There is a nondescript house on Brookfield Drive in East Lansing, Michigan, whose address I forget though I remember everything else about it. It’s where I lived for almost three years in the 1970s as part of a religious group called Shiloh Fellowship. When I’m in town, I sometimes drive slowly past it, letting my thoughts disappear into the past. I haven’t reached the point of ringing the doorbell to ask whoever lives there now if I can look at the rooms I once shared with the brethren.
The house, when I lived there, was part of the Kingdom of God. To the eye of faith, so was everything else. I was saved when I was in high school, and to the extent something like that can be explained it was for a common reason: I wanted everything to be saturated with meaning. This is a cruel demand to make of the world, but as a sixteen-year-old I felt comfortable making it.
The “hour I first believed,” as the hymn “Amazing Grace” calls it, belonged to the early seventies, when the countercultural idea of becoming a different person overnight was still strong. My younger brother Paul was saved when some college students held a youth rally at our church, after which he began leaving lurid Gospel tracts around the house. I resisted until one of them got to me and I recited the “Sinner’s Prayer” on its last page, writing down, as it instructed, the date and time of my conversion: January 6, 1973, 8:12 p.m. I became part of the subculture known as the Charismatic movement, which was then at its height. This mostly middle-class movement, which started around 1960 among Episcopalians in California, borrowed many features—especially an emphasis on the supernatural—from traditional Pentecostal churches such as the Assemblies of God. My first Charismatic meeting was in the cavernous basement of a Catholic church. Two hundred people, mostly young, occupied metal folding chairs arranged in a circle around a few men with guitars. Guitars and metal folding chairs were in many ways the symbols of this movement. A few minutes into the meeting the room filled with the sound of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. I spoke in tongues a few days later and found it pleasant rather than ecstatic, which was disappointing.
The emphasis on direct, unmediated contact with the supernatural was, in some ways, the Charismatic movement’s undoing. It had a warm, thoughtless glow but no real structure, which opened it up to predatory messiahs such as Moses David. In 1968, David founded the organization Teens for Christ, which later became Children of God, a cult that prostituted its female members. Shiloh Fellowship, the group I joined shortly after my conversion, belonged to the Shepherding Movement, which was a reaction against Charismatic vagueness. We were accused of being a cult by Pat Robertson, himself a Charismatic, who refused to allow our leaders on his TV show The 700 Club and said the only difference between our teachings and Jonestown was “Kool-Aid.”
I was raised in the Episcopal Church but knew basically nothing about Christianity. I had never read the Bible, whose pages were less than clear about what to do now that I was a child of God. There was friendliness and warmth at the guitar-saturated prayer meetings but little in the way of doctrine, ritual, or even Bible reading. The only point seemed to be having as many ecstatic encounters with God as possible. It was a drug culture without drugs.
The Charismatic movement started before the counterculture, then partly merged with it. Though too young for drugs and sex, as a middle-schooler I had fallen in love with the rhetoric of late-sixties radicals such as Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Mark Rudd, and Abbie Hoffman. I followed their arrests, bombings, and FBI posters the way some of my peers collected baseball cards. I carried this somewhat absurd romance to the point of publishing an underground newspaper, spelling America with k rather than c, and eventually getting sent to a Quaker school for troubled boys in Canada.
Much of this was standard adolescent posturing, but it had a grain of real fanaticism that had nothing to do with revolutionary politics. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman both had what I lacked—namely, a sense of humor. Unlike them, I had no practical agenda, only frustration with the visible world, which seemed to obstruct my view of reality. I didn’t really want to burn everything down, though I did want to make the visible world transparent enough to let me see what was behind it.
My relationship to this shadowy reality felt restored for a short time after getting saved. Everything became less opaque, and I saw God’s world, the world of reality, through trees, buildings, roads, and shopping malls, making seventies suburbia continuous with the biblical world of kings, lepers, and miracles. This period didn’t last, however. About three months after gaining access to it through the Sinner’s Prayer, what I thought was a firm hold on invisible things started wavering, and I reacted by going into religious overdrive. I prayed incessantly, read the Bible, preached the Gospel, and upped my attendance at prayer meetings. On a ski vacation I waited until I was high over the slopes in a chairlift before asking the stranger next to me if they knew of Christ’s salvation. None of this frantic activity seemed to help.
Shiloh Fellowship had just started meeting in the rented basement of a Lutheran church not far from where I lived. It had the familiar trappings of guitars, glossolalia, and metal folding chairs, but something was different. At the first meeting I attended, everyone had a Bible, which made it seem doctrinal, not just emotional. The founder, Erik, was preaching from a King James Version that lay open in one hand while his other swooped, gesticulated, and singled out verses for witty, incisive, and even sardonic commentary. He attacked Christians who wandered aimlessly from meeting to meeting, calling them “spiritual lone rangers” who were afraid of commitment. I found the remark about lone rangers striking, unaware that it came from a book by Don Basham, one of the founders of the Shepherding Movement and a member of the Ft. Lauderdale Five, the group that formed its nucleus. The book, Deliver Us From Evil, was about exorcism. Basham was a professional exorcist, as was Derek Prince, another member of the Five. The three others were Bob Mumford, Charles Simpson, and Ern Baxter. Their names are not forgotten by Christians of a certain age, and the ashes of the rigid hierarchy they attempted to carve from the Charismatic movement still smolder in discussion online as well as in books such as Damaged Disciples: Casualties of Authoritarian Churches and the Shepherding Movement by Ron and Vicki Burks.
