Say Nathan, have you had any contact with anyone from TFI lately?

FYI - a book review of [i:37ef08ee88]I Can't Hear God Anymore: Life in a Dallas Cult [/i:37ef08ee88]was published in the Cultic Studies Review.

This article is an electronic version of an article originally published in Cultic Studies Review, 2006, Volume 5, Number 3, pages 454-455. Please keep in mind that the pagination of this electronic reprint differs from that of the bound volume. This fact could affect how you enter bibliographic information in papers that you may write.

I Can’t Hear God Anymore
Wendy Duncan
Rowlett, Texas: VM Life Resources, LLC, 2006, 228 pages. ISBN: 0-977660-0-X.

Reviewed by Lois V. Svoboda, M.D., L.M.F.T.


Ms. Duncan’s first person account of her seven-year experience as a member of The Trinity Foundation of Dallas, Texas, an outwardly reputable Christian organization set up to model Christian living at its best, ranks along side of Hassan’s Combating Cult Mind Control and other first person cult narratives. For years I have searched for a book that could clarify from a Christian perspective both the scripture twisting and the theological distortions that quasi-Christian cults inflict on their members. This book fits such a niche. When I Can’t Hear God Anymore arrived in the mail I picked it up curiously, intending to look it over. It proved to be a page turner, and I finished it the day it arrived. I couldn’t put it down.

Duncan has done her homework. She has done a difficult thing: made the process by which she was seduced into membership into a highly authoritarian group with bizarre personal reinterpretations of scripture seem both understandable and reasonable. She addresses her particular vulnerabilities which blinded her to warning signs that all was not well in this group. She spells out the promise that fired her imagination. After a couple of divorces, causing her to be treated as an outsider in her own Christian denomination, she welcomed input from other and supposedly wiser people in choosing her next partner. She also balances the positives of group life (no more loneliness, a ready made social system, a sense of community) with the negatives. What is different about this book is the apparent “evangelical mainstreamness” of the Trinity Foundation.

Duncan was no naive, idealistic teenager. She was adult, in her forties, with a Master’s degree from a seminary and a stable job. She knew about cults. She checked out the group she was considering in several ways before joining. But in spite of her precautions, she still fell in and stayed in seven years.

She writes in a clear, straightforward manner. She organizes her material logically, including the theological distortions of her group leader, Ole Anthony. Superficially, the language and doctrine of her leader would be recognizable to any evangelical, although idiosyncratic. But the idiosyncrasies can be rationalized by the intelligence and originality of its leader. But also as in most cults, there was a discrepancy between the doctrine and the behaviors of the group. She has organized her material into chapters about her process of gradually being drawn into the group, the leader, his theology—including both orthodoxy and distortions, the ways the leader used scripture to systematically break down members’ egos, and her exiting the group. She describes the multiple metastases within her system of the pernicious doctrinal distortions, some of which took years to erase. Her recovery, interestingly, was done with a minimum of professional help. She details how she did that.

To someone unfamiliar with mainstream Christianity, the great detail that she uses to describe the theological distortions and scripture twisting that are part of the working credos of the Trinity Foundation may seem drawn out and overdone; but for me, it’s the kind of detail I have felt some of the testimonials of other pseudo Christian group former members have glossed over or left out.

I would recommend this book without reservation to anyone who is interested in understanding why the Christian church has always relied on scripture and why the church through the ages has rested on orthodoxy. Families, former high authority group members, pastors, students, could all benefit.

http:www.dallascult.com

Another one awakened!

[thedirtycalvinist.com]

Here is something I found supposed to have been written by Ole Anthony. You have to consider if this is something a sociopath or narcississt would write. It is really interesting in light of this current cult controversey.

[www.singleness.org]

rom Wendy's book, pages 182-183:

"Tilton's [i:34872e26ca]Prime Time Lies[/i:34872e26ca] was aired in multiple television markets throughout the United States for approximately six weeks before an attorney for Ole distributed a letter stating that the program those television stations were airing was libelous, effectively halting the further broadcasting of the show. Included with the attorney's letter was a
press release from Trinity Foundation and the multi-page document "Trinity Foundation's Responses to Accusations in Robert Tilton's 'Prime Time Lies' " with some fifty or more "supporting" exhibits. The entire package sent out to the media was approximately one hundred seventy pages long. [b:34872e26ca]Included in Trinity's document was a brutal assault on one of its former members who had participated in Tilton's program. [/b:34872e26ca] To refute this woman's allegations, Trinity Foundation attacked her credibility by including court papers concerning her divorce decree, an affidavit from a current member of Trinity Foundation stating that she had confided in him that she had at one point been in a psychiatric hospital, and two other affidavits from group members suggesting that she had an affair with another person in the group and left because of Trinity Foundation's "open refusal to endorse her illicit sexual activities."[b:34872e26ca]
While I could understand that the statements made by the former member would be upsetting to Ole and members of the Trinity Foundation, the denigration of this individual was ruthless and merciless.[/b:34872e26ca] And, it [b:34872e26ca]contradicted[/b:34872e26ca] what Ole taught. Ole often preached that the test of
whether a person truly loved God would be whether he would "lay down his life" for others. Laying one's life down for another meant that you put the other person's interest above your own, and that you gave up the right to protect yourself or your reputation. Clearly, Trinity Foundation's reaction to this former member and the Tilton program could hardly be called an act of love or and act of "dying to self" as Ole wrote in this excerpt:

