These are my own personal experiences in the Church of Bible Understanding from the years 1980 to 1993. I also kept a journal and wrote letters and essays when I was there. These can be found at the links below:
To read the journals I wrote while I was a member of the Church of Bible Understanding, see this link: My COBU Journal.
For essays and letters about life in The Church of Bible Understanding, most of which were written while I was still there, and some after leaving, see this link: The COBU Essays.
And for audio journals I made when I was in COBU, see here: The COBU Tapes.
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PREFACE to MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY as a FORMER COBU MEMBER
In some things, we come to an awareness of the facts slowly. While I was a member of the Church of Bible Understanding, I believed, for almost ten years, the avowed purposes of the organization and the reasons given for everything that was done there. The blinders came off through a continued series of painful experiences and disappointments, which now I am very glad that happened to me – though I was not happy about it at the time. If these things had not happened, I might still be there, having given up everything, even my very life, to serve the desires and goals of a so-called pastor, who was really the founder and leader of one of the worst mind-control cults to have existed in modern times. (The Church of Bible Understanding usually ranks high in any list of the top mind-control cults, whenever such a list is compiled.)
Groups similar to the Church of Bible Understanding have existed in previous centuries. I was eventually to learn that by studying the history of the Christian religion, particularly the history of Christianity in the America – a country which has always been a fertile breeding ground for religion. Religion of the genuine kind, but also of the worst possible aberrations and misrepresentations of Christianity, in which the Bible is twisted out of context in order to mean things that were never intended by the Author and used to promote the financial, egoistic – and sexual - designs of those who start these organizations. Finding out that we were not unique was one of the things that helped me to leave. The other groups I read about certainly were cults. It was obvious. And we were just like them. I was amazed at the similarities.
There are people who debate over whether Stewart Traill, the leader of the Church of Bible Understanding, was a sincere Christian who went astray, or whether he started the group fully intending to do what he did. The remaining few current members will say that he is a good, sincere and honest Christian man, a right example – though they may have private thoughts that they keep to themselves.
To me, it matters little. We know the course he has chosen over the years. An analogy I sometimes use, is, if someone is comes into the post office and is shooting the place up, is it because his girlfriend dumped him, or because he lost his job? The answer is, it does not matter. You just need to get out of there in order to save your life. I came to realize that I needed to leave the Church of Bible Understanding, and I did. I realized it was God’s will for me to leave there – something that was considered to be utter nonsense and a sign that I was losing my mind – if not outright rebellion and rejecting God – by my fellow church members. How could God be showing me to leave God’s true church? I tried to speak up about what was wrong there and about what God was showing me and no one would consider anything I had to say.
Others have questioned whether Stewart Traill is sincere and has good intentions and is unaware of the manipulation and abuse he uses on others, while others believe it is all consciously designed and calculated. I put myself in the latter group. Everything is constructed and planned so well, that it is obvious that there is a conscious intention and plan behind it. I was to become more aware of that as time went on.
This is about as far as I want to go insofar as any debate about the integrity of the leader, as these pages are about my own experiences in the Church of Bible Understanding. There is no debate about the fact that I needed to get out. And, regarding the above, the most intense debate I have ever experienced was my own inward struggle to sort out fact from fiction. My main struggle was to decide whether what I saw and became aware of was merely the “devil putting thoughts in my head,” or whether my perceptions were real. Any other considerations pale by comparison. It was an intense struggle, one that was to take me four years to be able to reach a conclusion.
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There are now quite a few comments by others who have read my pages and written their personal stories. You can read the ones left on this page by clicking the link for “Comments” below:
