From 1990 to 2018, thousands of southeastern Iowa families flocked to an amphitheater south of Kalona for a high-budget, wholesomely patriotic Fourth of July show. The spectators (the vast majority, at least) didn’t know it, but the fireworks bursting in the sky, the near-professional song-and-dance numbers onstage and the very land they were gathered on were property of a cult.
The cult successfully masqueraded as an all-American Christian church and business, selling the kind of bunk medicine and self-help strategies you find in the works of Jim Jones, L. Ron Hubbard, NXIVM’s Keith Raniere and Gwen Shamblin of The Way Down. This cult’s (less flashy) prophets impressed upon members the importance of blending in.
“You can be a normal person and be in this church. You can walk with God and not be from Mars, you know,” Gary Hargrave negged his devoted congregation in 1992. “People who are in their late 20s, early 30s, that were raised in the Walk … in a sense, [they’re] like cripples, emotional cripples.”
The Walk, also called the Living Word Fellowship, has outlived Jonestown, passed as a real church better than Scientology and, unlike Heaven’s Gate and other millenarian religious movements, maintained the faith after untimely deaths and poorly timed doomsday predictions.
More importantly, you probably haven’t heard of the Living Word Fellowship (LWF), even if you’ve lived mere miles from its Mecca for decades: Shiloh, a roughly 300-acre township boasting a 90,000 sq. ft. compound (built for worship, religious education and as bunker to stockpile supplies for the End Times), nestled amid the Amish and Mennonite communities of rural Washington County, Iowa. While dazzling the secular public with fireworks shows, LWF’s leadership were exploiting their followers — in Iowa, Los Angeles, Hawaii, Brazil and beyond.
“They were like, ‘If anybody asks, do not mention the church,’” former member Scott Barker recalls his adult mentors advising. “We were just conditioned for so long to be obedient and submissive.”
“We could listen to pop music. We could interact with the rest of the world. We just weren’t … given the space and the freedom to, because we were punished and manipulated into sticking with the cult,” another ex-member, Charity Navalesi, said.
Then one day, it went up in flames.
The aging facilities at Shiloh, erected through the unpaid labor of LWF devotees, were leveled in a demolition burn ordered by the city of Kalona in October 2020. The balloon-shaped “Shiloh” watertower was painted plain white. This literal cleansing followed a metaphorical one: LWF’s central organization and governing body were dissolved in 2018 amid a handful of lawsuits and a growing mountain of allegations brought by former church members. Gary Hargrave resigned.
Former leadership have been charged with sexually abusing minors in the church. Alleged perpetrators include the son of late, exalted apostle Marilyn Hargrave, Rick Holbrook.
As you might expect, the scouring of Shiloh was “very satisfying for all of us to watch,” according to Navalesi, who performed in the Fourth of July revue as a teenager — and under Holbrook’s direction. “To see it burn was so cathartic.”
She and Barker have been investigating the Living Word Fellowship since leaving the church behind in the last decade, after a lifetime inside. They interview former members and religious experts, investigate LWF’s origins and cover ongoing legal action against LWF figures on their podcast, aptly titled Oops! I’m in a Cult.
Through the podcast (and a documentary in the works), Barker said they hope to reframe their own fraught experiences in the Walk. “It’s an opportunity to research the history that they didn’t want to share, the stuff that they didn’t want exposed, the stories that they were actively trying to cover up and hide, and the [recent] lawsuits.”
In future articles, Little Village will explore the sketchy background of LWF founder and Iowa native John Robert Stevens. We’ll also delve into the consequences of medical misinformation, scams and systematic abuse, including at a summer camp in rural Iowa designed to “break” children’s spirits. (Read part two here.)
For now, we’ll focus on the cult’s central love triangle, its toxic teachings around sex and gender, and a program of mandatory “relationships” created to control members young and old.
