This article is the second in a planned three-part series about Shiloh and the cult of the Living Word Fellowship. Learn more in part one.
Content warning for descriptions of child abuse, including sexual assault.
Titus Walker lived in Hawaii, but he flew to rural Iowa for summer camp. Growing up in an insular church community in the 1980s, it was a blast to hang out with kids his age, even if the Young Adult School of Prophets (YASP) wasn’t much of a vacation.
“They would take us out into the fields below Shiloh,” the church’s township south of Kalona, Walker recalled. “At the time it was just plagued with these thorny-ass rose bushes. And we would remove rose bushes all day long.”
Boy-girl relationships were highly restricted at camp, as were snacks. Campers were fed mostly bland oatmeal, rice and salads for weeks on end. But they found time for “14-year-old shenanigans” — harmless pranks, dips in the leech-filled lake, perhaps even a day trip.
“[We’d call] that old fucking checkered cab and pile in like sardines, and we’d go to Iowa City or some shitty water park,” Walker said. (The shitty water park was Davenport’s Wacky Waters.)
But for him and a half a dozen fellow campers, YASP changed overnight.
“We were the more outspoken, rowdier kids. They gathered us up late at night and dragged us into a room with four or five Shepherds,” Walker recounted in an interview with the Oops, I’m in a Cult podcast. “Shepherds” were the adult leaders in the church. “They basically told us, ‘You guys are fucking assholes. You’re just running around, doing whatever you want.’ We were ‘pieces of shit.’”
“They said they’re going to break our spirits,” he continued. “And so the next morning, they woke us up at 5 o’clock, and that became our routine.”
The day started with calisthenics, then a two-mile run. “We were throwing up, puking, and it was no mercy. They didn’t care. Keep going. Keep going.”
The handful of teens forced into this “boot camp,” as the Shepherds called it, would serve and clean up meals for the regular campers, and were instructed to keep their heads down, avoid eye contact. The only breaks from work were the multi-hour church services in the evenings — great for stealth napping, Walker said, until Shepherds started making them take notes on each sermon.
“And then when the service was over, we’d have to go back to scrubbing toilets and cleaning the bathrooms.”
The day might finally end at 10 p.m., then begin again at 5 a.m. with military-style bed inspections and more running.
“After doing it for so long, you learn to fall in line,” Walker said.
“I was not the same person after that boot camp. I was super outgoing before that, and I became very introverted.”
Being a girl at YASP could be traumatizing as well. In addition to manual labor and a malnourished diet, female campers say boundaries were frequently crossed by Shepherds — and worse. Walker recalls church leader Rick Holbrook bragging to the boys about barging unannounced into the girls’ dorms and seeing them undressed. “This was an adult, like, dishing on 15-, 14-, 13-year-old girls. The dude was a fucking scumbag.”
The #MeToo story of Shalom Abrahamson-Caples, who was groped by Holbrook at YASP during one of these “dorm checks,” was posted online in 2018. (“My eyes were closed and my breasts were touched,” she writes.) In her early 20s, she was sexually assaulted by him again.
Over the years, she reported what happened to other church leaders. They “didn’t question him but blamed me, silenced me, shamed me for speaking out against Rick, and sent me to a physiatrist for possible chemical imbalance to be medicated,” Abrahamson-Caples wrote.
“I was too trusting and allowed people to control my life decisions that in return hurt me and others around me. I was fearful and intimidated and even worse, I believed they were the only way to God, ‘Christ in the flesh.’”
Abrahamson-Caples going public with her story was perhaps the single most pivotal event leading to the church’s implosion. She, along with four other people, filed lawsuits against church officials in 2020. Its board disbanded, and its properties have been sold or destroyed. Shiloh was leveled in a controlled burn by the city of Kalona in 2020.
But former “cult kids” are still reckoning with the childhood they lost to the church’s false prophets.
During the Great Depression, a 14-year-old farm kid in Story County, Iowa picked up a pen and wrote some 400 words that would define his life.
