ow does an abusive church or organization recover its
spiritual integrity? The only answer I can give is to tell
how one such group did so. That group was the
organization of which I was a member for five and a half years,
Great Commission Churches (GCC). If and when other cults or
cult-like groups seek to reform themselves, they may find lessons
in the journey of GCC.
So how did GCC do it? Like most groups that end up either as
destructive cults or abusive churches, GCC did not begin that
way. From its origins in the late 1960s, GCC provided a caring
environment for many young Christians to begin a spiritual life
and to grow in that life. This church had a lot of the features that
one expects to characterize a church. Its members were a warm,
friendly bunch of people (mostly in their twenties, but also a few
older couples and their families). It was not bound by tradition
but sought to emphasize knowing and serving God according to
the teaching of the Bible. There was no emphasis on money—in
fact, there were no collections taken at all in those days. And
there had so far not been any drive to erect or purchase a build-
ing to serve as a meeting place (most meetings were held in
homes or on the campus of the University of
Arizona). In addition, church members often sought to help the
needy. In other words, the emphases seemed to be in the right
place.
However, things changed. Even in the early years, some of the
seeds of later abuses showed themselves to those with the
courage to look. Initially, GCC welcomed spiritual help from men
associated with the so-called “Open” or “Christian” Brethren (from
which many early GCC leaders had come) although, after a few
years, GCC founder and chief elder Jim McCotter
counseled local elders against inviting such “outsiders” to address
their groups. He was afraid these outsiders might teach
something he would have to correct afterward. Thus, GCC
gradually became more insular and exclusive, believing that it
was closer than any other church to reflecting the first-century-
church lifestyle and beliefs.
There were other things that made me uncomfortable. At the
time, however, they were things with which I felt I could live.
For example, the church leaders tried to get the members,
including those with growing families, to participate in the
on-campus “witnessing.” I thought this focus was an inversion of
priorities, at least for the latter. But I concluded that it was not
really a major error, and I was willing to participate occasionally
in the campus outreach so I let it slide.
Later, other things began to bother me, and I learned that I was
not the only one. Some examples were doctrinal, although they
did not affect primary beliefs of historic Christianity as they are
contained in the Apostles’ Creed and other early, historic church
statements of faith. The most troubling concerns were behavioral
in nature namely, authoritarianism and inconsistent and
hypocritical ethical standards. For example (based on a list by a
former elder),
• The church tended to regard people more for their utilitarian
value than for their true, essential worth. In other words, it
treated them as deployable agents in accomplishing the goal
of world evangelization more than as human individuals with
their own aptitudes and gifts, which were being wasted in this
recruiting-team environment.
• Uniformity around an evangelistic strategy became the
substitute for true biblical unity based on the sharing of our
common life in Christ. Thus, the focus was wrong. As the
Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it, the “chief end of man”
is “to glorify God, and enjoy Him forever.”
• Authoritarianism developed to maintain that uniformity for
example,
-Domination over members’ personal lives outside biblical
moral directives—e.g., telling them who could or could not
be their roommates, whether or not they could visit their
parents during the Christmas season, whom to marry or not
marry, and many other things.
-The tendency to make the elders’ interpretation of the
Scriptures the last word on the subject, virtually “sanctifying”
the elders’ teaching.
-Cultivation of uncritical submission and identification of
criticism as stemming from a “bad heart,” thus creating a
“non-falsifiable system.”
-A focus on eradicating and preventing “faction” and “slander”
(redefined as any criticism of the group, its leaders, or its
teachings, true or not, and even if it was not intended to be
negatively critical) as crucial sins.
-The cultivation of an "imitation principal [sic]" whereby the
members were encouraged to pattern their thinking and
behavior after their leaders, without critically evaluating
whether or not that thinking or behavior was biblical,
correct, or just.
• The movement had become basically a closed system that
allowed very little, if any, influence from the rest of the
Christian community, let alone the rest of society. Any such
influence tended to be carefully controlled.
• A sense of elitism was cultivated from the self-perception
that GCC was the only group that really followed the New
Testament pattern of church life.
• Loyalty to the movement, and especially to founder Jim McCotter,
who was the ultimate source of any developing changes in the
theology or practice, was highly cultivated as a result.
• Ethics drifted in a pragmatic direction, becoming ethics of
expediency, with a lack of integral consistency this shift led to
the justification of exaggeration, half-truths, and, at times,
outright lies and injustice in the treatment of people. In fact,
this atmosphere is what finally led Paul and Barb Martin and
others to break their ties with the movement.
