Click on the quote below to read the article...
people dancing holding hands in a circle
"A live-by-faith, work-for-God-not-money Christian community. We distribute Bible-based comics, videos, CDs, novels, and other tracts, and do free (voluntary) work. We are against hypocrisy and self-righteousness in the church; and we are in favour of honesty, humility and love."

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A comprehensive summary of our history and beliefs appears on a website that originates from Commonwealth University (Virginia, U.S.A.) at the following link:

https://wrldrels.org/2019/05/19/jesus-christians/

This "Project on World Religions and Spirituality" includes papers on various religious groups from around the world. It is an independent resource for media, theologians, and academics, which is not under our control. Consequently, we cannot endorse all that is said there. However, it does give people an opportunity to hear what OTHERS are saying about us.

The Jesus Christian entry was prepared by Geraldine Smith, an academic from Australia.



Below are some frequently asked questions.  Click on them to read our answers.
QUESTION: How are you different from other Christian groups?

ANSWER: We don't teach anything that is unique, but we do put them together differently. For example:

1. Like Quakers, we believe Jesus (not the Bible) is the Word of God.  We also believe that all holy writings are inspired (as are all spirit-filled Christians), butwe think it is obviously true that being inspired doesn't make anyone infallible.  (See The Word of God.)

2. Like believers in the Salvation Army, we do not practice any official sacraments. True Christian baptism is with the Holy Spirit, and true communion is a continual relationship in a community of believers. (See Water Baptism, and I Will Have Mercy.)

3. Like some Catholic orders, we believe in living together communally, and in sharing everything that we own. (See Living in Community.)

4. Like just about every denomination claims, we believe that the teachings of Jesus are the Cornerstone of our faith.  But we also believe that these teachings have been universally set aside in favour of other religious traditions. This is probably the closest thing to a unique teaching that we have, and yet there are very few churches which would admit to differing with us on this, because it is so transparently heretical NOT to accept Jesus as the Cornerstone, or ultimate authority, on all matters of doctrine. (See Solid as a Rock, and What is Faith?)

5. Like the Uniting Church and a few other more liberal denominations, we believe that people (like Abraham) from other non-Christian religions, can be saved on the basis of their faith in God, even if they have never heard of Jesus. (See Another Cornerstone, and Faith and Sincerity.)

6. Like many evangelical Protestants, we believe in the imminent return of Jesus. We believe that The Revelation relates to events happening in the world today. (See Endtime Prophecy and the Revelation of Jesus Christ.)

7. Like Catholics, we teach the spiritual advantages of remaining single; but like Protestants, we do not forbid marriage for church leaders. (See The Virgin Army, parts 1, 2, and 3.)

8. Like most liberal denominations, we teach that there is nothing sinful about masturbation, and that trying too hard to refrain from masturbation often leads to other really serious sexual sins. (See Wanking, The Last Taboo.)

9. Like most clergymen, we believe in the concept of "living by faith"... except that we believe the entire company of believers can live by faith, and in so doing, we will effectively "turn the world upside down." (See A New Economic Policy, and Living by Faith.)

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QUESTION: Why are you so critical of the churches?

ANSWER: There are serious errors in the church, which could have eternal consequences. Drastic problems require drastic remedies. (See Thou Shalt Judge, Hard Decisions, and The Tolerance Myth.)

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QUESTION: How can you survive if you all "live by faith"?

ANSWER: Bascially, we survive by faith. The fact that people find that so hard to believe reflects the widespread lack of faith in a God who could create the universe from nothing. The real questions we need to ask ourselves are: (a) whether Jesus really is God's Son; and (b) whether Jesus really asks his followers to live by faith. If the answer is yes to both of these, then it's up to God to provide for those who seek to obey Jesus. We went about it this way and it worked.  (See our article Living by Faith -- How to Do It for a more detailed explanation. See also The Pizza Parable, which emphasises the need to get the full picture rather than just one aspect of living by faith.)

