by Vyckie
Wow ~ we just did 55 posts in a 4 days! Plus ~ there was plenty of commenting and game playing on the forums ~ and the NLQ Chat Room was pretty busy for much of the time.
What a tremendous response to our NLQ Carnival Days ~ we really knocked ourselves out, didn’t we? I want to thank everyone for their help and participation ~ together, you made the carnival a spectacular success.
We didn’t even come close to meeting our donation goal ~ 
Oh well, we’ll just have to come up with some other excuse to share Angel’s account of her time at the Campbell Compound in Tennessee. Any ideas?
Time for a rest, huh? We’ll be slowing down considerably here at NLQ for the next week or so to give everyone a chance to catch up and digest all the excellent NLQ Carnival Grandstand contributions.
I do have one more post I’m working on ~ and I hope to have it finished right away. It’s my detailed perspective of the discussion on the Joy Behar Show. Other than that, let’s all just relax, welcome new NLQ members, and take it easy.
We did it! Thanks again for making it happen 
Discuss!
by Journey
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
When I shut off my brain and became willing to do whatever Mark said, he was delighted. Absolutely delighted. And everything changed. Everything. The first thing he did was give me a list on how I was to clean the bathroom. I had daily chores and weekly chores from him, down to minute details.
I remember the first day I followed his list. I was humiliated. It was as if I was a child again and he was the parent. I told him that, too (in a humbled and submissive way, of course) and he smiled and said, “Exactly. Your parents did a terrible job of raising you when it comes to cleaning, and now God has given you to me so that I can raise you and help you become the way you should be.”
I worked through the humiliation, swallowed my feelings (something I would do daily from there on out) and soon obeying Mark’s whims and will became the norm. There wasn’t really much choice. I mean, every time I didn’t obey Mark, even in the slightest thing, I was in rebellion against God and in league with Satan.
Plus, if Mark wasn’t there to patiently and gently correct my rebellion, my own head would do it, so fearful I was at being the rebellious woman that the prophetic word from God had warned me about. No. I loved God and because of that, I *would* obey my husband and do it cheerfully.
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by dogemperor
My story of how I walked away from Joel’s Army–and joined the survivor community–started, quite ironically enough, with (of all things) Christian heavy metal…because, interestingly enough, it was my first major experience in how coercive groups operate by telling their members a thousand little lies to create a culture of fear.
To make a long story short, when I was eleven both the Sunday school I attended (at an Assemblies of God megachurch which I would eventually discover some 24 years later was one of the fifteen most influential churches in the United States of what was then known as “Joel’s Army” and which has since rebranded as “Elijah’s Army” and the “New Apostolic Reformation”–and which was at the center of a poorly-documented pre-Brownsville “Toronto Outpouring”-style Third Wave event in the 70s and 80s) and televangelists we’d watch in the household before and after church started condemning Christian rock–and they made the mistake of condemning the band Stryper in their missives as “satanic”.
For those who remember the 80s, yes, this is the same Stryper that literally named itself after Isaiah 53:5 (“By his stripes we are healed”), the same one that wrote of Jesus as “The Rock That Makes Me Roll”, the same one that held altar calls at their concerts and tossed out Bibles to the crowd. The very Stryper that was the very EPITOME of Christian metal at the time (and the best-known by far, because they actually got airplay on secular metal stations and MTV’s Headbangers Ball among other things–probably the very reason they were condemned, in retrospect).
Yeah. THAT Stryper.
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