Where The Willow Weeps The Inside Story Of Growing Up In A Cult And How I Found Freedom In Christ

I grew up in a homeschooled family in rural Pennsylvania, the 8th out of 13 children. From my earliest years I was raised in The Message, a legalistic, fundamentalist sect of Christianity. I followed a man who was dead long before I was born; William Branham, who I was taught and believed was the prophet for the end times. I'll share with you how my sin, and the lies I believed from The Message affected my everyday life from my childhood and on into my teenage years. I'll illustrate for you, in words and artwork, how Jesus came into my life and changed the plot of my story. By God's grace I was able to pick up the broken pieces and dissociate the lies about God I heard in the Message, from the reality of who He is. By God's grace, I am free from The Message, and from my sin. I invite you to join me on my story, to laugh with me, and cry with me. My prayer for these pages is two-fold; that you can see how God wove my broken story for His glory, and that you can find hope and gratitude for your own.

Author Charles Paisley is formerly associate pastor the second oldest Message church in the world. Faith Assembly Church was the original sister church to the Branham Tabernacle and home to many of William Branham's oldest friends and family. The Message is the worldwide cult following of the late evangelist William M. Branham. While many biographies of Branham this is the first history of the The Message, its community, and its teachings ever put into print. The Message did not appear in a vacuum. The ideology of The Message is merely a continuation and evolution of ideas which came before. What were they? Where did they come from? Are the sources reputable? There is a lot of biographical information about William Branham available, but there is little which explains the origins and development of The Message as both as a community. This book also explores the development of the early Message as a community of people.

'A rare, highly detailed insider account of a "family" designed to be shut off from the world. And of Morgan, a ferocious young girl who railed hard against it.' Sunday Times 'This is an unflinching and courageous memoir, exposing one of the world's most infamous cults. It's an inspiring, if at times upsetting, read.' Daily Express My name is Faith Morgan and I was born into the infamous Children of God cult, or 'The Family' as it came to be known. At age 19 I managed to escape and entered a world in which I had to learn how to live again. Rebel is my story. My teenage diary helps piece the story of my travels in Costa Rica, India, Greece, Mexico, and London together. Of the communes, the 'missions', the friendships and the relationships. And of course, my enduring faith: in Jesus, in the Prophet (cult leader David Berg), and in the inevitability of the coming end times, which I fully believed would arrive. But beyond the brainwashing and mistreatment is the extraordinary story of my family and the adventures of my early life which help me understand what happened and why, so it doesn't happen to others. The spirit of that defiant girl who escaped is still in there somewhere, and through telling my story I wish to look into the eyes of 'evil', with its many faces so I can send it on its way.

One young woman’s true story of growing up in a repressive cult led by her charismatic grandfather, Hopeful Christian. In an idyllic valley in New Zealand, the Gloriavale Christian Community seemingly flourished. Founded by Lilia Tarawa’s grandfather, Hopeful Christian, Gloriavale was run according to an oppressive interpretation of fundamental Christianity and became a strictly controlled world of arranged marriages, religious control and spiritual abuse. Born into the cult that her grandfather had started, and surrounded by friends and family, Gloriavale seemed like paradise for Lila Tarawa at first. Her mother, Miracle, had grown up in there too and Lilia’s father managed a thriving moss export business, one of several companies owned by the community. As Lilia grew older, however, she began to see and experience the darker side of the cult, with its strict rules, tight control and shocking abuse. As Lilia and her family started to question Gloriavale’s beliefs and practices, Lilia was forced to make a desperate choice: stay with people she loved or flee to a world that she had always been told was evil. In Daughter of Gloriavale, Lilia Tarawa exposes the shocking world of the secretive cult and details her heart-wrenching journey to break free, find happiness and discover her own strength.

