Post by rachelcarson1953 on Sept 20, 2017 20:44:17 GMT
(Source isn't really known to me but the AP investigation is searchable.)
Anyone remember the hullabaloo about Jane Whaley in the early 80s and the "sect" she'd started? Rumors about some form of human rights abuse, etc...
Welp... holly cow...
Read the whole thing for an eye-opening experience, but here's a slice:
SPINDALE, N.C. (AP) — When Andre Oliveira answered the call to leave his Word of Faith Fellowship congregation in Brazil to move to the mother church in North Carolina at the age of 18, his passport and money were confiscated by church leaders — for safekeeping, he said he was told.
Trapped in a foreign land, he said he was forced to work 15 hours a day, usually for no pay, first cleaning warehouses for the secretive evangelical church and later toiling at businesses owned by senior ministers. Any deviation from the rules risked the wrath of church leaders, he said, ranging from beatings to shaming from the pulpit.
“They trafficked us up here. They knew what they were doing. They needed labor and we were cheap labor — hell, free labor,” Oliveira said.
Trapped in a foreign land, he said he was forced to work 15 hours a day, usually for no pay, first cleaning warehouses for the secretive evangelical church and later toiling at businesses owned by senior ministers. Any deviation from the rules risked the wrath of church leaders, he said, ranging from beatings to shaming from the pulpit.
“They trafficked us up here. They knew what they were doing. They needed labor and we were cheap labor — hell, free labor,” Oliveira said.
There is a group in my part of the world - International House of Prayer, abbreviated as IHop, just like the pancake house - that do similar stuff. People sell everything they have, donate it to the church and then are put in organization-owned houses and work for low wages in upper member's businesses. They come from all over the world. Sometimes they wise up and go home, though they have to start all over again. I have some friends that live in the middle of an older subdivision that this church is buying up, and they talked to their neighbor who was a member at the time.
I don't remember Jane Whaley, I was busy with a job and a farm and new husband, and not paying that much attention to anything else.