Ex-Testimonies Part V - Testimony from ex-member in Australia

The following testimony was made in 2006 and was part of an ABC radio program with Rachel Kohn. No matter where they are in the world, the affect they have on an individual's life is very consistent.
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Rachael Kohn: What was the group that you decided to join?

Guest: The group’s known as the Twelve Tribes, or the Community, they’re also known as. They’re out near Picton, but they’re quite common around several festivals in Sydney going under the name of The Common Ground Café.

Rachael Kohn: Is it an international group?

Guest: Yes, it’s all around the world. It’s currently located in about eight different countries.

Rachael Kohn: And is it a Christian group?

Guest: They kind of claim that they are Christians, but when you really get into their doctrine, they certainly are not Christians. In fact they believe that Christianity is led by Satan and that anyone who truly believes in Jesus or Yashua, as they call him, will leave Christianity and join the Twelve Tribes.

Rachael Kohn: Now the Twelve Tribes obviously refers to the 12 Tribes of Israel, so do they claim to be the original descendants of the 12 Tribes?

Guest: They don’t claim to be the original descendants but they do claim that they are God’s chosen people on earth, brought here to bring about the 12 Tribes, which is what God originally intended with the Jews.

Rachael Kohn: You were Christian, an active Christian. What attracted you to this group?

Guest: What attracted me to this group was the fact that they didn’t appear to be hypocrites. They claimed that they loved one another and they showed this love by their life and the way they looked after and cared for each other, and I was really taken back by the amount of commitment that these people seemed to live their life by.

Rachael Kohn: You seem to be implying that you were disenchanted with Christianity or the church that you’d been going to.

Guest: Yes, the church I was going to, they said all the right things, but I felt there was very little outside of the church that made people who’d claimed to be Christian, any different to anyone else in the world. They were just like everyone else in society, they just put a label of ‘We’re forgiven because Jesus died for our sins’ on top of their life.

Rachael Kohn: So what were the features of the group that you joined, the Twelve Tribes, that made you think this is the real thing?

Guest: The features that really drew me was the fact that they truly seemed to live the life they proclaimed. They truly seemed to love one another, they weren’t hypocrites in what I saw before I joined.

Rachael Kohn: Did they share things communally? Live together, commune style?

Guest: Everything was shared in common, everybody worked for the community, nobody had anything that they called their own. No-one got paid.

When we went out and did jobs for the outside, it went into a communal fund, and unless you were part of the people who distributed the money, you never had money unless it was given to you. But everything was provided for you, your food, your clothing, the children’s education, which was done at the farm out at Picton, cars, everything, medical expenses.

So although you didn’t have money, you were provided for.

Rachael Kohn: You were there for what? Over two years? What prompted you to leave it?

Guest: What prompted me to leave in the end was the hypocrisy that I saw in Christianity was even more so in the Twelve Tribes, because although they would point at Christianity and say, ‘Look at them, they are not loving one another’, what I found within the community, once you really learnt what they were doing is there wasn’t a whole lot of love there, there was a whole lot of fear and there were the people with the haves and the have-nots. And to quote Animal Farm, ‘We are all equal, but some are ore equal than others’, and that’s exactly what I saw in the Twelve Tribes.

The leaders cushioned their nest, so to speak, and although they weren’t rid in money or material goods, they had all the nice jobs. They had access to the cars, they could go visit their families, they got to go on business trips, whereas the less fortunate members of the group, they were the ones who just went out there and worked really, really hard, day after day.

Rachael Kohn: Were you discouraged from having contact with your family? You parents, for example?

Guest: I was certainly controlled with my contact, and I ended up being sent over to America to try and get away from my family’s influence over me.

Rachael Kohn: So you felt they were controlling your life?

Guest: The Twelve Tribes were certainly controlling my life, in every aspect. I mean they were controlling my physical existence, they were controlling what I did day to day, they were controlling me financially, and in the end they were also controlling my wife and getting information out of her to help control me even more.

Rachael Kohn: But they didn’t seem to control your mind, altogether, you were still able to discern things like hypocrisy and that kind of thing, that prompted you to leave.

Guest: Yes, I think I was fortunate in that I joined the Twelve Tribes for all the right reasons, because I wanted to be a committed Christian, and the longer I was there, the more hypocrisy I could see, and being a fairly strong character, I wasn’t afraid of being cut off from the group. And I also knew that I had the love of my family outside the group, no matter what happened. I always had somewhere to go, I wasn’t going to be left on the streets.

Rachael Kohn: Did your parents actually help you when you were starting to have doubts? Were they an important factor for you coming out?

Guest: The most important factor for me coming out with my parents, was firstly they went to a lot of trouble to understand cults, so when I did come out, they understood what I’d been through. They were working hard to try and get me out, but I managed to do that myself.

But the biggest thing was, I knew that I had unconditional love from them. Now the Twelve Tribes claim that they’re the only ones who truly know how to love, but when I asked my parents for help, they were there. When I asked my brother for help, he came over and got me, and I knew I had that, I always had that to stand on.

So the Twelve Tribes couldn’t scare me like that and make me capitulate to what they wanted me to do, because I knew that at the end of the day, I had my family support on the outside.

Rachael Kohn: What did they say would be the consequences for you if you left the group?