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Navalesi’s mom was around 15 and her father 20 when they journeyed to Laguna Beach, California in 1970 to join the burgeoning Living Word Fellowship. Her hippie parents sought a sense of belonging, structure, “someone to tell them what to do,” Navalesi explained. “But they also were fed this whole idea that we’re going to change the world and bring the kingdom of God on Earth. This is, like, the new thing that God is doing. Regular Christianity and religion isn’t cutting it.”
John Robert Stevens — billing himself as a salt-of-the-earth preacher from Story County, Iowa, with the powers of prophecy, faith healing and speaking in tongues — would host “bless-ins,” gathering young followers in tight circles for meditation and group prayers. These play off the hippie “love-ins” popular at the time, as well pseudoscientific self-help concepts like the law of attraction and the Power of Positive Thinking.
In a pamphlet from Jan. 26, 1975, Stevens condemned “the seeming luxuries that living in Babylon” — that is, the modern world — “pours out. Man in his civilized existence has reached the epitome of wretchedness, weakness, lethargy, perversiveness, sexual depravity, deformity, abnormal obsession, demon possession and premature death, plus scads of unnamed diseases waiting to pounce upon the unexpected and unaware.”
Before long, the self-styled apostle would order “intercessory prayers” or “sieges”: groups of believers praying in shifts, 24 hours a day, for God to manifest the apostle’s will, whether it be healing his cancer or bringing death upon his critics and ex-lovers.
Shiloh became the go-to gathering spot for these sieges after its construction in the mid-’70s. Raised in the L.A.-area church, Barker regularly flew with his parents — another pair of hippies-turned-LWF-followers — to rural Iowa for major church gatherings, never venturing outside of the Shiloh area.
Barker has pored through hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings he and his parents collected over the decades, all featuring the sermons of “Papa John” Stevens. (When the Hargraves took over LWF, they continued this recording habit; Barker was one of several church members tasked with recording services over the years. Other former members have revealed they were tasked with editing new and old tapings, removing references to Stevens’ first wife, Gary’s first wife, Marilyn’s first husband, the death prayer sieges, politics, outdated racism, etc.)
These tapes and their transcripts — sold to followers for a tidy profit — were collectively called “the Word,” and were studied within the LWF far more diligently than the Bible. Navalesi estimated that for every minute a member spent reading the gospels, they spent at least nine minutes ingesting the meandering, sometimes slurring and occasionally plagiarized Words of the alcoholic Stevens, or one of his successors.
“His every utterance is, like, divine — divine and prophetic and valuable,” Barker said.
An example of Stevens’ divine wisdom, played on the podcast: “They [women] want to be dominated. Something in the female cries, ‘Grab me by the hair and drag me off to the cave.’”
Stevens eschewed most Christian holidays, instead embracing bastardized versions of Jewish High Holy Days and Shabbat. “We did not celebrate Hanukkah, and we did not celebrate Christmas. No Easter. We did Passover instead,” Navalesi said. “Yeah, it’s very confusing. It was very piecemeal.”
“They would tell us all the time, ‘don’t be religious,’” Barker recalled. “They could change the rules from week to week and get mad at you if you were doing the thing that was last week, because today’s a new day. You never really knew what was happening.”
By the time Stevens succumbed to cancer in 1983, his second wife Marilyn and righthand man Gary Hargrave were already plotting a takeover of the Walk and its assets, including the L.A. home in which Papa John was slowly dying, without hospital intervention.
According to Kristy Pfeiffer, a guest on Oops! I’m in a Cult who grew up in the cult’s secretive inner circle, Gary and Marilyn were having an affair under the same roof as the dying Stevens, and even forged his will in the final days.
The two wed within a year of the founder’s death at the age of 63 — an early demise for a man who wasn’t meant to die at all, ever. Roughly half of LWF’s adherents scattered in the wake of this scandalous change of leadership.
“When John died, Gary spun the narrative, eventually saying that the reason he died was because John didn’t submit to Marilyn, or wasn’t obedient to Marilyn,” Barker explained.
“It is surprising that Marilyn and Gary were able to save it the way they did after his death. They did lose a lot of followers, but to keep people going for another 40 years, almost, is — if it weren’t so terrible, it’s really impressive.”