All I knew then was that I suddenly felt at home. I wanted something larger than myself, and this was it. It spelled the end of guesswork about “reality.” Erik, the founder, was charismatic in the usual sense and looked like a rock star. His message, however, went in the opposite direction, which made me trust him. He was from upstate New York and had a distinctly non-Midwestern accent that also grabbed me. The message, which came straight from Christian Growth Ministries in Ft. Lauderdale, was this: the “Jesus movement” most of us belonged to was a good thing that had run its course. It was now time to start building the Kingdom of God. The Body of Christ, meaning the church, was more important than the individual Christian. Baudelaire said that on encountering the works of Edgar Allan Poe, he felt he was reading an exact transcript of his own thoughts. I felt that way listening to Erik preach. He seemed to be reading not from the Bible but from the page of Reality.
In 1975, the New York Times published an article entitled “Growing Charismatic Movement is Facing Internal Discord Over a Teaching Known as ‘Discipling.’” That was us, and I had by that year moved into the house on Brookfield Drive with three other “brothers.” Discipling and shepherding were the same thing. According to this teaching, the true church was not the usual setup of pastor and congregation but rather a vast network of relationships between sheep, who could be men, women, or children, and shepherds, who could only be men. You weren’t a real Christian unless you were personally “accountable” or “submitted” to a local shepherd who watched over all parts of your life. You also paid tithes directly to this person, who in turn tithed to the shepherd above him in a pyramid whose summit was in—you guessed it—Ft. Lauderdale.
I soon had my own shepherd, a Jewish convert named Kim Levinson who answered directly to Erik, who answered to Derek Prince, one of the Five. In Charismatic circles, Derek was a genuine celebrity whose books and cassette tapes circulated widely. His calling card was exorcism, a subject that, like shepherding, divided the Charismatic movement. Many Christians said it was impossible for a saved person to be invaded by demons. Derek maintained otherwise, arguing with a great show of scholastic rigor that Christians could harbor secret or unconfessed sins that left them vulnerable to the enemy. On one memorable occasion, he came to our neck of the woods from Florida to conduct a public exorcism session, or “deliverance service,” in a conference room at Michigan State University. A tall, slightly cadaverous Englishman who wore dark suits and spoke in a monotone, Prince seemed to exhale the fumes of all the demons he had cast out of people. His only serious competitors in the field were Frank and Ida Mae Hammond, authors of the exorcism manual Pigs in the Parlor: A Practical Guide to Deliverance. His approach to evil spirits, as I witnessed that night, was starkly mechanical. He endowed the operation with a medical aura by placing a box of Kleenex onstage in case anyone needed to “cough up” a demon. He then invited sufferers in the crowd to approach him for diagnosis or, as he called it, “discernment” of the demon or demons to be gotten rid of. There followed a period of shrieking, writhing, coughing, and other manifestations as the body in question was purged of unwanted inhabitants.
The “gift of discernment,” especially of demonic activity, soon became a kind of management technique in our group. If anyone had a problem with the Shepherding Movement or anything else, it was darkly suggested that demons might be at work. I had a few qualms about the direction we were taking but was far from wanting to leave, so I asked my shepherd, Kim Levinson, to pray for me. The gift of discernment showed him I was afflicted by a “demon of knowledge,” meaning the ungodly desire to understand things that should be taken on faith. I found this persuasive, though after coughing up that particular demon I didn’t feel much better.
I shared the house on Brookfield Drive with three other Christians, all of whom I had known in high school and at least one of whom I had personally led to the Lord. Our model was early Christianity as depicted in the Book of Acts, though the effort to blanket every part of our lives with Christian love sometimes fell short. One of the brothers saved butter wrappers, which he folded into small squares and kept in the refrigerator. Something about this innocent, frugal practice filled my mind with homicidal imagery, which I traced to a demon.
We were growing as a group, and almost everyone worked and tithed. I worked night shifts full-time at a twenty-four-hour restaurant. A sizable portion of our money went straight to Ft. Lauderdale, but we still had enough to buy the church building from our Lutheran landlords, who moved elsewhere. There was also enough to buy Erik and his wife a house near the church. A key tenet of the movement was “service” to those in authority, and I eagerly volunteered to help Erik with chores around his new house. I was set to work carpeting a room in his basement with a pile of scraps someone had given him. I pieced these together and tacked them to the floor, which took a couple days. When another brother tried to vacuum them, they shot up into the cleaner. I heard this from Erik and was about to apologize when he started laughing. I had idealized him heavily, which wasn’t his fault. Still, it was disconcerting to watch his features dissolve in high-pitched giggling.
