For a pair of prominent anti-war activists, John Lennon and Yoko Ono had many battles to fight in 1971. Upon their move to America, they faced the ire of bitter […]
Living Word Fellowship
Posted inCommunity/News
At a cult compound in rural Iowa, death prayers and doomsday prep gave way to ‘natural’ health grifts and costly tests of faith
On Dec. 12, 1972, cult leader John Robert Stevens made a big announcement: he was a time traveler. “I had a real meeting with the Lord,” Stevens told his followers […]
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‘They said they’re going to break our spirits’: Summer campers toiled in the Iowa heat, endured abuse from church leaders at Shiloh
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.”
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Shiloh’s popular fireworks show played cover for an abusive cult: ‘We were conditioned for so long to be obedient and submissive’
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, […]