Think you could never join a cult? Think again.Cults thrive on secrecy, isolation, deception, and manipulation as they coerce even worldly and intelligent people into their cruel grip. In this award-winning memoir, Alexandra Amor shines a light on cults so that others might learn from her heartbreaking experience. Amor gracefully and sensitively explains how ordinary and intelligent people get seduced into joining cults, why they stay despite the emotional and psychological abuse, and what the long process of recovery looks like once someone leaves a cult.Amor's transparency about her decade-long involvement with a Vancouver, Canada cult makes this powerful and gripping book an excellent resource for those wanting to know more about how the mind control of a high demand spiritual or religious group works."This excellent memoir reveals how a charismatic, manipulative spirit medium can use love for God and neighbor as a hook to drag a small group of devotees into her cynical web of impossible goals for self-perfection. After a heroic struggle for insight, Alexandra Amor was one of the cult members who broke the abusive spell."Joesph Szimhart, Cult Information SpecialistKnowledge is power. Buy this chilling memoir today and educate yourself about how cults work.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

The #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside

Who was William Branham (1909-1965) and what were his claims? He was an American pastor and evangelist credited for spearheading the post World War II healing revivals of the 1940s and 50s. In the 1960s, he began to view himself as Elijah the prophet of Malachi 4:5-6, who restores the elect to the word of God as a forerunner of Christ's return; the seventh angel messenger of Revelation 3:14 and 10:7, who reveals every hidden mystery of the Bible in the end time; and the fulfillment of the Son of man ministry of Luke 17:30, who reveals Christ to the last generation as a prophet. He also believed his message was the "shout" of Christ's second coming in 1 Thessalonians 4:16.Currently, an estimated two million people believe Branham's claims. Nonetheless, this full-sized book of 17 chapters and 320 pages challenges his claims and teachings from an insider's perspective through an eight months investigative research. In doing so, the author provides a convincing compilation of more than 3,000 excerpts, credible references, official documents, archived newspaper articles, historical facts, and insightful scriptures. This compilation uncovers wide-ranging plagiarisms, disproven and embellished supernatural vindications, failed visions, failed prophecies, failed "Thus saith the Lord," failed predictions, and vast unscriptural doctrinal errors. Among Branham's most celebrated claims, the revealing of the seven seals in the book of Revelation are considered the pinnacle of his teachings. He supposedly did what the Old Testament prophets, New Testament apostles, church reformers, or any other clergy throughout history had never achieved. He claimed that seven angels revealed these hidden mysteries.However, this timely book examines, diligently compares, and provides nearly 100 pages of evidences that suggest Branham almost certainly got his understanding of the seven seals and 20 other significant revelatory teachings--supposedly revealed by God--from several well-known biblical writers of the past. These teachings include the seven church ages and messengers, seventh angel of Revelation 3:14 and 10:7, two comings of Elijah, the beast of Revelation 13, Mystery Babylon and daughters; the image, mark, and number of the beast; United States in prophecy, Daniel's seventy weeks, historical applications of four beasts, Godhead doctrines, serpent seed, water baptism, and several more.The authors of these commentaries and books are mostly Clarence Larkin (1850-1924), a very distinguished and knowledgeable Bible teacher; Uriah Smith (1832-1903), an educator and theologian of the Seventh Day Adventist; Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916), a restorationist and founder of a movement that later became the Jehovah's Witnesses organization; John Gill (1697-1771), a noted biblical scholar and theologian; and Albert Barnes (1798-1870), a noted theologian. We shall also consider other noted biblical scholars of the same eras (e.g. Cyrus Scofield and Henry Halley).Moreover, this research provides extensive scriptural evidences uncovering vast errors in Branham's teachings, including a false gospel of salvation. How? During the latter years, Branham believed his message was necessary or the evidence for salvation, the Holy Spirit baptism, the new birth, and rapture to heaven; rather than the gospel of Christ preached by the apostles.This book also examines the inaccuracies and repeated revisions in Branham's visions of 1933, whereby God allegedly revealed seven major events that would transpire before Christ's return in 1977. This research pinpoints developing historical trends and occurrences between the 1920s and 1960s that possibly influenced those seven prophecies and revisions. The final updated version of these visions appears in his 1965 book on the seven church ages, where the obvious errors from earlier sermons had been cleverly removed. Thus, when facts are weighed, Branham's teachings and claims are conclusively proven wrong.