As an aside in relation to my series on the dominionist parallel economy (and in an effort to show how all of this ties together), I've been doing occasional discussions on bits of the dominionist culture which supports--and is supported by--the parallel economy itself. (I realise that it's hard for folks to understand WHY the "parallel economy" is such a Bad Thing without context.)
This is going to be one of those "context pieces". Specifically, about a missing link that I've neglected to do a write-up about.
I've written about how "cell churches" have been used to hijack--or more properly, "steeplejack"--mainstream Christian churches and how they have been used to hijack the Republican Party from within, but I've not written a ton on their origins--namely, as a tool in Assemblies of God megachurches to make sure their members are toeing the dominionist line--and their use in other groups (particularly the ICC and Maranatha) as well as in the Assemblies as a tool of abuse. Today, we start that history.
Very few people realise that a tool commonly used for steeplejacking was originally a method of maintaining control over church groups at home.
Now, the Assemblies have been doing steeplejacking since their very origins--they've been targeting Baptists since at least the early 1910s for steeplejacking (which has borne particularly bloody fruit in a "Slavic Pentecostal" movement that is linked to the vicious hate-murder of a Fijian national who happened to be gay).
Cell churches do have a different origin, though, and--whilst effective for steeplejacking to a frightening degree--were (surprisingly) not originally designed for it.
To go back to the origins of cell-churches as a coercive practice in neopente churches, we have to go back to the originator of multiple abusive tactics in the Assemblies--namely, Paul Yonggi Cho, otherwise known as "The Most Influential Dominionist You've Never Heard Of".
Cho, Juan Ortiz, and the origins of cell-churches within the Assemblies
Now, I've written a lot about Cho before. I'm not sure it is possible to underestimate his role in shaping modern dominionism in the Assemblies--especially as he essentially functioned as the worldwide head of the entire denomination for most of the nineties.
Along with his other abusive tactics (cribbed from a veritable "who's who" of coercive religious groups operating or originating in South Korea, including Soka Gakkai and the Moonies), he also in large part originated the very concept of the megachurch.
And to say the concept exploded is probably an underestimate in and of itself--Cho's church, Yoido Full Gospel Church, is in fact the largest megachurch in the world: over 800,000 members at last count, still growing, and effectively operating as the Assemblies of God in South Korea.
For the record, the size of this Assemblies megachurch is in fact much larger than many denominations in and of themselves. His church probably has (if estimates of the actual size of the Assemblies of God membership worldwide are accurate and not inflated) something like one-fortieth of the world population of Assemblies members--and as the Assemblies does have a habit of inflating its numbers in some countries (counting everyone who's attended a revival meeting and filled out an interest card, among other things) it could be an even higher percentage.
It's probably not an exaggeration to describe Cho as the modern father of the Assemblies as we know it now.
Much of the operation of Yoido Full Gospel is via a plethora of satellite congregations spread throughout much of the country, but much of the secret of the original growth--and the secret of how over 800,000 members could be corralled into a singular theology and not split into a plethora of independent churches--is the concept of cells.
Now, I had had suspicions that the cell-church concept was in fact originated by Cho (both from documentation I had found and the fact that Cho's use of cell-churches was the earliest record I could find of the concept). The book The Discipling Dilemma (which is a very damning look at the concept, especially among the Boston Church of Christ (now International Church of Christ)) details in chapter 8 that the "charismatic movement" (more accurately, the neopentecostal movement) originated the concept in the 1950s; a history of "shepherding" movements at a conservative Christian site highly critical of the entire dominionist movement details a bit more:
(detailing Jews for Jesus' adoption of cell churches)
What Al Dager's World Christian Movement [WCM] series perhaps failed to say clearly, was that besides the inroads of the Perspectives courses accepted globally and the myriad of "Christian" organizations all committed to the same purpose, the local churches are all involved in the WCM through the Lighthouse Movement and the Cell Church Movement.
Jews for Jesus involvement with the WCM goes back clearly to their speaking engagement and participation at GCOWE '95 which was sponsored by Christo/pagan Paul (David) Yonggi Cho at his megachurch in Seoul, South Korea, and perhaps before. Staff from Fullers School of World Missions went to Korea as well to find out about the cell church movement from Cho. "The purpose was to learn how to plant churches in the same fashion..."13.