The group soon had seven or eight full-time shepherds who followed Erik’s lead by using money from tithes to buy houses near the church. Though mostly in their early twenties, they became known as “the elders” and assumed increasing importance at meetings and elsewhere as Erik began traveling, often for weeks at a time, with his mentor Derek. The two men (Erik and Derek, as we called them) frequently went overseas to spread the movement’s teachings to London, Paris, Amsterdam, Jerusalem, and elsewhere. It was on our dime, of course, and some of us found it troubling while others attributed all doubts about it to you-know-who.
It was while Erik was away on one of these extended trips that an elder named Ron took the microphone at a meeting to announce that Erik, who had founded Shiloh Fellowship, was no longer its leader. He had been expelled from the group, but Ron didn’t say why. If anyone tried to contact Erik to find out what was going on, that person would also be expelled.
The announcement’s dreamlike quality was enhanced by what happened two or three weeks later. The same elder, Ron, said that “we” had made a mistake, and that an apology had been extended to Erik, who was still somewhere in Europe. He had, in effect, been crucified and raised from the dead. Later there was speculation that the elders had canned him because they thought he was being controlled by his wife, with whom he co-owned an antique store. No one ever found out, though it soon became clear that the decision to get rid of him had been reversed by Derek.
We were told that when he got back from Europe, Erik might or might not accept our offer of reinstatement. Rank-and-file members of the group such as myself had been reduced to spectators of what was happening while also being told we were to blame. A special meeting was convened at which Erik walked scornfully to an empty chair and made a show of reluctance to sit down until the elders had buried him under a mound of contrition. After he was officially reinstalled, an earsplitting exorcism session ensued in which several Kleenex boxes were deployed against the demons that had caused “us” to betray him.
I left the group shortly after that evening, as did several other people. About two years after I left, the group had a public meltdown that was covered in the pages of the Lansing State Journal. I have all of those investigative articles, with titles like “Former Shiloh leaders recount ‘horror stories,’” “Shiloh, is it a cult or fresh approach?,” and “Shiloh group makes Bailey area anxious,” the last a reference to the residential neighborhood in East Lansing that Shiloh tried to turn into a theocracy by buying up real estate. In addition to lawsuits and op-eds, there was the personal testimony of an ex-member named Kathy Dawe who remembered “300 people on their knees on the floor of the basement (where meetings were then held) screaming, retching and coughing out spirits of rebellion and deception,” adding that “[i]t was during this time that I first began to seriously question things.” She also, however, remembers feeling “in the midst of a great movement of God,” writing that “I was home and would never leave.” Shiloh Fellowship eventually changed its name to New Covenant Church and, like the Shepherding Movement, slowly withered away. Two members of the Ft. Lauderdale Five, Derek Prince and Bob Mumford, eventually disowned the movement and apologized for their part in it.
Seated in the chaos of that last meeting, I was invaded not by demons but by a sense of calm. I somehow knew that I didn’t have to do this anymore. Once the shrieking had subsided, I went up to Erik and told him I had decided to leave the group. “I respect what you’re saying,” he said. “Let’s talk about it.” I was still working the night shift at the restaurant and met him there for breakfast a few days later. After admitting the Fellowship had lately experienced a few problems, he said we were back on track and tried to persuade me to stay. If I did, I would be “discipled” by him personally and would learn exorcism, have access to the group’s money, and maybe meet one of the sisters as a prelude to getting married. It was flattering, though not very tempting. I declined his offer to pay for breakfast, shook his hand, and, having been up all night, went home to bed.
I have lived with the memory of Shiloh Fellowship for a long time and tried to figure out what it meant. I am tempted to think that it had nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity, but that is probably going too far. I am now a member of the Episcopal Church who believes, for what it is worth, every part of the Nicene Creed. What Shiloh Fellowship and the Charismatic movement ruined for me was not Christianity. It was the notion of God as something pulsing, immediate. That sounds like a wonderful idea, and perhaps it is if you happen to be Julian of Norwich or St. John of the Cross. It is, in many ways, the religious equivalent of hard drugs. I am a Christian partly because I perversely enjoy the red tape of going to church, believing in crazy things like the Incarnation, singing bad hymns, and generally seeing everything through a glass, darkly.
The Charismatic movement tried to get rid of all the red tape by reducing religion to immediate experience. I accept the reality of the supernatural, including evil spirits. What drove me out of Shiloh Fellowship was not exorcism but the emphasis on subjective emotion to the exclusion of almost everything else, including Christian doctrine. Religious subjectivism abhors a vacuum and sooner or later falls exhausted into the arms of some authoritarian structure. I mentioned the Nicene Creed because it forms part of the bulwark against bullshit like the Shepherding Movement’s “gift of discernment.” By bringing in historical data like Pontius Pilate, it feeds private emotion (mine, at least) while also keeping that emotion from enthroning itself above everything else. It states that Christ “came down from heaven,” thereby turning the world into a kind of sacramental maze that is, blessedly I think, the opposite of all “immediate experience” of God.