When you are forgotten, or neglected, or purposely provoked, and you don't sting and hurt with the insult or the oversight, but your heart is happy, being counted worthy to suffer for Christ, THAT IS DYING TO SELF.

[b:34872e26ca]
It was troubling that Trinity Foundation's response to Tilton's program was inconsistent with Ole's teachings. What Trinity Foundation did to the televangelists was exactly what Ole preached against. Ole often said that we should not judge other people because we do not know what God is doing. We might judge with our senses that some event or activity is wrong, but we cannot know how God is using that situation for His own purposes. Should not that same teaching apply to the televangelists? How can we judge whether or not God is using their ministry for His good?"[/b:34872e26ca]


There's talking the talk, and then there's walking the walk. What we have been saying all along, what you do not seem to understand (or rather want to understand) is that Ole says one thing, and does another. It boils down real simply: the man is a hypocrite. We who have met the man and spent any significant period of time around him, and then left his orbit, know this.


I know that it is hard to believe and I didn't want to admit it to myself either. Please take our word for it. How could you presume to say that you know the man better than those of us that have actually MET and LIVED AROUND him? Come on Nathan, listen to reason. Face it, you have been had.

Brian, Ole has been kind to me when I've asked him direct questions. Ole as is true of many of us is a hypocrite in some areas no doubt. The description of Ole as a sociopath and narcississt as Doug says doesn't line up with his actions or his words though. A sociopath does not care for the homeless. A sociopath does not not talk about "Dying to self." I remember hearing a talk show host who kept talking about how much he loved Ole. Somewhere in the conversation Ole told him that guys like Benny Hinn existed to show him what his own character was like. It seemed to put a chill on the discussion. If he was just targeting televangelists to make himself look good he wouldn't say stuff like that. I don't believe you Brian. You have called me a troll here and on other forums saying that I have no real interest in TFI. Am I to believe your character judgements?

QUESTION: According to certain individuals, the Duncans went to Benny Hinn and TBN looking for financial support for the book? Did you do that, and were you able to attain support from such sources?

Nathan A, in honest answer to the question, could one imagine a cult -type/ or over controlling religious leader saying something like this: Definitely.

Don't know anything about the Trinity Group beyond what I have read here, so am not able to give any opinion on the group itself.(and anyway that is something you need to decide for yourself.)

However, teaching people that God demands total sacrifice, and that any attempt to protect oneself from abuse is against God's requirements, leaves a situation whereby people may accept abuse uncomplaining, since any complaint would be the sign of an unspirituality.

If all complaint is unspiritual, then what happens to the boundaries that protect one from abuse?
Just my knee jerk reaction to that religious approach.
Wishing you luck in your spiritual search, Yasmin

Quote

QUESTION: According to certain individuals, the Duncans went to Benny Hinn and TBN looking for financial support for the book? Did you do that, and were you able to attain support from such sources?

This is disinformation that Trinity is putting out about us—a profoundly sociopathic approach to the matter, I say. I believe it falls under the category of “bearing false witness,” which you, Nathan, have now become accomplice to by repeating these scurrilous charges in a public forum.

[b:a83af3b49b]For the record: It isn't true. We have not sought funds from any of the televangelists, nor have we ever seriously considered doing so. The things we are saying are entirely our own. We are not speaking for Tilton, Hinn, Crouch, or anyone besides ourselves and about 50 former members of Trinity Foundation. Wendy and I are mainstream Protestants and not associated with Word of Faith doctrine or churches.[/b:a83af3b49b]

Again, Nathan, I ask you: How did you come upon these charges? Did someone from Trinity put you onto them? If so, how does that sort of game playing square with their presentation of themselves as people who are somehow interested in our well-being?

NathanA.

[b:c81369854e]A sociopath does talk about "Dying to self.

"[/b:c81369854e]Of course a sociopath would [b:c81369854e]talk [/b:c81369854e]about dying to self. He just would not do it himself but expect others to. And he might also pretend or let others imply that he wrote a poem about dying to self.
cultaware

Could it be...Ole?


[www.overcomersunlimited.com]

[www.robertfitts.com]

[www.agenttimonline.com]

[home.earthlink.net]