Failure to go along with the plans, programs, and lifestyles that
national and local GCC leaders promoted often resulted in those
persons who opted out being regarded as less spiritually mature
and disobedient to God’s will. In short, these individuals were
looked on, often, as “dead wood.”Consequently, many concluded
they couldn’t live up to God’s standards and could only look
forward to living as “second-class” citizens in God’s kingdom.
The bottom line in all of this and more was that, in various ways
and to different degrees, people were being hurt.
Another individual who became alarmed at the gradual
deterioration of GCC was one of the elders in Columbus, Ohio,
Bill Taylor. During a meeting of national leaders in 1974, Bill
expressed his displeasure with the cultural ethos that founder
Jim McCotter was introducing into the movement. Bill accused
McCotter of acting like a “king-bishop,” compelling (or trying
to compel) members simply to accept his interpretation of the
Bible and fall in line with it, among other things.
H
An Abusive
Church Movement
Recovers Its
Balance
Back
From
the
Brink
By Lawrence A. Pile
8 ICSA TODAY VOLUME 4 |NUMBER 2 |2013 9
ICSA_volume4Issue2_Final 8/9/13 8:31 PM Page 10

VOLUME 4 |NUMBER 2 |2013 11 10 ICSA TODAY
To make a long story short, 2 years after that meeting, Jim
orchestrated Bill’s excommunication from the Columbus church
(the Solid Rock Fellowship [SRF]) and from the movement at
large for being “factious.” Jim made it look like the decision was
simply the action of the Columbus elders and obscured the fact
that he was actually plaintiff, prosecutor, judge, and jury. The
only role he didn’t play was that of defense attorney—a role no
one played, the verdict and sentence having been decided
beforehand.
Taylor’s excommunication in 1976 was the event that, for many,
showed up the spiritual decay that had been moldering at the
core of GCC. In consequence, many SRF members also left,
including my future wife and me, and one of the other elders,
Fred Colvin (see below), who had been manipulated to act
against Taylor. In addition, Taylor’s excommunication became the
pattern for dealing with many other dissidents over the next
decade and a half. Former leader Jerry MacDonald wrote his
master’s thesis in sociology for the University of Virginia on GCC’s
handling of dissension and other internal troubles. An abridged
edition of this important paper (’Reject the Wicked Man’) was
published in the Cultic Studies Journal, 1988, Vol. 5, No. 1. Much
additional material was written and published, privately and
publicly, over the succeeding years, in the form of personal
letters, testimonies, affidavits, and so on. These publications
included Ronald Enroth’s treatment of GCC in his books Churches
That Abuse (1992) and Recovery From Churches That Abuse
(1994). Finally, the Internet coughed up a Web site,
gcmwarning.com, which made some of this information
available and directed interested parties to a blog where former
members (and some members) shared their stories and debated
the merits and demerits of GCC.
As a result of all the bad press targeting GCC both publicly and
privately, the leaders expended a great deal of time and energy on
damage control. Often, however, those efforts made things worse
rather than better. Oddly, GCC pastors frequently felt the need to
explain to their congregations why certain members had decided
to leave and most often the reasons they gave had little, if
anything, to do with the facts. Such meetings were held in many
different GCC churches throughout the country rather than
healing rifts, those meetings often convinced others to leave.
In May 1985, in response to a major crisis in Kansas City, Missouri,
several former leaders decided to hold a weekend get-together
to help heal spiritual and emotional wounds. Thus, over the long
weekend, some 70 to 80 people gathered to listen to and share
their stories of life in GCC. Most importantly, many shared how
they had recovered, or were recovering from the hurts they had
suffered. A second such conference with a similar agenda and
similar attendance was held later in Norman, Oklahoma.
Many of the former leaders of GCC who either arranged the
conferences or spoke at them kept in touch over the following
years to share news about GCC, discuss possible ways to work for
reform from outside it, and discuss how to help those who left it.
To our surprise, we learned in 1987 that McCotter had resigned
his leadership in 1986 and then withdrawn from GCC entirely in
1987 to concentrate on his business interests.
With McCotter’s departure, it seemed that the remaining
leaders—both national and local—slowly began to feel more
freedom to move toward reform. The men who were left in
charge were basically good, decent men who really wanted to
serve God and people, with sincerity and integrity.
