This Church Promised to Save Their Souls. Defectors Say It Was a 'Cult'
How a group of Christian outcasts banded together to expose alleged sexual assault and manipulation that was happening within its ranks. How a group of Christian outcasts banded together to expose alleged sexual assault and manipulation that was happening within its ranks ... Illustration by Matt Cooley. Images in illustration by iStockphoto/Getty Images; Adobe Stock, 3 · In 1991, when Chele Roland was a college student, regular customers at the diner where she worked persuaded her to come to the Los Angeles International Church of Christ, a protestant evangelical church with a handful of locations in the greater L.A.Filing these cases was the only mechanism by which to bring it to the attention of the public and to turn the microscope on these organizations, so that the conduct will stop.” · ICOC FOUNDER THOMAS “KIP” McKean, born in 1954, was baptized through a campus ministry program at the University of Florida. In 1977, according to a letter from an archived page on McKean’s own website, he was fired from a Protestant church in Illinois for teaching doctrines “not in accordance with the Bible,” including denying people baptism until they were deemed ready, holding that people must suffer for the salvation of others, and the idea that Christians should confess their every sin to a prayer partner, “no matter how personal, how intimate, or how destructive that might be.”Thanks in part to its practice of recruiting members via campus ministries, it reportedly became one of the fastest-growing Christian groups of its time. Today, plaintiffs say the ICOC has more than 120,000 members across 144 nations. Originally called the Boston Movement, the church took theological cues from the conventional Churches of Christ, a loosely associated group of conservative Protestant congregations, including relying on scripture as the sole basis for its teachings, and holding that baptism by full immersion in water is necessary for salvation.The ICOC had its own practices, too, namely the system of “discipling,” where church elders offered members spiritual and personal guidance, and to whom members were directed to confess all their sins. Further, the ICOC, as designed by McKean, plaintiffs said, held that its members were the only Christians chosen by God for salvation in heaven.