Keeping in mind the role of John Wimber, Fuller Theological Seminary and all the para-church organizations involved in the ecumenical movement, a former assistant to Wimber states how the strategies evolved.
"...during the "think tank" years at Fuller Seminary, when John Wimber, David Yonggi Cho, C. Peter Wagner, Bill Bright [CNP], Jay Grimstead, Donald McGavran, Ralph Winter, Billy Graham, David DuPlessis, Robert Grant (CNP), Don Richardson, etc., etc.. were all there.. and the "strategies" and "methodologies" of "taking the world for Jesus" were being developed (i.e. Lausanne, GCOWE, AD2000 and Beyond Movement strategies, the contextualized gospel, the global "harvest" and "revival" ect).... John traveled extensively for Fuller as a "church growth expert (i.e. cell group theory ala Cho) and taught seminars worldwide to hundreds of thousands of pastors "equipping" them for ministry.. by the impartation of the "gifts" and "ministries" of the Holy Spirit.. John promoted and taught and trained up hundreds of thousands of workers globally to take their places in the new found "apostolic network"... each submitted under a "mentor" or person above them in a hierarchal authority structure - also known as "shepherding" doctrine.. he and Cho also introduced these ideas to the church in China.. those attending Vineyard churches these past twenty years have all been "equipped" to "use their gifts" in the manner prescribed by their doctrine, and under their authority..." 14
"...John could secretly know that his position in the hierarchy (as an apostle) was completely assured. He went on from retiring from the Association of the Vineyard Churches to working directly with Schuller, Cho, Hayford et al in perfecting their cell model through the post-denominational church movement and "Touch Ministries", the "Antioch Church Network" and much much more..." 15
(Footnotes:
- Media Spotlight, p. 10, The World Christian Movement,Albert James Dager; Volume 22-Number 1, April, 1999
14), 15) The Vineyard Without Wimber; Cephas Ministries; Interview with "Nef"; http://newsletters.cephasministry.co...
The big question, of course, was how the concept was transmitted via Cho to the Fort Lauderdale Five (who are probably most known for the promotion of cell churches in the US--the concept is often (incorrectly) attributed to them).
In researching on the history of dominionism, I found some very tantalising hints.
The first was a rather informal Angelfire page which claimed to use Sara Diamond's "Spiritual Warfare" as a primary reference:
In 1965, in South Korea, Paul Yonggi Cho started a sysytem called Shepherding.He was inspired by the organizational methods of Rev.Moon.He wrote the book Successful Home Cell Groups in 1981, based on his ideas of shepherding.
1970-Argentina,An Assembly of God pastor,Rev. Juan Carlos Ortiz, established a new church, Body of Christ. It had a highly structured authority from small cells led by a "shepherd", who was in turn led by another shepherd and so on in a pyramid form of command.It was from reading about what Cho was doing.
1972- Rev. Bob Mumford visited Ortiz's church and was impressed. He brought Shepherding to America.He was a Bible teacher in Ft. Lauderdale,Florida.. Mumford,with four other associates,moved to Mobile, Alabama,directing the Christian Growth Ministries.They saw in the Charimatic Movement too much chaos. Shepherding would bring discipline.
Most leaders of the Shepherding Movement required their members to disclose intimate details of their lives and submit to the Shepherd(no female was allowed to be a Shepherd).The shepherd directed all facets of their followers' lives.
Pat Robertson denounced the Shepherding Movement, but he invited Don Basham, one of the Shepherd leaders, to the 700 Club in 1987.
They have a magazine called New Wine. Cult Awareness Network declared they are a cult.
Mumford promoted dominion theology or Reconstrutionism, which was trying to get theocracy in America.Rev. Peacocke was one of Mumford's disciples and his Coalition on Revival (COR) promoted Reconstructionism.
(Of note, the "Cult Awareness Network" noted is the pre-steeplejack version; in the late 90's Cult Awareness Network was the subject of a hostile takeover by the Church of Scientology in an effort to shut down their landmark research into abuses in that group.)