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QUESTION: If you teach people to obey the teachings of Jesus, isn't that the same as teaching salvation by works?

ANSWER: No, it definitely is not. Everyone teaches obedience of some sort: obedience to the laws of the land, obedience to church authorities, obedience to parents. So why not obedience to Jesus Christ, the only one who can save us? As James said, "Faith without works is dead." But we also teach that our obedience will never "buy" salvation. All of us must depend upon the grace of God every day of our lives. But we should never abuse that grace by being slack in our own personal discipline. (See Lest You Fall, Amazing Grace, and Self-Righteousness.)

 
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QUESTION: Do you teach that you are the only ones who are going to be saved?

ANSWER: No. But we do think that the way to heaven is a very narrow one... so narrow, in fact, that it is quite likely that some, if not many, of us Jesus Christians will not make it either. The secret to salvation is not to be found in membership in any group (including our own), but only in a deep, abiding, personal faith in God, which evidences itself in actions.  (See In In Search of Truth, The Narrow Way, and Universalism, Pros and Cons.)


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QUESTION: What is your relationship with The Family (formerly known as The Children of God)?

ANSWER: Only one of our members (Dave) has ever belonged to The Family, and that was just for a few months in 1975. As soon as he learned that they were teaching sexual promiscuity as a way of winning converts, he left the group. For many years he was shunned by The Family because of his opposition to their teachings about sex.

In recent years, The Family has altered some of their teachings. We have not, however, been able to agree with their stand (even now) with regard to sex outside of marriage, and we have never hidden that fact.

There is a series of articles which deal more closely with other differences between ourselves and The Family. (See Simple Salvation, Eternal Salvation, Living by Faith, The Bible, and Jesus Christ.)

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30 December, 2006

Sanity


In my youth, I thought of insanity as a fairly rare disease that one either had or didn't have. However, as I got older, I discovered that the line between sanity and insanity is a gradual one, and that people are constantly slipping closer to insanity or climbing activity toward sanity. The movement one way or the other is often affected by our own conscious choices.

Psychologists talk about neuroses (or being neurotic) and psychoses (or being psychotic). Virtually everyone is neurotic. It just means that we have some peculiarities that make us a bit different from the norm. It could be that we are fastidiously neat, that our sex life is tumultuous, or that we spend an awful lot of time worrying about our weight. It's only when a neurosis becomes so strong that it interferes with the rest of our lifestyle that it becomes a psychosis. Psychotic people are the ones we traditionally think of as crazy.

Probably one of the reasons that the average person is able to think of insanity as something that only affects other people is that most of us are so obsessed with appearing to be "normal" that we will usually do a reasonable job of achieving that goal even if we fail in every other area of our life. A person can be as neurotic as they like, but if they try hard enough to appear normal on the outside, they can be serial murderers in their thoughts and desires and still not be regarded by mainstream society as psychotic (crazy). It's probably one of the reasons why society is so often shocked when some real serial killer turns up. "He seemed so normal," most people will say.

For me as a Christian, however, this subject of sanity is one that is almost constantly there in the back of my mind. Maintaining sanity is something that requires a lot of conscious effort, considering that so much of my lifestyle as a Christian revolves around deliberately questioning the things that so many other people regard as normal.

My own understanding of sanity is far more exacting than just being able to turn up for work at least four out of five days a week. My understanding of sanity has a great deal to do with my ability to be rational, to question myself, to listen to people with whom I disagree, to imagine how others feel, to detect inconsistencies as well as consistencies both in myself and in others, and to spot errors in logic.

Someone recently commented on the fact that a number of the ex-members who are presently fighting us so fiercely seem to have serious mental problems, i.e. to be a bit crazy. But I had to point out that most of them had similar problems when they were members of our community too, and many of our present members and supporters have mental problems as well. It's just that within the community these tendencies were being dealt with, whereas outside the community they seem to run riot.