Marilyn Hargrave was elevated to Christ-like status within the LWF, worshipped as “the Lamp of Israel.” This didn’t spell a change in the cult’s view of gender roles, however.
“Any male is a perfect target. That’s why I don’t like women. I really don’t care for a woman’s spirit. I think they are a trip,” Marilyn says during a recorded Word from 1980 titled “Girls, Turn it Off!” which was required listening for girls and young women within LWF.
She criticizes the feminine tendency to turn “tittery, giddy, flirtatious, sultry, seductive” and “manipulative” in the presence of men. “Girls are not just cute little Barbie dolls. Back in there is, like, a viper.”
According to Navalesi, Marilyn’s constant message was, “‘Be nothing. Actually just barely exist. Don’t draw any attention to yourself.’ I was told that a guy only liked me because I ‘beamed it at him.’”
Even though many young members harbored some degree of resentment towards the leadership, they were also conditioned to see people outside “the Body” of the LWF as even more uncaring. In the 1992 sermon, Marilyn calls non-Walk society “scary.” “People don’t care. They’re just trying to use you in an overt way.”
The Hargraves’ wealth and influence ballooned, even as the church body contracted. (At its peak in the ’70s, there were as many as 100 LWF congregations. At the end, there were 10.)
“They had two paid assistants, and then they had volunteer labor,” Navalesi said. “They had people doing their dishes, cleaning their house, doing their shopping, I mean, everything. And then when the whole Elijah-Elisha stuff came out, that’s what all the leaders started doing.”
The Elijah-Elisha doctrine, also called “designated relationships,” required all LWF members to accept a “shepherd” to guide their decision-making: jobs, tithes, moves, dates, marriages, divorces. Of course, Gary and Marilyn would have final approval over the pairings, and shepherds, almost always non-family members, were expected to report back to the apostles.
“It was not unheard of for an ambitious college student in his twenties to ‘shepherd’ a middle-aged husband and father, which meant micromanaging his life: deciding if, when, and where he would take his family on vacation; what car he might buy; whether his kids could go to college,” former LWF member Andrew Marzoni wrote in a 2019 article for The Baffler, comparing the church to a dysfunctional corporate workplace.
“Each congregant literally reported to managerial figures assigned by an intercongregational oligarchy known as the Apostolic Company (APCO) in dependably shifting, haphazard, and dumbfounding arrangements.”
Despite denying in a deposition that designated relationships were a central part of the LWF hierarchy, Gary Hargrave preached the importance of the concept countless times over the decades.
“A designated relationship is, is anybody where there’s something in the Lord, you know, God’s in that relationship between the two people,” Gary attempted to explain in a 1992 Word shared with Little Village. “… Don’t leave the shepherding authority out of the loop of what’s going on with you. … If you’re not submissive, you’re going to violate the relationship.”
Unfurling more red flags, he added, “You are creating a bond and a connection with a person that is as deep and as real as what sex does in melting two spirits.”
Elijah-Elisha was not supposed to be discussed outside the Body. Members were instructed to call it a mere mentorship program, specifically to avoid cult accusations, Barker said.
“Your friends ended up as that person that would control you. You had to be submissive to just some asshole in the church.”
“Someone could be very well intentioned and going to tell one of the shepherds, ‘Hey, Charity said XYZ,’ and I get in trouble, but that person thought that they were just looking out for me,” Navalesi added.
“I remember I wanted to go visit with a friend from college, and I asked permission, because that’s what I was supposed to do. I think I was like, 23, you know, I’m not a child. And [my shepherd] says to me, ‘Well, I’m not going to tell you what to do. You decide for yourself.’ I was like, well, that’s new. So I went and saw my friend.”
The next day, Navalesi was scolded by her shepherd for associating with unsavory people outside the church.
This whiplash was nothing new. Throughout her adolescence and early adulthood, Marilyn would love-bomb Navalesi, only to ice her out for years on end over small supposed transgressions, such as sitting in the wrong spot in church. She felt increasingly isolated.