A young John Robert Stevens’ musings on what it means “To Be a Christian” became the centerpiece of his fundamentalist church, the Living Word Fellowship (LWF), which formed in southern California in the 1950s and grew into an international organization. Shiloh was established in the 1970s, and touted by Stevens as “the center of the universe.”
Followers cited “To Be a Christian” more often than any Bible verse, and considered it as equally, if not more, divinely inspired.
“To be a Christian,” it reads, “means that in everything I am and do — when I eat and drink, when I buy and sell, when I work and play, when I read and think — that I look to Jesus as my Master. … My joy must be in doing His will, in being His slave, in the confidence that whatever comes to me, when following Him, is His doing. … I am also sure it will be mainly waste, friction, vain striving and misdirected effort, sickening failure and defeated ambition if I try to direct my own life.”
“Brother John” Stevens said he had a direct line to God, and even though his teachings could strain belief — from claiming to time travel to accusing his first wife of being possessed by an evil Nephilim spirit (after she discovered his rampant infidelity), to ordering the stockpiling of supplies for an apocalypse that never arrived — “To Be a Christian” remained a well of sanity his followers could return to.
Stevens never wrote another thing like it. And in fact, he didn’t write “To Be a Christian” either.
“He basically founded the church on a lie,” said Charity Navalesi.
Ex-LWF members and Oops, I’m in a Cult podcast hosts Navalesi and Scott Barker confirmed in 2023 what others had suspected for years: Stevens plagiarized his church’s founding text. It was taken, word for word, from an 1897 publication called Cut Gems, which is preserved in the Library of Congress. While the author is unknown, the piece was published 22 years before Stevens was born.
“The cornerstone [of the LWF] was ‘To Be a Christian,’ and they made such a big deal out of it. It’s on the website, I think even still,” Navalesi said. Indeed, the site johnrobertstevens.com, owned by remnant LWF members, credits Stevens with writing the piece in 1933, when he would have been a student at Washington High School.
By the time Stevens’ original sin was revealed in 2023 on Navalesi and Barker’s podcast, his church had already fallen. But it still shocked many ex-followers, causing some to reevaluate the words that had moved them to tears and cheers during shows at the Shiloh Amphitheater — and were used as justification for Stevens and his successors, Gary and Marilyn Hargrave, to control members’ every decision.
“Instead of giving yourself to a higher power,” Navalesi explained, “it was giving yourself to a person who said they were your higher power … Anytime you kind of showed up as an individual, it was, ‘we gotta break you back down to be submissive.’”
Education isn’t a big priority in cults, especially of the doomsday variety. As Barker puts it, “What’s the point of getting a college education when the Kingdom is coming?” Still, Stevens didn’t want to lose his young flock to mainstream, “Babylonian” institutions, so he diverted them to Living Word schools.
From preschool through 5th grade, Navalesi attended class in the basement of the Shiloh compound, roughly 1983 to ’89. Most of her memories of that time are a haze.
“I just remember that I hated it, and I didn’t feel safe there,” she said. Children who misbehaved were beaten with wooden Navy paddles, or made to stand in the corner of the room holding their ankles, rear-end facing the class. This did nothing to help Navalesi, a shy child, come out of her shell.
“They kept telling my parents ‘something’s wrong with her,’” Navalesi told Little Village. “There was always that sense that I was defective. It got so bad to the point where I would pretend to be sick every Sunday evening so that I didn’t have to go to school the next day.”
One afternoon, the principal boarded the school bus and told a 6- or 7-year-old Navalesi she wouldn’t be getting off at home.
“They had decided that, because I was too bonded to my mother, they were going to take me away from her for a time and have me live with this other family,” she said. The relocation only ended up lasting a few days, but it wasn’t the last time Navalesi was threatened with being “taken away for good” by leadership. “That was my experience for most of my time in the cult: Something’s always wrong with Charity.”
Navalesi’s 3rd grade teacher, however, was a godsend. She was the only teacher to have a degree in education, and could see Navalesi was a bright, normal student. “That’s when things got to be OK for me.”