I do agree that when people stick their fingers in their ears and refuse to confront problems in their own lives (inconsistencies, bitterness, etc.) then they are moving closer and closer to clinical psychosis. On the other hand, if the ultimate measure of clinical psychosis is whether or not a person turns up for work each day, then we Jesus Christians have lost that battle even before we start. We may faithfully turn up for work for God; but that doesn't count in the "normal" scheme of things. So no matter how intelligent, rational, tolerant, patient, or understanding we may be, the general public (and psychologists are, after all, part of the general public) are going to see us as a bit "crazy" even before the testing begins.

But the kind of sanity I crave is the sanity that will be seen by God (and possibly by society as a whole, sometime after we are dead and gone) as a genuine desire to know the truth. I feel that it is part of my regular spiritual maintenance to continually carry out sanity inspections. It's not easy for critics to get me to give in when I know I'm right; but I do listen to what most of them are saying, and I do take the time to consider whether there is any truth in their criticisms. It is precisely this practice which, I think, keeps me sane. And in practical terms, it is precisely this practice which makes it so hard for them to destroy us.

One of the universal instructions handed out by cult-busters is to exploit contradictions in the teachings of the leader of any group that you wish to destroy. Keep doing it long enough, and you will destroy the leader's credibility. Why? Because contradictions are everywhere. I don't mean the kind of ironies that make one truth appear to contradict another, but outright inconsistencies, usually based on one standard for ourselves and another for others.

But I'm delighted that our enemies have had such a difficult time trying to find those inconsistencies in what we teach. After all, if they did find one, we would probably set about trying to correct it, since we have this craving for consistency.

In a worldwide scramble to find such an inconsistency in ourselves, the best one that could be found was something that appeared on the surface to be saying that I am in favour of people killing other people in the name of Jesus Christ. Well! If that was true, they would have had one fantastic inconsistency, not to mention a shocking and frightening doctrine. But what was all of this built on?

It was built on my hypothetical suggestion that there could be times when someone would be taking another person's life with a loving motive, as in when someone performs a mercy killing or when someone kills a madman who is on a rampage killing many other people. I said that such actions could not be construed as illustrations of hatred or a desire for revenge, the sort of things that Jesus was really opposed to.

Anyway, enough on that side issue. The thing is that we can and should live our whole lives in search of the truth. As we do, we will come to see that side trails leading off toward insanity abound everywhere. Many have strayed down them, and, although they may not have been locked up in mental institutions, they have made shipwreck of their souls.

Let us all strive for a lifetime of sane understanding, never forgetting that all it takes to lose it is a failure to consider that such a fate is possible.
Academic Articles:

Geraldine Smith - World Religion and Spirituality - article on the Jesus Christians.

Below are links to some websites with similar content to our own.

TrueChristianity.com

This site was developed by a man in Australia who has through his own experiences come to many of the same conclusions as us with regard to the monetary system and the lack of faith in the churches. We recommend the article "How to discern True Christianity from False Doctrine".

Click here to visit his site.


People of the living God

The People of the Living God are a well established Christian community in Tennessee (USA) who teach obedience to the teachings of Jesus, including forsaking all and (possibly) living by faith. They put out a monthly newsletter, and can be contacted by email at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Click here to visit the site.
circa 2006

Persecution and the Cross

We've said a fair bit in the past about persecution, and about our need to be willing to endure it. Just as happened to Jesus, there were people who tried to say that we were paranoid, that we were imagining things. At times we were just speaking theoretically, i.e. accepting that if Jesus really knew what he was talking about and that if we were really following him, then we would ultimately face the same kind of persecution that he received (as he clearly promised). It was just childlike faith in what Jesus had promised (one of those promises that never appear in a churchy 'promise box'!)


Most of our "persecution" over the years has just been expressed as snubs, especially from the religious establishment. People just kind of distance themselves from us, but don't say much about why they are doing it. And they don't appear to say that much about us to one another either.  Everyone just kind of quietly agrees not to mention us, hoping that we will go away.

