Self Help Books
for
Persons Leaving the Exclusive Brethren
--RKW
How To Identify a Dangerous Religious Group
edited by David Sper Published by: Resources for
Biblical Communication
USA: Grand Rapids, Michigan,
49555-0001
Canada: Box 1622 Windsor, Ontario N9A 6Z7
Australia: Box
365, Ryde, 2112 NSW
Europe: Box 1, Carnforth, Lancs., England LA5
9ES
Singapore: Raffles City, Box 1017, Singapore 9117
Philippines:
Box 288 Greenhills, 0410 Metro Manila
India: Box 1037, Kilpauk, Madras
600 010
Jamaica: Box 123 Kingston 10
Africa: Box 36000, 0102 Menlo
Park, RSA
Africa: Box 8132, Ikeja, Lagos State, Nigeria
Africa: Box
14599, Nairobi, Kenya
Africa: PMB 5723, Accra, Ghana
Reviews
December 6, 1997
This booklet was sent to me by the author of PLYMOUTH BRETHREN:
Exclusive Raven/Taylor Sect.
It is a 32 page tract with the following
contents:
- As the Third Millennium Approaches
- The View From Within
- Was Christ Dangerous?
- How To Identify the Leader of a DRG
- What Are the Marks of a DRG?
- The Bait-and-Switch Method of DRGs
- What's the Difference?
- Coming Out
This pocket-sized booklet is designed to be placed in the hands of
someone in a situation that may be a cult. It may also be useful to
someone whose loved ones are in such a situation. The booklet emphasizes
the authority of scripture and describes the differences between "the
right kind of church and a dangerous religious group" (DRG).
Copies are available at no charge from the publisher. RBC Ministries is
not funded or endowed by any group or denomination.
Here is an exerpt to give you an idea of the tone of the book. After
quoting Matthew 7 verses 15-20 (Therefore by their fruits you will know
them), the author writes:
It doesn't feel good to be suspicious. We have learned
not to doubt but to believe. It's hard to accept that a person who talks
knowingly about the Lord, and who speaks disparagingly of the devil,
could be dangerous. Yet Jesus taught us to believe that it is not by
people's words but by the fruit of their lives that we can tell who
they've been spending time with.
One former member of a DRG says that our Lord's principle of knowing
a tree by its fruit is one of the principles that helped him to see what
he was involved with. Looking back, he says, "There were several
scriptures that were helpful. One was about judging the roots of the
tree by the fruit. And I didn't see any good fruit growing. I saw only
destruction. I saw people who were getting worse instead of better; they
were becoming more dependent and more psychotic. There was guilt and
shame and bad feelings. There was no love involved. There was no
forgiveness anymore."
Time will usually show the fruit of a leader's life. First
impressions and words, by themselves, don't say a lot about motives. Yet
life has a way of writing its journal about the purposes of our
hearts.
--RKW
Why We Left a Cult:
Six People Tell Their Stories
by Latayne C. Scott
Copyright 1993
Published by Baker Book
House
P. O. Box 6287
Grand Rapids, Michigan
49516-6287
USA
ISBN: 0-8010-8338-9
Reviews
December 6, 1997
I found this book in my local public library. The author is a former
Mormon who uses the voices of six people who are now "mature, committed
Christians" but who were either born into or converted to faiths described
as cults. The faiths in question are Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian
Science, witchcraft, and the New Age movement.
The following quotation is from the conclusion of the book
...ex-Mormons who are new Christians are not just newborn
babes, they are newborns who are born addicted. They must be cared for
differently than other newborns, for they have very real needs that
other babies do not have. They cannot be blamed for their addiction but
must be lovingly weaned from it.
Furthermore, people who escape cults and come to Christ are not just
babies born addicted. They are born abused. Child abuse occurs
when an authority figure, someone bigger and stronger, uses a position
of trust to hurt a child. Therefore, I don't think any of us who have
lived as faithful members of cults have escaped unscathed from the
experience. Cults, after all, exist as the result of a conscious plan in
the mind of Satan to define a subculture and control the people within
it. You can't live under that kind of deliberately destructive
leadership for long without dire consequences.
I can say what I am about to say because I, too, was ravaged by the
aftereffects of a cult. I don't believe anyone who escaped from one gets
out whole. We are all skewed by that experience in one way or another
and in varying degrees. Denying that fact doesn't help us heal.
Neither addiction nor abuse is healed until it is first recognized
and then dealt with. You can't tell a victim of cultism just to pray and
be more spiritual and everything will work out. There are no quick fixes
and instant cures. Someone has to teach God's way of truth, and love,
and forgiveness. This will take time and patience. It will be very hard.
But here's the truth that Jesus died for: Children -- all his
children -- are worth it.
--RKW
Man's Search for Meaning
by Viktor E. Frankl
Copyright 1959, 1962, 1984, 1992
Published by
Beacon Press
25 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts
02108-2892
ISBN 0-8070-2918-1
With millions of copies in print, this book is sure to be available in
your local library.
Reviews
December 11, 1997Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist who was
imprisoned at Auschwitz and other concentration camps during the
Holocaust. After being freed, he wrote of his experiences in this slim
volume. Visitors to this site may turn from this book because of Frankl's
association with Existentialism and the Unitarian Universalist Association
of Congregations. But for those of us to whom life has dealt unavoidable
suffering, Frankl has a message. But first a caution ...
But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering
necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible
even in spite of suffering -- provided, certainly, that the suffering is
unavoidable. If it were unavoidable, however, the meaningful
thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological,
biological, or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather
than heroic.
If view of the possibility of finding meaning in suffering, life's
meaning is an unconditional one, at least potentially. That
unconditional meaning, however, is paralleled by the unconditional value
of each and every person. It is that which warrants the indelible
quality of the dignity of man. Just as life remains potentially
meaningfull under any conditions, even those which are most miserable,
so too does the value of each and every person stay with him or her, and
it does so because it is based on the values that he or she has realized
in the past, and is not contingent on the usefulness that he or she may
or may not retain in the present.
As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents
a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may
actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of
his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is
asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer
to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only
respond by being responsible.
Frankl's bottom-line imperative is: Live as if you were living
for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are
about to act now.
--RKW
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