The basement school was shuttered when Navalesi was in 5th grade, so she and her peers were enrolled in public school in the Mid-Prairie Community School District.
“We did get a pretty good education, from what I can tell, thinking back on how we performed when we got to public school,” Navalesi said. “But socially, like, we were weird. We were just weird. And I remember that feeling of, I’m a stranger in a strange land.”
Barker, about a decade younger than Navalesi, attended an LWF school in Los Angeles from preschool through 2nd grade, then junior high and high school in the early ’00s.
“I had that little gap where I went to public school, and I remember being intimidated thinking all these kids at the church school are super smart. [But] I realized really quickly it was just kind of a free-for-all,” Barker told Little Village.
“They kept calling it a college prep school. I didn’t go to college, because I was not prepped.”
There were only six people in his graduating class, and all played hooky often. Boys would be pulled from class to do construction work or set up for an event, while girls might be tasked with cooking a meal for the Hargraves when they visited. Female students typically faced harsher treatment from the principal (also the English teacher), who shared Marilyn Hargrave’s belief that a succubus lurked in the soul of every woman.
“None of them put the kids first,” Barker said. “They just didn’t care to protect anyone.”
One of Barker’s L.A. teachers is mentioned in the ongoing abuse lawsuit. This teacher was in his late 20s, was raised in the church and had no college education. When he wasn’t gabbing about Friends or Survivor, Barker said, “He would talk about his sex life. He’d ask the kids about their sex life. He’d talk about sex positions and sexual acts [and] his sexual status. All of this was, like, during history class or math class.”
According to filings, the teacher successfully pressured two students to make out, and would instruct girls to try and hold a pencil under their busts to “test” their breast size.
“The principal gave him reprimands, but he was never suspended, never fired, over a 15-year teaching career,” Barker said. “Everything is connected, and there’s no checks and balances because the Shepherds are the principals, the teachers, and they can tell your parents what to do.”
Like Navalesi, one caring adult saved Barker from alienation. In his case, it was his father, a Shepherd who taught a video class.
“Because of my dad, I definitely felt very privileged. I got to kind of escape,” he said. “Everybody would go spend lunch with [the younger teacher], and I would just go into my dad’s room and work on video stuff.”
After her freshman year of college at the University of Iowa, Navalesi attended a LWF young adult leadership conference in Colorado, where she faced pressure from Gary Hargrave to get a job as a church secretary.
“He said, I quote, ‘because you have a servant’s heart, you could just drop out of college.’”
Such counsel was not uncommon. “Shiloh University was the fulfillment of the Word in that sense,” Barker explained. LWF’s unaccredited college programs, like its leaders, fed aspiring professionals back into the Kingdom Businesses that supported the church. “Some people that wanted to have medical degrees, for example, were turned to alternative medicine.”
“A lot of promising young people, definitely young men, got turned away from school and into the construction stuff to keep ‘building for the Kingdom.’”
“I knew of one guy,” Navalesi added, “that was a year out from finishing his master’s degree, and they told him to quit and just work for the church building. And he did.”
“If it came from Gary and Marilyn, you were prone to just agree with whatever they said.”
Still, after years of agreeing, Navalesi ignored Gary’s secretary pitch, instead returning to UI and graduating with the Class of 2001. “I was like, I’m not fucking dropping out of college.”
Navalesi was 12 when the Young Adult School of Prophets — YASP, later renamed the Young Adult Summer Program — debuted at the end of the ’80s. Campers paid fees to attend, on top of any travel expenses.
“We were young and dumb enough to think it was cool to spend our summers paying to do manual labor,” she said.
“There were four Ws: The Word, work, worship and ‘wec-we-ation.’ And let me tell you, there wasn’t much wec-we-ation. It was just mostly working … It was all in the name of learning discipline and submission and breaking barriers.”
Apart from grounds duties, campers were put on construction projects — loading wheelbarrows with gravel and cement, or operating heavy machinery — farm work, kitchen crew and, if they’re lucky, the yearbook staff. They watched videos on how to make their beds and fold their clothes like Army recruits. Navalesi remembers being scolded for giggling with a friend during nap time. As punishment, the pair were made to clean the walk-in refrigerator with toothbrushes.