Guest: They didn’t tell me anything directly, because the leaders weren’t that good at making any arguments with me, because I’d call them on their bluffs. But there were plenty of stories going round about people who left who turned gay.

There was a couple of boys who left who grew up in the cult, they had a car accident and their mother was actually told that that was God’s mercy on the boys to kill them before they got into more sin. So it certainly wasn’t encouraged for people to leave, and if you did leave, firstly you were going to Hell and secondly that you’d probably go there a lot quicker than everyone else. That God would punish you for leaving.

Rachael Kohn: You had a wife and children. What happened to them?

Guest: My 3-1/2 year old son came with me when we got kicked out, and that was over in Winnipeg.

Rachael Kohn: In Canada?

Guest: In Canada, Winnipeg in Canada. So we were a fair way from home, and the group who told me they would always look after me and care for me, kicked me out on the street with $100, which doesn’t get you too far when you’re trying to get back to Australia.

So my wife and my other two children came back to Australia about two weeks after I got back here. I arranged to meet my wife to discuss why I’d left and to encourage her to leave with me because my family unit was very, very important to me, and she dropped the kids off to me, listened to me for half an hour, didn’t say a word, and then left. And that was almost the last time we ever saw her.

Rachael Kohn: How do you explain her staying there so long, giving up her husband and her three children?

Guest: I believe that she’s been coerced into believing that if she leaves, then her children will go to Hell, and that if she truly loves her children, the only hope they have is if she stays, and God will reward her obedience and bring her children back to her. But if she leaves, then she’s condemning her children to Hell. So she’s scared to leave for her children’s sake.

Rachael Kohn: Did she ever communicate that to you, or is that your surmise?

Guest: That’s my surmise, based on things that I heard in the community. But I’ve tried to speak to her many times, but she couldn’t open up to me. She was scared to talk to me, but I think she was scared to listen too much to me because I had so many good arguments as to why she shouldn’t be there, that it may cause her to stumble and leave as well. So she felt it was better to cut off all contact rather than continue to contact me, in case she did end up leaving.

Rachael Kohn: Well you had the help of your parents and their concern. Did she have help from hers?

Guest: Unfortunately her parents didn’t go to the extent that my parents went to educate themselves about the group that we were in, and how cults actually work. So when we got out, they were quite happy that I’d left with the children, but saying that she’s an adult, she’s smart enough to think for herself, she seems very happy there, and as such, she’s still there four years later.

Rachael Kohn: What do you think made you vulnerable to a group that exercised such control over your life?

Guest: I think what made me vulnerable was wanting to be a better Christian and not be a hypocrite, but I also had a lot of pressure from my wife, knowing that if I didn’t join, she was going to leave me, and I wanted more than anything to keep our family together. So I was willing at that stage to give anything a go.

But having said that, I believe that everyone at some stage in their life is vulnerable to these sorts of groups, and they’re not necessarily religious groups, they can be self-help or business groups, or meditation groups or whatever. It’s we at one stage, we’re all vulnerable to the right message.

Rachael Kohn: You’ve used the word ‘cult’ a few times. What do you think is the distinguishing factor that makes you use that term with respect to the 12 Tribes?

Guest: I use that term for the Twelve Tribes because they truly do try to control your emotions, they try to control your spirituality, they control you financially, they control you physically, and they certainly manipulate you into staying through fear and coercion, and so I’m quite comfortable calling the Twelve Tribes a cult. Also if you meet these people, they are really nice, they are really lovely and genuine because they do truly believe in what they are saying to you.

So I know many people who are listening to this will say, ‘I’ve met the Twelve Tribes at their Common Ground Café at the Woodford Folk Festival, and they’re not like that at all.’ But until you live with them and leave and be able to analyse your experience, you’re not in a position to be able to say ‘These are just nice happy people’. It’s taken me many years to be able to determine what this group was really about.

Rachael Kohn: Isn’t it just the case that some people really like a tightly organised style of life, and others jack up against it?

Guest: No, it’s not that simple. For example, take my ex-wife. Before she joined the group, she would do anything for her children. Now she’s in the group, she hasn’t seen them for over three years, because they have changed her mind into thinking that it is best that she doesn’t see her children that she has nothing to do with them.

We had a fairly good marriage I believe before we joined, but she was willing to dob on me. These groups will change your mind in the way you think, and they will change your value system, and they will exploit you for everything they can, and then when you’ve got nothing left to give, they’ll spit you out on the streets, and say it’s your fault.

Rachael Kohn: And do you reckon that’s what happened to you?

Guest: Fortunately I do. I’ve done a lot of reading and study and been quite introspective, for a number of years. I’m still going through things of course, but I’m certainly well on my way to understanding my experience and being able to understand how these groups operate, and understand why other people get caught up in the same trap.

Rachael Kohn: Has CIFS, the Cult Information and Family Support group, been of help to you?

Guest: They were a great help to my family as a starting point, as to what’s going on, why did my son just give up his business and leave and join this group without telling us much. And it gave them a starting point to get the information they needed to understand what I was going through so they knew what they needed to do to help me.

Rachael Kohn: Do you have a sense now that you want to help others?

Guest: Yes, I do have that sense, and if anyone needs any help or even someone to talk to, I’m always open to doing that.

Rachael Kohn: It’s been great talking to you.

Guest: Thank you.

Rachael Kohn: The name of my guest has been suppressed to ensure the anonymity of his children