Fortunately, there are searchable pages of Sara Diamond's "Spiritual Warfare" online, and--sure enough--there is a definite connection:
There are conflicting stories as to the origins of the "shepherding" teachings. Throughout the history of Christianity, various subcultures have relied on New Testament passages that justify an authoritarian social structure. But within the United States, the earliest antecedent to contemporary shepherding seems to be the "Latter Rain" pentecostal movement of the 1940s and 1950s.
. . .
It is unclear if the Fort Lauderdale Five derived the "shepherding" teachings solely through their own collaboration or via the influence of pentecostals in other countries. Many of the folkloric accounts of the shepherding stories pay homage to Argentinian Assemblies of God pastor Juan Carlos Ortiz. His book, A Call To Discipleship, is considered a manual for shepherding pastors. He emphasizes the use of "cell groups" and a radical form of "spiritual imitation" in which new converts learn the Christian tenets and lifestyle through direct obedience to a shepherd. In a 1986 letter to a fellow Christian, Ortiz explained the shepherding relations:
"We need to be related to some leaders to whom we are accountable to as fathers in the Lord. To those we are teaching ast to children in the Lord. And to those who are leaders like us, our peers, as brothers in the Lord...
Do not add new members to the primitive small group. Jesus never added one to the group of twelve. Every time you add a new person to the group you have to start with the ABC again, and stop growing. Whoever wins a new person should start a new group in his house and keep on adding till a certain number. Then the members of teh new groups have to open their houses and start new groups with the new people, etc. etc."
Ortiz implemented his cell group plan in Argentina during the turbulent 1970s and created a church with many thousands of members. In the 1980s, he resided in the United States for several years before returning to Argentina where he claims to have established Bible study cell groups within the Raul Alfonsin administration.
About the same time that the Fort Lauderdale Christians and Juan Carlos Ortiz were practicing shepherding, South Korean pastor Paul Yonggi Cho was also using the cell group plan to win converts. His flock grew from 600 in 1965 to a claimed 500,000 by 1986. Cho says his secret lies in training cell group leaders to lead weekly prayer and counselling sessions for no more than fifteen families in urban residential areas. Members deemed "mature" split from their mother cells, recruit new members and form new cells. Cho is an extremely popular speaker at charismatic conferences in the United States and on religious broadcasting networks.
(Sara Diamond's book also goes on to detail how Cho rather explicitly took advantage of the Assemblies promoting itself as an anticommunist group to ingratiate itself into South Korean society under the military regime of Chun Doo-Hwan.)
It is especially noteworthy that Juan Carlos Ortiz explicitly attempted targeting of the Argentine government (in similar fashion to targeting of US and Guatemalan leaders); it's also noteworthy that the origins may go back beyond Cho to the very origins of dominionism itself according to Diamond. (Whilst the Assemblies "officially" disavowed Latter Rain stuff in 1948 after considerable bad press, it has quite unofficially tolerated it for decades, and in fact it has been argued that "Joel's Army" theology is in essence a modern manifesation of Latter Rain teachings.)
Other sources within the apologetics community support the geneaology of shepherding and "Cell churches" being Latter Rain -> Cho -> Ortiz -> Fort Lauderdale Five -> neopente dominionists in general. Sarah Leslie of Christian Conscience has noted this line of transmission in her own history:
The earliest book we could locate on the modern home church movement is vintage mid-50s, entitled Creating Christian Cells. This book is a series of articles about the positive spiritual successes of the new-style church that was being developed, mostly in conjunction with the Marble Collegiate Church in New York (Norman Vincent Peale's church). This book provides the earliest working definition of cell church, one which is nearly identical with definitions provided by cell church leaders decades later:
"The Christian Church began AS A SINGLE, SMALL GROUP FELLOWSHIP.