Another common task: weeding around a pond of human sewage on the property. “Obviously, like, no one needs a shit lagoon to look nice. It was just to labor for the sake of labor,” she said.
Bootcampers got it the worst.
“Go pull weeds, go move rocks, dig a hole and throw a rock in and bury it, you know, dumb shit,” Walker said. “They just wanted to let you know who was in charge. And if you buck that system, it was game over.”
Walker tested this one mealtime. “I hated peas. I didn’t want to eat those damn peas. So I was taken out behind the maintenance building and I was made to do push-ups over my plate of peas until I ate them.”
The Shepherds also separated Walker and his best friend from back home, his only confidant. He believes his parents were just happy to have him gone, and they trusted the Hargraves — the same Hargraves who would watch the campers running hills from the window of their cushy Shiloh apartment.
“I just bowed down and broke. They basically neutered me,” Walker said of the boot camp.
“And the crazy part is, after all of this, I asked to stay in Shiloh.”
Dreading returning to his rough high school back in Hawaii, Walker stuck around Iowa for the year. Whether it was inertia or conditioning, he had set his mind on becoming a Shepherd. He got a job on a construction crew, building facilities for the LWF around the country. The pay was good at $800 a month, even though room and board at Shiloh wasn’t included.
“I felt really special being a part of the crew … they made you feel like we were the ones that were going to usher in the Kingdom.”
The hours frequently resembled YASP boot camp or worse, with no such thing as overtime. On one 48-hour shift working a rush job in L.A., Walker fell asleep at a jackhammer. He hung up his hat and went home, only to be awakened by an angry phone call informing him his shift wasn’t done. He found the will to refuse. “I was just like, I’m done being slave driven.”
Walker didn’t lose his job, but he was falling out of favor. He was called to a meeting one day, and found himself in a room with LWF’s top brass, including Gary and Marilyn Hargrave, the latter regarded as “the voice of God.”
At a recent get-together, Walker and a girl his age had had consensual sex. She confessed the encounter to the Shepherds.
“Sex was not OK in the church if you weren’t married,” Walker said. “… They’re like, alright, well, you’re done. We gotta set you out. We’re gonna make an announcement in the church, nobody’s allowed to talk to you.”
Walker was devastated and angry. He turned to drugs and alcohol to cope. “I started robbing, stealing, breaking into cars, doing shitty-ass things. I was homeless for a little while, and went to the deepest, darkest places I never thought I would go.”
After a stint in jail, a friend picked him up and helped him enter a six-month rehab and work program through the Salvation Army. Bit by bit, he built his life back.
In 2018, the same year LWF dissolved in controversy, Walker’s house in Paradise, California was destroyed in a wildfire. Any lingering grief over being ousted by the church seemed to burn away, too. Walker felt reborn and clear-eyed.
“To be trapped in [a cult] even though you’ve been rejected by it is the worst kind of hell I can think of,” he said.
Abrahamson-Caples’ open letter accomplished what she intended.
“I want the other girls and women and men and children who have also been abused to know that they are not alone,” she wrote. “I am not being brave, I just believe that the truth will set me free and hopefully provide a way, a safe way, for others to come forth with their truth and be set free.”
Navalesi and Barker hope their podcast interrogating the cult’s history and highlighting survivors’ stories can do the same. Institutions that operate like LWF are more empowered than ever as the Trump administration dismantles the Department of Education, and states like Iowa relax child labor laws while passing “school choice” legislation diverting public funds to private religious schools.
“One of the best ways that we have in our communities to pick out trouble, whether it’s sexual abuse, physical abuse, stress, dietary issues, all of this stuff for kids, is public school,” Barker explained. “[Too many] kids are now locked into an environment like we were in the Living Word, where Sunday is the same people as Monday through Friday.”
“The more insular they can make it,” Navalesi added, “the more they’re able to control you and control even your beliefs, because if you’re not exposed, you’re not educated.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s May 2025 issue.
