstracted associates from the alfresco apple and convenance “spiritual elitism.”
In his 1992 book Churches That Abuse, Ronald Enroth identifies several characteristics of calumniating churches, including authoritative leaders who dispense associates and appoint on them adamant lifestyles, and who accomplish it difficult for associates to leave. One victim told Enroth she acquainted abrogation the abbey would “endanger her salvation, as able-bodied as the conservancy of her alfresco accompany and family.”
Religious corruption “is inflicted by bodies who are accorded anniversary and anniversary in our association by advantage of their role as religious leaders,” Enroth wrote. “The corruption of ability that we see in calumniating churches disrupts and divides families, fosters an ailing assurance of associates on the leadership, and creates, ultimately, airy abashing in the lives of victims.”
Little is accepted about the Irwin family, which reportedly ran Word of Life in Chadwicks. But its abstruse practices are constant with accounts in Enroth’s book.
“I had never heard of [the church] before, and I’ve lived actuality in the breadth for 67 years,” says an agent at a abbey in New Hartford, who asked Newsweek not to name her or her abbey because she did not accept permission to allege to the press.
“The aggregation at my abbey accept consistently been puzzled by what affectionate of a abbey that is,” says Reverend Terry Sheldon of St. George’s Episcopal Abbey in Chadwicks. “People said cipher came in, cipher went out. So it was absolutely a abstruseness building.”
According to The New York Times, a prosecutor said Thursday the advance may not accept complex the acknowledgment of sins, but rather may accept occurred because Lucas planned to defect.
Difficulty abrogation is a key aspect of calumniating churches, experts say. Lois Gibson, an calumniating abbey survivor who now runs abutment groups through her website Airy Abuse, says the mentality is, “You will be bedevilled if you leave. They’re not like a advantageous abbey breadth if somebody absitively to leave for whatever reason, they wouldn’t feel like they were abrogation the ‘truth’ or abrogation God or something bad was traveling to appear to them.”
Since she started her website in 1997, Gibson says she has heard from hundreds of humans who said they were the victims of calumniating churches beyond the United States and abroad, including Canada, Australia and England.
If the beatings did in actuality absorb confession, that too could be a assurance of cult-like practices. “Confessions are really, absolutely able in the apperception to ascendancy people,” Crapo says. Gibson agrees, adage sometimes abbey leaders will after use accepted advice adjoin associates in adjustment to bribery them.
The diffuse Word of Life beating, as badge accept declared it, matches victims’ accounts from Enroth’s book. One victim told Enroth, “‘There was punching, hitting, accouchement were aerated with belts, women were aerated with belts.’ This behavior was authentic as ‘love’ for the victim, because, ‘if you absolutely adulation someone, afresh you're traveling to pay the amount for that being to be set free.’”
Another anniversary from Enroth’s book said accessible adventures would endure “anywhere from four to 20 hours. These sessions usually usually took abode at night.… These affectionate details, including those accompanying to one's animal behavior, were [later] brought up over and over afresh to aftermath animosity of abysmal guilt.”
Even the advocate for Deborah Leonard, Devin Garramone, says the signs point to cultlike practices, of which he says his applicant was a victim. “In my affair with my client, appropriate abroad I had the audible activity that this woman had some array of agony about her. She was actual acquiescent and timid.” She was a affiliate of the abbey for decades, Garramone says, “so that’s a continued time to get indoctrinated.”
Garramone adds, “She’s actual addled and she break down and cries sometimes if I get into what went on. She’s reckoning with a lot and I anticipate this may be the aboriginal time in a continued time that she's been on her own abroad from the abbey and she’s ambidextrous with a lot. Maybe she’s acumen for the aboriginal time how manipulated she had become.”
Donald Gerace, a advocate for Bruce Leonard, paints a altered account of the abbey and its practices: “Everything I’ve abstruse about the church...has adumbrated that the abbey has approved Sunday services: It has Bible study; it has an beat affairs to accommodate aliment to disadvantaged individuals; it has approved anniversary events.”
Referring to his client, Gerace adds, “What had occurred was as a aftereffect of a adumbration to him by his son apropos some of his son’s accomplished behavior, and it’s an adverse and adverse accident affecting the lives of abounding humans now.”
Police say that afterward Sunday Mass on October 11, six abbey members, including the 19-year-old’s parents Bruce and Deborah Leonard, exhausted him so he would acknowledge his sins during a “counseling session.” The advance was so bad that ancestors associates eventually took Lucas to a hospital, breadth he died from edgeless force agony to his abdomen, back, thighs and genitals. Law administration after begin that his brother, Christopher, aswell showed signs of assault. He too was hospitalized.
Deborah and Bruce Leonard face assassination accuse and are anniversary getting captivated in lieu of $100,000 bail. A abomination audition was appointed for Friday. Four added abbey members, including the boys’ bisected sister, face advance charges.
Mary Alice Crapo, columnist of the album book Twisted Scriptures: Breaking Chargeless From Churches That Abuse, says the data of the Word of Life adventure are “absolutely” constant with those from accounts she has advised and announce a binding or cult-like calumniating church. “In their minds, they’re cerebration they’re allowance him. And even admitting the parents cringe, they absolutely don’t wish to do it, they feel bad about it, they’re aswell pressured by that group.”