Of course the murder attempt on Reinhard was pretty extreme, and definitely in line with the kind of stuff we had been saying would happen (and the kind of stuff that everyone laughed at as sheer imagination). But it was still possible that Jared Johnson and company were just a one-off family of violent crazies, who might have done the same thing to almost anyone who disagreed with them. "It's really awful what they did to Reinhard," people would say, but then they would imply that it was definitely not the sort of thing that society as a whole would condone.

Then we felt that God was leading us, in connection with the murder attempt (and the fact that the Long Beach Police Department had strangely 'lost' the file on it) to conduct some kind of a trial of our own in Long Beach... a trial that would do more than protest against the injustice, but that would also illustrate something about the cross of Christ.

For a group that had never said much of anything about the cross (because we were more interested in Jesus the Teacher), this in itself was a bit out of character. But the more we talked about it, the more it seemed that the cross was becoming real to us. It was a shocking symbol of torture and injustice at the same time that it has become an icon of infinite mercy and, as we were quickly discovering, God's symbolic promise of ultimate justice. Something was changing in our whole understanding of the cross.

We were starting to gain an appreciation for the radical implications of those final few chapters of each of the gospels. They held out hope of a world that will one day be truly just, and the message seemed so far removed from the do-nothing selfishness of the churchy interpretation of the cross.

Almost from the start we sensed that this was going to become the nail the entire world needed to hang us on. We discussed it and counted the cost, then all agreed together to go for it. If taking a hard stand against sin but a radically soft stand toward the sinner was going to be the excuse everyone needed to come out from behind the trees and start shooting, then let the shooting begin.

And so it has!

Faux News set the pace with as many distortions as it could cram into eight minutes, and then climaxed with a tear-jerker about this poor family who had now been charged with assault on top of all the other horrible things they had suffered at the hands of the Jesus Christians.

Our rational minds could see how someone might, at the worst, say, "How weird! Imagine whipping yourselves for something someone else did!" But the Faux report was not prepared to stop there, and neither have many others who have heard about it.

You only have to scan the flurry of activity that has been taking place at the Rick Ross forum since Nov. 7, to see that the trial in Long Beach has become the turning point in our history, the excuse that everyone needed to come together and express their hatred.

Here is a typical posting:

Quote:

I realize that as a believer I am supposed to pray for those who do evil and all, but quite honestly: in the flesh, when it comes to Dave McKay (and I know I've never met the man so tell me if I am out in left field here) I say "screw him"; I think of him the same way I'd think of somebody who rapes kids. I have no mercy nor compassion in my heart for people who do that sort of thing. Same with McKay, except in my mind he's worse, more perverse than a guy who rapes kids. Sorry if the content of this message is too graphic for you; I'm just trying to put a fine point on what I am driving at here. Because like I said he rapes minds and kills souls. And so I really don't feel sorry for the man. He ought to be locked up forever. He's like another type of serial rapist, he's just found a legal way to take what he wants by force and f**k people's minds in the process.

People on that forum (including Rick Ross himself) did NOT question the hatred of this man. Instead, they fueled it and joined together, more or less under his leadership to declare war on me and the Jesus Christians. Here is another posting:

Quote:

Now that I have seen that video of the trial I have decided to go into full-on "attack mode" and really work, dedicate substantial time and energy, in exposing and breaking up this group. I have made this one of my missions in life and do not plan on letting McKay get or stay comfortable. I am dedicated and have taken this on as my cause; that is, organized anti-McKay activity. Precision-guided bombing, so to speak. What I am trying to do might cause some pain in McKay's children's lives, and I am not insensitive to that, but the whole goal here is in preventing equal and greater pain and disruption in the lives of others.

The numbers continued to grow as more and more people flowed to the forum to express their outrage.

Here is another posting:

Quote:

Somebody has got to stand up and do something before more people get hurt, or worse, before people start dying. This man (McKay) is dangerous... we've got to take him and his group out before people start dying. By "take him out" I mean put an end to the JCs, disband them, and get McKay the psychiatric care he needs. Campaign to get this chicken-hawk put away.

