I am not going to get into who might have started these practices, but I believe that Living Word Fellowship, and other cults as well, deliberately set about to brainwash people to the point of mental illness and then with purpose keep people in that state for as long as possible, sometimes, for the rest of their lives.
Look up the terms: Magical thinking, paranoia, illusions of grandeur, psychopathy, neurosis.
There are others too, but right off the top of my head this is what I see UNFOLDING. I think the ones that are picked to shepherd the people are the ones that show signs of psychopathy. The ones that are eternally in the flock of sheep, are people that show signs of neurosis. I think the leaders have delusions of grandeur, and the people in the flock have low self-esteem, and those people are worked on to the point that they have no self-esteem and they believe that they can-not survive without the leading of their psychotic shepherds. The sheep even believe that their thoughts are dangerous and the start weighing all their thoughts, to the point that every time they have a thought that their leaders might be wrong, they believe that they are on the edge of committing blasphemy.
For the leadership commit such mental cruelty, instead of helping people snap out of it and mature, this is an atrocity. This is not Christianity, it's a crime.
Any real pastor that I know, and I know a few, any of them, if they heard someone say something like that unknown poster said, they would speak with that person's family, they would strongly suggest that person get psychiatric help. None of them would encourage such an attitude in their congregations. And that is what Living Word Fellowship, at least the part of it on the west coast did, and this is what they apparently still do.
Look up the terms: Magical thinking, paranoia, illusions of grandeur, psychopathy, neurosis.
There are others too, but right off the top of my head this is what I see UNFOLDING. I think the ones that are picked to shepherd the people are the ones that show signs of psychopathy. The ones that are eternally in the flock of sheep, are people that show signs of neurosis. I think the leaders have delusions of grandeur, and the people in the flock have low self-esteem, and those people are worked on to the point that they have no self-esteem and they believe that they can-not survive without the leading of their psychotic shepherds. The sheep even believe that their thoughts are dangerous and the start weighing all their thoughts, to the point that every time they have a thought that their leaders might be wrong, they believe that they are on the edge of committing blasphemy.
For the leadership commit such mental cruelty, instead of helping people snap out of it and mature, this is an atrocity. This is not Christianity, it's a crime.
Any real pastor that I know, and I know a few, any of them, if they heard someone say something like that unknown poster said, they would speak with that person's family, they would strongly suggest that person get psychiatric help. None of them would encourage such an attitude in their congregations. And that is what Living Word Fellowship, at least the part of it on the west coast did, and this is what they apparently still do.