“She would regularly get on me about not being too much,” Navalesi said. “‘Oh, you were trying to be the center of attention,’ or, ‘You were trying to dress provocatively to get the attention of the guy,’ and I just got to the point where I was like, I can’t do anything right. So I dressed really dumpy and didn’t say a word. … Basically, I just wasn’t myself at all, and just became, as Marilyn would call it, a zero with the rim rubbed down.”
That 1992 recording from Barker’s archive is a four-hour videotaped sermon on sex and designated relationships led by the Hargraves and attended by adult and high school-aged members. In it, Marilyn claims children begin a “hormonal stage” at the age of 5 or younger, and a “sex drive by 8 or 9.”
“I feel like there is a tremendous amount of sexuality in young children,” she says.
“There’s no question that there’s such a big deal about the innocence of the little kids over here that are molested or whatever. But there’s still an intrigue about that that is sometimes mutual, but the kids die because that whole thing is, like, something they’d have to admit, if only they were honest … as an adult, don’t say ‘my kid isn’t interested.’”
Pfeffer feels safe saying she was groomed by Marilyn and Gary as a child. Beginning with her 8th birthday, the couple would invite her to their house for a private dinner and champagne toast. Pfeffer said they would encourage her to drink to the point of intoxication.
Along with homosexuality, the Walk absolutely condemned sex before marriage — even if you’re the victim of unwanted sexual contact. “You have to stay in control of your spirit,” Marilyn advised. “You should never let somebody do something that is a violation to you.”
Inevitably, this attitude from the top allowed sexual abusers to thrive in the LWF. Marilyn’s son from her marriage before Stevens, Rick Holbrook, faced repeated accusations of child sexual abuse and was only temporarily removed, then reappointed, to leadership roles while his accusers were silenced.
A former cult member interviewed by Navalesi and Barker, Lauren Beckman, described being told by her shepherds to “repent for the part [she] played in” her own rape by a church member. She was forced to work as a live-in servant in her shepherds’ house, and says she was abused on multiple occasions by Holbrook.
“They let him stay in positions of leadership, even though they knew he was a sexual predator of children,” Navalesi said.
Marilyn’s daughter, Rick’s sister, faced far greater punishment for coming out as a lesbian. Though she was pushed into a marriage with a man, she fell in love with a woman and divorced him to be with her. “Instead of being encouraged to pursue her happiness, be embraced for who she is, she’s kicked out of the church,” Navalesi explained.
Marilyn died in 2015, three years before the reckoning that would take down the Walk. “A fish doesn’t know it’s swimming in water,” Charity said of the cult mindset, but certain events can create a ripple. Like Stevens, the Lamp of Israel was never supposed to die.
“That’s the thing about most cults in general,” Barker said, “is, like, they can lay down the law. They can instruct people, but they need you to believe. They need you to think that the leaders are actually special.”
Navalesi has bittersweet memories from her school days, first in a Shiloh classroom, then in the Mid-Prairie School District starting in 5th grade, where she and her peers were known as the “cult kids.”
“For the most part, especially in my age group, we really cared for each other, and we just didn’t know we were allowed to,” she said. “We were very siloed. We weren’t allowed to speak to each other about what we were going through, because if we did, and the shepherds found out, we’d get chastised for talking negatively. I think that we really loved each other, and it was the leadership always fucking with us.”
By airing the history of the long-running, far-reaching and relatively undiscussed cult that controlled the first quarter of their lives, Barker and Navalesi go beyond relishing its fall to find healing.
“My favorite quote from [feminist theologian] Meggan Watterson … ‘The truest teachers are the ones who point us back to our own power,’” Navalesi says on an early episode of Oops! I’m in a Cult. “That’s something that will always stick with me, because with the Living Word Fellowship, all we did was give our power away to leaders who were telling us we had to.”
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This article was originally published in Little Village’s February 2025 issue.