Okay, so Jared and his family were not the only crazies in the world. Maybe Rick Ross had managed to gather a small group of other crazies who were harmlessly venting their rage through his forum. But then the attack began to spread "closer to home" as a poster in Sydney put it. They started to write letters to anyone with any contact with me or the Jesus Christians, calling on them to view the video. Like I said, the trial (or at least the video of it) has become the focal point for all of this irrational hatred. They called on people to stop us, the same way that Craig Hendry attacked the work we were doing with refugees at Woomera some six years ago. (Craig, of course, was also there amongst the leaders of the renewed campaign.)

We found other living organ donors suddenly coming out of the closet and saying, "I knew it all along. They are forced to donate their kidneys by that horrible man. He must be stopped."

Even on the Quaker forum (and Quakers are famous the world over for being very slow to point fingers or pass judgment), people started saying, "This kind of activity must not be allowed to continue." One Quaker said of the trial and the whippings that all she could feel was "total revulsion" at what was being described... and that was after listening to half an hour of explanations about how we saw it as an expression of love and not of hate, and a plea from us not to condemn what they might not understand.

But was anybody listening?

What I am saying here is that Jesus did a lot of things that outraged people. They couldn't stand the thought of him and his disciples not having to slave away at jobs that they didn't like. They were jealous of his miraculous power. They feared his confidence and boldness in the face of their threats. All of it angered people. But it culminated in his willingness to lay his own life down as a sacrifice for others. It was just his WILLINGNESS to suffer for love that made people want to MAKE him suffer.

As Jesus said, "For what good deed do you seek to kill me?"

As the quotes above would indicate, the plot to demonise me (and make no mistake, the campaign target will pass on to the next in line the moment I have been "taken out") is centering on some kind of unspeakable abomination committed against the people who have joined the Jesus Christians in the past and who later left.

Throughout our entire history, we have prided ourselves on the fact that people who have left our community have never come out publicly and exposed any scandal that took place while they were with us. One embittered member left us twenty years ago, promising to go public as soon as he could find something to nail us on. He's still trying.

Eight years ago, the whole community split down the middle, after twelve of 25 members tried unsuccessfully to vote me out as the leader. In the end, two of them were voted out, and their followers went with them.

They have continued to meet together ever since, and have scoured the world looking for other disgruntled members. But they have never come up with anything to charge us with. We have even asked them several times over the years exactly why it was that they left, and the answers that have come back have differed every time, usually something along the lines of "You know why."

But now, with the release of the Faux News video about the whipping trial, they believe they have their cause celebre, the ultimate case against the Jesus Christians. After all, whips hurt, and it was a Jesus Christian who was wielding it. How easy it would be to make people believe that they (the disgruntled ex-members) had been whipped while they were members of the Jesus Christians (which, of course, they had not been).

But, of course, it was Jesus Christians themselves who were (perhaps stupidly) volunteering to be the recipients of the punishment, and two of the four volunteers were the evil leaders of the group.... the monster himself, and his wife. That is so casually brushed aside, as just some sick publicity stunt. The point is (to those who have become consumed with righteous indignation) that people's minds are being raped, their souls are being killed. A monster is on the loose. Revulsion is everywhere.

When I point out that I suffered more pain at the hands of my track coach in high school, or that there are hundreds of people belonging to kinky sex clubs who do worse, people get outraged that I would even suggest that these people fall into the same category as serial rapists and mass murderers.

We hardly understand OURSELVES just what the trial was aiming to achieve (although we've written a fair bit about it on the "cross" link on our home page), but we're starting to feel kind of good that this is apparently going to be the issue that galvanises and unites our enemies, whether they be raving fundamentalists, atheists, left-wing theologians, mental patients, prosperity gospellers, university lecturers, or so-called experts on cults. This wonderful cross-section of humanity is coming together in unity against a handful of people who dared to experiment with what it really means to take up our cross and follow the example of Christ.

Wonderful. Bring them on! And take note how they still mutter that we are just imagining that we are being persecuted!
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