Unfortunately, I believe that McCotter’s charismatic presence had
squelched their natural inclinations and carried them along his
path to power and control. In the years since McCotter’s
departure, GCC leaders have taken significant steps to bring the
movement back to its original purpose and to restore the
leadership to the servant leadership model of Jesus Christ.
Several local and national leaders have sought out former
members and apologized for their roles in hurting those
members. Some of the latter were satisfied with this, although
others thought more needed to be done.
But now the negative side of GCC had been exposed and with
the coming of the Internet, that negative side was visible to
anyone who cared to look. Consequently, the leadership seemed
desperate to sanitize their image and short of trying to remove
all critical information from the Internet and elsewhere (an
impossible task), they set about to turn their critics into
supporters.
Through a somewhat circuitous route, Paul Martin and I were
invited to meet with two national leaders of GCC—Dave
Bovenmyer and Tom Schroeder—in Lancaster, Ohio in February
1991. The 2-hour meeting was a good “ice breaker” and served
mainly as a preliminary face-to-face to arrange a more
substantive meeting between Paul and me and the full GCC
Board of Directors the following July. The latter meeting (3 hours)
broke more ice and helped remind all of us that we were human
beings able to think and reason and act civilly toward one
another. In fact, at one point toward the end of the scheduled
time, one of the board members remarked to the effect that
“One of the reasons this meeting is even taking place is because
[sic] some of us have had concerns of our own.”This revelation
was a surprise to Paul and me.
The same day as this meeting, the GCC board ratified a
“Statement Recognizing Early Errors and Weaknesses….” Paul
and I had been provided draft copies of this statement for our
information, with the request that we suggest improvements.
(Not all of our suggestions were adopted, but the statement did
address many of the issues that concerned us. Further, the
statement did not receive a wide circulation, being given
primarily to those who asked for it.) A fact unknown to us until
much later, GCC had also newly inaugurated a program called
Project Care. This program established guidelines for pastors in
the hope that they would avoid at least the worst abuses. Also as
part of Project Care, GCC pastors and other leaders were urged
to seek reconciliation with the many men and women who had
left the movement because of abuses they had suffered and/or
witnessed.
The next day, another meeting took place. This meeting was
between former leaders Bill Taylor, Rick Harvey, Paul Martin, and
me, and then-current GCC leaders Bovenmyer and Schroeder,
with the addition of John Hopler (now director of GCC) and Mike
Keator (then an elder in Columbus).
In a heavy exchange of letters following these three meetings, a
number of other matters came up and were dealt with in some
detail. (Two issues were the definitions of slander and faction,
biblically, legally, and according to Webster.) One thing
Bovenmyer told us during the sixteen-and-a-half-hour meeting
in July was that the GCC board acknowledged a number of
“procedural errors” in the excommunications of various
individuals, including Taylor.
Unfortunately, GCC took no action, although Paul and I and
others continued, in a sense, to hold GCC’s feet to the fire by
withholding any public statements to the effect that the
About the Author
Larry Pile
has been a staff member and Director
of Cult Education and Research for
Wellspring Retreat and Resource
Center of Albany, Ohio from May 1988
to the present. He is currently
semiretired and conducts workshops
on a wide variety of spiritual and
practical issues and topics designed to
help people who have suffered abuse
as members of high-control,
destructive organizations and relationships. Larry also has been
responsible for maintaining communication with the
organization’s constituents in the general public and the Church
at large. These responsibilities have necessitated conducting
extensive research on a vast number of organizations labeled by
some as cults. He has written an online book about Great
Commission Association of Churches (Marching to Zion,
accessible through www.gcmwarning.com) and is currently at
work on a commentary on the biblical book of Galatians, geared
toward survivors of abusive churches and other totalistic
organizations and relationships. ■
movement had adequately reformed. We told the leaders we
needed not just to hear about changes, but also to see a good
track record of positive reports and few to no bad reports. In
fact, however, throughout the ’90s, and even into the new
century, I kept receiving calls and emails from recently departed
members saying that the situation continued as before despite
GCC’s protestations to the contrary.
The situation remained pretty much status quo, with minimal
communication between GCC and us, until 2007. That year,
former GCC member Dan Lilly decided to try to arrange a
reunion picnic of current and former members in Ames, Iowa.