In the aboriginal 1990s, about the time if about 80 humans at a religious admixture active by the Branch Davidians abreast Waco, Texas, died during a collision with law enforcement, experts in psychology, folklore and adoration began autograph about what they alleged religious or airy abuse. Cult-like churches are not consistently as apparent as the Branch Davidians. Such corruption can appear anywhere—from baby Bible-study groups to mega-churches, the experts say.
In 1991, the Airy Counterfeits Project appear a 37-question anniversary to advice humans anticipate if their churches or religious groups were abusive, with questions like: “Does your abbey collaborate with added churches?” “Does your abbey agents abstain secrecy?” “Are your accouchement blessed to appear church?”
“If you’re in that church, it’s so subtle,” says Crapo, who is the survivor of what she describes as a New Age cult. “People don’t accept their minds. They think, Oh, my mind’s strong, I’d never accept that.”
The New England Convention of Religious Research describes “aberrational Christian or Bible-based” groups as afterward “some [religious] assumption of greater strictness, added committed dedication, or added acute abandonment of the apple and its attractions.” Such groups generally yield scripture out of context, the convention says, abstracted associates from the alfresco apple and convenance “spiritual elitism.”
In his 1992 book Churches That Abuse, Ronald Enroth identifies several characteristics of calumniating churches, including authoritative leaders who dispense associates and appoint on them adamant lifestyles, and who accomplish it difficult for associates to leave. One victim told Enroth she acquainted abrogation the abbey would “endanger her salvation, as able-bodied as the conservancy of her alfresco accompany and family.”
Religious corruption “is inflicted by bodies who are accorded anniversary and anniversary in our association by advantage of their role as religious leaders,” Enroth wrote. “The corruption of ability that we see in calumniating churches disrupts and divides families, fosters an ailing assurance of associates on the leadership, and creates, ultimately, airy abashing in the lives of victims.”
Little is accepted about the Irwin family, which reportedly ran Word of Life in Chadwicks. But its abstruse practices are constant with accounts in Enroth’s book.
“I had never heard of [the church] before, and I’ve lived actuality in the breadth for 67 years,” says an agent at a abbey in New Hartford, who asked Newsweek not to name her or her abbey because she did not accept permission to allege to the press.
“The aggregation at my abbey accept consistently been puzzled by what affectionate of a abbey that is,” says Reverend Terry Sheldon of St. George’s Episcopal Abbey in Chadwicks. “People said cipher came in, cipher went out. So it was absolutely a abstruseness building.”
According to The New York Times, a prosecutor said Thursday the advance may not accept complex the acknowledgment of sins, but rather may accept occurred because Lucas planned to defect.
Difficulty abrogation is a key aspect of calumniating churches, experts say. Lois Gibson, an calumniating abbey survivor who now runs abutment groups through her website Airy Abuse, says the mentality is, “You will be bedevilled if you leave. They’re not like a advantageous abbey breadth if somebody absitively to leave for whatever reason, they wouldn’t feel like they were abrogation the ‘truth’ or abrogation God or something bad was traveling to appear to them.”
Since she started her website in 1997, Gibson says she has heard from hundreds of humans who said they were the victims of calumniating churches beyond the United States and abroad, including Canada, Australia and England.
If the beatings did in actuality absorb confession, that too could be a assurance of cult-like practices. “Confessions are really, absolutely able in the apperception to ascendancy people,” Crapo says. Gibson agrees, adage sometimes abbey leaders will after use accepted advice adjoin associates in adjustment to bribery them.
The diffuse Word of Life beating, as badge accept declared it, matches victims’ accounts from Enroth’s book. One victim told Enroth, “‘There was punching, hitting, accouchement were aerated with belts, women were aerated with belts.’ This behavior was authentic as ‘love’ for the victim, because, ‘if you absolutely adulation someone, afresh you're traveling to pay the amount for that being to be set free.’”
Another anniversary from Enroth’s book said accessible adventures would endure “anywhere from four to 20 hours. These sessions usually usually took abode at night.… These affectionate details, including those accompanying to one's animal behavior, were [later] brought up over and over afresh to aftermath animosity of abysmal guilt.”
Even the advocate for Deborah Leonard, Devin Garramone, says the signs point to cultlike practices, of which he says his applicant was a victim. “In my affair with my client, appropriate abroad I had the audible activity that this woman had some array of agony about her. She was actual acquiescent and timid.” She was a affiliate of the abbey for decades, Garramone says, “so that’s a continued time to get indoctrinated.”
Garramone adds, “She’s actual addled and she break down and cries sometimes if I get into what went on. She’s reckoning with a lot and I anticipate this may be the aboriginal time in a continued time that she's been on her own abroad from the abbey and she’s ambidextrous with a lot. Maybe she’s acumen for the aboriginal time how manipulated she had become.”
Donald Gerace, a advocate for Bruce Leonard, paints a altered account of the abbey and its practices: “Everything I’ve abstruse about the church...has adumbrated that the abbey has approved Sunday services: It has Bible study; it has an beat affairs to accommodate aliment to disadvantaged individuals; it has approved anniversary events.”
Referring to his client, Gerace adds, “What had occurred was as a aftereffect of a adumbration to him by his son apropos some of his son’s accomplished behavior, and it’s an adverse and adverse accident affecting the lives of abounding humans now.”
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