Friday, November 5, 2010

Jesus-Christians Have Disbanded

We received a notice today. The notice said:

The Jesus Christians have officially disbanded...These are dangerous times, and only those who are ready to "count the cost" and pay the price are going to survive spiritually. Lukewarmness is not enough. If you have a Bible, please read what Jesus said to the multitudes who came to him in Luke 14: 25-35...
...But don't let anything stop you from practicing the teachings of Jesus right now. Jesus said that anyone who hears his teachings and does not obey them is like a foolish person building their house on the sand. He said the way that leads to life is narrow and very few will find it. Pray that you may be one of those few.

Freedom is still sacred, and this blog wishes the best of God's graces to all the Jesus-Christians as they go their separate ways. We, here, in this blog, will continue to hold the line against terrorist vigilantes and their intrusions into the free private lives of all souls.

Here is the Biblical reference given in their plain-spoken farewell note:

Now great multitudes approached Him; and He turned and said to them, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters and yes, even his own life, he canot be My disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, 'This man began to build, and was not able to finish.' Or what king, going to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and take counsel wheter he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he senda an embassy and asks terms of peace. So, therefore, whoever of you does not renounce all that he has canot be My disciple.

"Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is fit neither for the land nor the dunghill; men throw it away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear."

2 comments:

  1. Hi Denise,

    This is not Dann, but Sue Gianstefani. Our account has our son's name on it which is why it comes up as "Dan said".

    I was a member of the Jesus Christians for 25 years. My husband was a member for 29 years. Our son was born in the movement and lived his entire childhood in the group (with the exception of a short time after we were kicked out in 2005 during my husband's persecution with the Kenya abduction charges) until we were asked to leave permanently, never to return, by Dave McKay in August 2010. This was literally days before the Jesus Christians cruise which everyone in the Jesus Christians, except some members in Kenya who could not leave, were booked to go on with their families and friends.

    Strangely, we were included in the email communications about "going underground" that the group had in early November 2010. When Dave assumed we would obey his directions and immediately cut off all ties with our families, friends and everyone in the "outside world", we seriously prayed about whether this was really God's will. We then emailed everyone involved in the community with the answer we had from God, which was not to join them in going underground. We were immediately excommunicated and eventually told via a ransom style note we could only communicate via Dave if we had any reason to talk to any of the Jesus Christians, who had been our closest friends and a kind of spiritual family for all of our adult lives until that point.

    A similar situation happened to Ross Parry who was the longest standing member in the community other than Dave and Cherry.

    So, giving you some background, we were involved in the initial emails where Dave suggested the idea of deceiving the public and publicly announcing the group had disbanded to anyone who wrote in to the movement from that point on. David Mckay authored that "official statement" you have on your blog above. Knowing it was an outright lie, he later tried to pretend it was someone else's idea, which is why he changed his tune with his later posts on the website, and he even wrote to us and stated he had NEVER even used the word "disbanded", "from the beginning"! When we challenged this lie, he didn't reply and the discussion we had which was intended to try to resolve our disagreements with him ended abruptly.

    David Mckay has accused us of being the closest thing to being his worst enemies yet all we have done is try to communicate and resolve our disagreements with him and other members of the Jesus Christians, and to think and act independently, which is what he is claiming all the other Jesus Christians are have been doing since they "disbanded" or "graduated".

    Sue Gianstefani. survivors_team3@yahoo.co.uk

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    1. Many apologies for lateness of this reply. I know that I am seen as some kind of total-slave of Dave because I refrain (now!) from venturing into the disputes between JC's and him and Cherry. I know I was stupid at the beginning to get entangled but now I see that such entanglement is one of the tools the hate-forums use.

      Frankly, I usually ignore the reports of those disputes because they are usually third-hand through pasted postings and they usually involve arguments that are nobody's business. You and your family have every right to choose how much you rely on Dave's direction or not. It is nobody else's business, really. And I won't venture to guess what he really meant by going "underground" concerning the cut-off of family ties. But if in fact he did tell you to cut off such ties, then please don't blame him completely. It is a plain hard fact that my daughter DIED because of the kind of harassment my family caused by telling those thugs anything they wanted to know about her or my whereabouts. I am watching them stalk your son now, not allowing you and your husband and son to solve your own problems. You saw how they continue to stalk the other teens into adulthood. I will not try to tell you Dave is a great guy. He has all the human weaknesses we all have and on top of it he is quick with language, which seems to be one of the skills that the hate-forum keeps painting as if to be verbally quick is some kind of crime.

      I count Dave and Cherry Mckay as close friends, not as my religious or spiritual gurus. I think this "excommunication" was due to Dave's genuine fear that contact with the public fuels the haters. I know otherwise, that underground or over, that group will not stop stalking. They did indeed kill my daughter. They did indeed contact several members of my family and several neighbors in the weeks after her death, pretending to be "friends", and I have had to move several times. Dave knew this was going on. THAT is why he reacted so strongly. He really did not see the serious extent to which Rick Ross and Brian Birmingham are engaged in American organized crime and in direct violence until he realized that my daughter WAS KILLED during that disopute and that Brian Birmingham's apparently insane postings were in fact both before and after her death. His insanity was in fact materially connected to group actions that happened against both her and the other victim that summer. He is connected to other crimes in Massachusetts and Texas as well. As members of the Catholic Workers (a group I have known since childhood) you surely are no stranger to the fact that the government uses and protects domestic terror-squads like the Rick Alan Ross Institute all the time.

      Please see Dave's accusations, whatever they were, as emotional statements instead of in the worst light and please do the best you can to inculcate a sense of privacy as well as public confidence in your family. I never intended to deceive anyone, since it did indeed appear to me that the disbanding happened. Communications with Dave and Cherry after that indicated that you all were in discussion and undecided as to whether you would stay disbanded. But it doesn't matter, does it? Each one of us is an individual in the eyes of God and whatever you do, it is indeed God and not any person whom you serve.

      Ultimately, you JC's have done more with a few rv-campers and some pamphlets to promote Christ than most churches. You have set up successful programs in three continents. You have made some wonderful statements in your documentaries, especially concerning Justice, and the arguments against you are all from people who are absolutely clueless about the larger context of those basic issues.



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