This reunion took place in August that year and, with some three
hundred people in attendance, served to mend, or at least begin
to mend, a number of fences. Dan invited Bill Taylor to attend
also and on the day after the picnic, Bill and Dan spent 2 hours
with Dave Bovenmyer, again rehashing some of the same
ground covered in 1991. In addition, Dan began an email
correspondence with Jim McCotter himself, urging him to seek
reconciliation with Bill Taylor, but to no avail. Jim still seemed to
be hiding behind the mockery of church discipline by which
Taylor had been put out of the movement, and thus Jim could
not speak to him.
In 2010 the exchange of emails became a virtual blizzard, with
Dan Lilly still the main “mover and shaker.” In fact, former
Columbus elder Fred Colvin, in a reply to a message from Lilly,
wrote, “Your email forced me to open a file I hadn’t looked at
since February, 1978. For 32 years it has been closed. It was part
of my ‘therapy’.” Besides his emails to Colvin, Lilly wrote to GCC
leaders Bovenmyer and Hopler, and to former leaders Bill Taylor,
Mike Royal (former editor of GCC’s campus paper), and me and,
of course, this got all of these men corresponding with (and
phoning) each other.
So Dan Lilly was the first of three “energy centers” that came
together to form a “perfect storm,” but with positive results. A
second energy center was JoAnn Taylor, Bill’s wife, who, as
Hopler put it later, had “a deeper prayer burden for a resolution”
of the issues separating Bill and her from men and women with
whom they had once worked in love and harmony. And finally,
the third energy center was Hopler himself. In his words, “In May
2010, while reviewing the history of our movement, I began
praying for reconciliation.”
To continue from Hopler’s account, after he had mentioned
Lilly’s email to Colvin:
This resulted in many emails back and forth and some
conference calls in late 2010. At that time, I was affected by
1 Peter 3:8: “To sum up, all of you be harmonious,
sympathetic, brotherly, kindhearted, and humble in spirit.”
Harmony comes when there is sympathy—seeing things
from the other’s viewpoint. So we made extra effort to see
things from Bill’s viewpoint. For example, I was sympathetic
that in the 1970s there was no defined appeal process (as
there is in GCC today) for Bill to express his concerns with a
pastor who had national influence. Even though we in GCC
still questioned some of Bill’s conduct, God used 1 Peter 3:8
to prepare us for our meeting in January.…
On January 6–7, 2011, I invited Bill Taylor and Fred Colvin
to Columbus to meet with Mike Keator, [and GCC directors]
Herschel Martindale, Tom Short, Dave Bovenmyer and me.
The January meeting began with the GCC men immediately
declaring Taylor’s excommunication to be null and void—in legal
parlance, they “vacated” the judgment it was no longer an issue.
They agreed that so many errors were made in 1976 that there
was no point in revisiting the case. The rest of their time together
consisted, in Hopler’s words, of “rich fellowship, characterized by
humility, brotherly understanding, forgiveness, and grace.”Thus,
the single biggest hurdle in the way of reconciliation between
the “ins” and the “outs” of GCC had been moved aside.
I was happy to hear of this, although I knew it was only a
beginning. At Hopler’s request, I gave him a list of other issues I
felt also needed to be addressed and to have steps taken to
correct and/or prevent the situations from occurring again. In a
subsequent series of lengthy phone calls, John and I discussed
those issues in detail. He later wrote up and sent me a list of
“Proposed Action Steps” based on our discussions. He assured
me that he had already initiated most of those steps and would
ensure that the rest would be followed through on as well (some
of the steps would require some time to fulfill).
In addition to the process rehearsed above, over the past several
months reconciliation has been effected between current and
former leaders and members of GCC. We will attempt more as
time goes by. At the same time, I recognize that there may still be
problems in the future, just as there also may be within and
among churches of mainline denominations. In such cases, it is
my strong recommendation that these problems be brought to
the attention of GCC Director John Hopler, at jrhopler@gmail.com
As in the past, I will remain available to offer counsel and
information to anyone with questions or concerns about GCC. I
want to be informed of any current or future problems in
teaching or action in GCC.
I think it important to clarify that Great Commission Churches
(formally Great Commission Association of Churches) and Great
Commission Ministries today are organizationally independent of
each other. Therefore, one should not assume that what I am
saying here about GCC applies to GCM. I have had no
communication with anyone from GCM for several years. For this
reason, I suggest that any concerns regarding GCM be addressed
to GCM director Tom Mauriello at info@gcmweb.org ■
ICSA_volume4Issue2_Final 8/9/13 8:31 PM Page 12