As it grew and divided, many such groups ("churches" or "parishes") were formed. The process resembled MITOSIS, or cell-division, in the biological world; hence, the term "cell." (forward) AA [Creating Christian Cells]
The next time we find a reference to the concept is in a statement by Juan Carlos Ortiz, who presented his views on the new church structure to a conference of pastors meeting at Montreat, North Carolina, home of Billy Graham, in the early 70s. His message, "the basic principles for restoring the Kingdom of God here on earth through the unity of the body"3, was published and widely circulated. Ortiz began his experiment with the formation of cell churches in Argentina in the 1950s and his model has been widely replicated across the globe:
"`Cell' is a transitory name we used for a meeting of five or more persons for certain purposes. I say it is a transitory name because we don't see the word "cell" in the Bible. The proper name should be 'church in the home.' But the name 'church in the home' brings to mind the type of church we used to have. So we use the word 'cell' to show it is not a common meeting where they go to a home, open the Bible, read and discuss it, sing a chorus, then pray and go home. That's no advantage that's the same as we always did. Therefore we called our new meetings 'cells' because they were a completely different concept" (p. 103) [Call to Discipleship, 1975]
Ortiz placed the emphasis on evangelism (numbers), not discipleship:
"The early church knew nothing about Sunday schools. They knew the best way for believers to grow and multiply is not through Bible lectures, but through living cells. This means small groups of four or five persons who meet in homes under a leader so their lives may be shaped so they may mobilize and multiply themselves in other cells." (p. 29, Call)
The most famous leader of the cell church movement is Dr. Paul (David) Yonggi Cho who wrote a book Successful Home Cell Groups, published in 1981. He began a cell group structure in his church in the 1960s in Seoul, Korea. His first attempt to implement this structure in his church was turned down by his deacons. He then turned to his future mother-in-law and together they developed a plan to use women as leaders of the small groups, a plan which proved to be very successful in multiplying numbers of converts. Cho explained, "Another thing I learned about the cell-group churches in China is that 99 percent of the leaders are women. They took the leadership when the men were afraid to expose themselves as Christians." (p. 85)FF [Successful]
Cho's emphasis was also placed on evangelism (multiplying the numbers of new converts and dividing the cells when they reach a certain size) rather than discipleship:
"Our church has become a living organism. The home cell groups are living cells, and they function much like the cells in the human body. In a living organism, the cells grow and divide. Where once there was one cell, there become two. Then there are four, then eight, then sixteen, and so forth.
Cells are not simply added to the body; they are multiplied by geometric progression." (p. 65)CC [Successful]
"There is only one way that the home cell group system will be successful in a church, if that system is to be used as a tool of evangelism."(p. 107, Successful)
In the 1970s, the cell church concept began to gain momentum in America. It was borrowed and adapted by numerous denominations.
In the same article, Sara Diamond is noted as attributing much of the popularity to Campus Crusade and to Billy Graham (including an explicit description of Campus Crusade members literally hexing non-dominionist in the name of Christ to convert or suffer):
Yet another theory on the origin of cell churches was put forth by Sara Diamond, who wrote a book critical of the religious right. She attributes the idea to Henrietta Mears and her disciple, Bill Bright, who founded Campus Crusade:
"Under the influence of Sunday school teacher Henrietta Mears who in 1949 had helped launch Billy Graham's career by sending 5,000 people from her Hollywood Presbyterian Church to Graham's Los Angeles Crusade -- [Bill] Bright developed the concept of "spiritual multiplication" using "Christian cells." The idea was based on the symbol of a triangle: two Christian students write their names on two sides of a triangle and on the third side they write the name of an unsaved friend for whom they pray and witness.
Once the new person joins the triangle, the "cell" splits into two more triangles in search of a third side. It was an organizational strategy intended to mimic (and defeat) Bright's conception of how communists organize." (p. 51, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Religious Right)
(This still pretty damningly points a finger at the origin of the abusive cell-church within the Assemblies; Campus Crusade is very tightly connected with the Assemblies and the two cross-promote each other.)
Another article (ironically, from one of the very few groups that is premillenial-dispensationalist but also which has strong theological objections to dominionism) also recounts this line of descent:
The co-fathers of the modern "cell church" movement are Juan Carlos Ortiz and David Yonggi Cho, from Argentina and Korea respectively. The movement has been popularized in the U.S. by Ralph Neighbors, Carl George and others. As we shall see later, it is closely linked to the apostles and prophets movement. We will discuss each and then take a close look at the "cell church" structure.
Roots in the Shepherding and Discipleship and Positive Thinking
Juan Carlos Ortiz began Cell Churches in Buenos Aires back in the 60’s and 70’s. He is credited with sparking the shepherding/discipleship movement in the U.S. by introducing his discipleship teachings to the Fort Lauderdale "Five". He declares that everyone needs to be under someone’s authority. His first law of discipleship is, "There is no formation without submission" and his second is like unto it, ""There is no submission without submission." (from Disciple by Juan Carlos Ortiz, pp. 111, 113) He clarifies this by saying, "Only when I am in line can authority pass through me to others...If you want the right to control others, you must be under the control of others yourself." (ibid., p. 113, 114) He points to a structure where the commands for the body flow "from the top through the middle to the bottom." (Ibid., p 125)
. . .
Another foundational doctrine of Juan Carlos Ortiz is the position of apostles in the church today. "The New Testament speaks often not of ‘Jesus doctrine’ but of the ‘apostles doctrine’. They were infallible."
. . .
He ends with the concept of "one church, one city" – that all the pastors of the city are all co-pastors of one church. (ibid. pp. 128,129). This is an attempt to bring all Christians in a city under one group of "super elders" consisting of self-appointed apostles over the pastors and laity of a city. The basis for the cell church movement is an unbiblical approach to accountability where everyone is under or over someone else. We will discuss this in depth in the next chapter. So where is Juan Carlos Ortiz today? He is currently the Hispanic pastor at the Crystal Cathedral working hand in hand with Robert Schuller. For those who think he is anything but an apostate, this is just for starters, "Schuller's false teaching is an extremely serious matter in light of his wide influence. His is the most popular religion television broadcast in America. His books sell by the millions. He appears with presidents. His "self-esteem Christianity" has been adopted by multitudes. These believe they are Christians and attend churches; but in reality, they worship a false christ and follow a false gospel. Robert Schuller and his mentor, the late Norman Vincent Peale, are two of the key culprits in promoting this error."
(And this is where the section on dominionist television networks starts getting important. We've already had two big-name televangelists--Billy Graham and Robert Schuller--linked to the promotion of "cell churches"; Schuller in particular linked to one of the major promoters of cell-churches in the Assemblies in particular. There's also the matter of historically heavy involvement with the Assemblies and televangelists in general.)
The article continues:
The most successful cell church by far is reputedly the largest church in the world in Seoul, South Korea which is pushing one million members. David Yonggi Cho is also closely connected with Schuller’s positive thinking movement, along with miraculous healings, prophecy, visualization, prosperity theology, and other charismatic practices. "Cho's teaching is a system of mind over matter (or rather, imagination over matter). He frankly admits that it is a Christianized version of precisely the same methods practiced by Buddhists, exponents of yoga, and the followers of other pagan, mystical, and occult systems...Of positive speaking (confession), Cho declares: "You can create the presence of Jesus with your mouth ... He is bound by your lips and by your words ..." As for visualization, the most powerful occult technique, Cho writes, "Through visualization and dreaming, you can incubate your future and hatch the results."" (Please see http://www.rapidnet.com/... for more details on his ministry.) Cho teaches that the keys to success is in positive speaking, visualization and speaking to give birth to the physical reality. This is not Christianity. This is witchcraft!
Cho states that, "Our church has become a living organism. The home cell groups are living cells, and they function much like the cells in the human body. In a living organism, the cells grow and divide. Where once there was one cell, there become two. Then there are four, then eight, then sixteen, and so forth. Cells are not simply added to the body; they are multiplied by geometric progression." (Successful Home Cell Groups by David Cho, p. 65). Cho’s church is not a network of "house churches" but a single church divided into cells with a hierarchical leadership and mandatory weekly services. It almost fits more into the "Meta Church" model of Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church.
Tomorrow, we present info on how cell churches are set up, their modern use...and how cell churches may be the Mother Of All Coercive Tactics.