Forgive me if this is long, or if you don't believe me and if that is the case please treat it as a perfectly valid hypothetical situation for philosophical debate, however, this is a real account and I want to know what you think Jesus is asking me to do or not to do. So the post will be very long but the end question is - do I simply move on with my life forgive and forget or go to the authorities and ask them to investigate the wrongdoing I 100% believe is occurring and then there is wrongdoing I think is potentially occuring, but really have nothing but suspicions through my deductions.
So here it goes..
In the Spring of 2015 I started attending a new church, the church is in Northern Virginia and claims 'non-denominational' but has all the markings of Pentecostal such as speaking in tongues and the 3 baptisms and the pastor attended a Pentecostal seminary I believe.
Well, tbh I loved this church from the outset very much. The music was outstanding, everybody was super friendly, and it seemed very 'new age' in the sense few people wore suits or ties (most keep it pretty casual) and the band was like a rock/pop band rather than organ music with hymnals. EXACTLY what I wanted so I started regularly attending, early on I answered the sinner's prayer, soon after was baptized, and by Fall/Winter 2015 started volunteering as an usher.
Everything was going exceptionally well, I was new to the area and trying to find a group of people to connect with and in the Spring of 2016 they started doing small groups. The pastor's niece, only a few years younger than me invited me to her small group and became quite flirty with me. Well, skip all the nitty gritty details, things went awry in the communication dept. and we never even went out and she seemed quite upset. Thereafter, the pastor seemed to give me the impression he had a serious problem with me and probably wanted me to leave. He would give me nasty looks with sort of a snarl, etc. but I was hopeful it would all pass as most things do and kept attending, and his niece invited me back to her small group for the next session and hoping things would smooth over I kept attending.
So far, not too terrible, but then stranger and stranger things started occurring. The pastor would make seemingly out-of-place remarks in his sermon that would catch my ear as strangely coincidental in that they seemed to be specifically directed towards me in a thinly veiled manner. I thought "wow crazy coincidence"! But they kept happening, and by the 3rd or 4th time my mind was racing.
You're probably wanting an example, so let me use a slightly hyperbolic example. Let's say today you google: "Do rainbow colored unicorns have humans as pets and is their favorite food shepherd's pie?".
Now Sunday in church the pastor mentions rainbow colored unicorns and something about shepherds pie! MAN that will get your head spinning even once, but it is slightly less obvious than that (okay they were quite a bit more subtle than rainbow unicorns eating shepherds pie and a man of average iq might not have connected the dots or at least not as quickly as I did but I am actually quite intelligent and I did connect them rapidly) but nevertheless I withheld judgement until it continued to happen and I could no longer deny that the string of coincidences were not coincidences at all. So if you are wondering how could this be, let me tell you this church is in Northern Virginia and has a very heavy population of military and other federal employee personnel so without too much thinking it seemed obvious either someone in the congregation is in the intelligence/surveillance community or they have a connection.
Now this continued for quite some time and I learned that they had uncovered an online forum account - 100% anonymous - not this one but they probably knew about this one as well, it was one that was somewhat quite the opposite of this style forum where things often get quite incendiary, lascivious, absurd, and otherwise foul. I did not post those messages and many people use it for general discussion it is really supposed to be discussion and humor intertwined, but there is that foul undertone so I decided well I want to know 100% are they really surveiling me and how far does this knowledge spread? At this point, I believed he thought I was unaware his comments were directed at me or the surveillance that was taking place . So I started posting regularly, usually there was no mention of the church or anything related. I would make just general posts to throw some shade, and sometimes I would post something with some intent to see if it would illicit any noticeable responses, occasionally when I thought the opportunity presented itself to stay perfectly in the context of an already on-going thread I would throw in bits about the church or the pastor. So what I deduced was 100% they were spying on me and it was not just the pastor and a crony or two that knew about it, but that there was wide-ranging knowledge within the inner-circle members of the church. I was part of their gossip circle now. Okay so the obvious thing to do now is just leave, right? Okay I'm a little different, I wanted to see how much I could learn so I literally invested about another year or so of my life confirming my suspicions that this was going on and also trying to see if I could get clues of the source and also if this was something they frequently due or was I simply the victim of attack because I apparently hurt the pastor's niece's feelings?
I cannot say I figured it all out, I can only say I am 100% confident this was going on and happening to me, however, these are my 'probable suspicions':
- They regularly surveill on new members, however, normally nothing is said or done. My interaction with the pastor's niece elicited an emotional response from him, he seems to have terrible impluse control with no five-finger filter (I also share these proclivities so I will offer him a nod in that department). One of the biggest tells that led me to this conclusion is the pastor is constantly followed by a body guard. You can't really tell because it's not a big man dressed in a black suit open carrying a 9 mm or anything, it is generally one of the members of the staff or volunteers who is in the military. So, I suspect, I am not the only one who has ever found out and the pastor ffears physical retaliation. I also know this is not a new thing, because I did meet one person who had attended this church maybe 5-7 years prior to me for a short time and when I asked him why he didn't stay he mentioned the bodyguard thing. Actually, he kind of alerted me to it, it isn't 100% noticable unless someone makes you aware. They just kind of follow him around staying off to the side, but if you take a look he always has someone near him before he gets off the stage and walks around with the congregation. He also throws out mentions of there being concealed carrying guards mixed within the ranks of the congregation every once in a while, presumably as a deterrent to any would be retaliation.
Now the question is WHY? Why do they spy on new members? Is it simply because they can? I will admit, I'm curious, I will look people up on facebook and see what info they've made publicly available. If I want to know someones age I will google "first name last name city state whitepages" and frequently whitepages.com will have that person's age listed (honestly high accuracy there, kind of freaky). I will look things up in the tax record if I'm curious how much someone paid, etc. However, using Google or Facebook or tax records is not the same as using government surveillance tools and certainly the gossip and weaponization aspect are entirely different matters and you would think a congregation of sincere Christians would realize and not allow this.
So I have had many hypotheses but I have 2 that stand out:
1. This is a heavily military-concentrated population and adultery is rampant in the military I have heard. Also, a large number of kids, so they are trying to weed out adulterers and pedophiles before they can do any harm. I can see how they could rationalize this as 'righteous' up until the point they weaponize and gossip someone such as myself who is neither of those (although I do like nature), however, I still think it's wrong. It's an abuse of government power, and it is your job to guard your marriage and your kids in more traditional and legally acceptable manners.
2. I suspect fraud. As an usher I noticed, the offering buckets, they were very light! Is everyone on auto-draft? What is going on? Also, on the flip side, the expenses of the church must be crazy high! I would estimate $1.5M+ of expenses per year. They have a huge staff! 10-15 people I would guess and for a congregation that size a staff or 3-4 would seem much more appropriate. They have 2 buses, including one large one and one smaller sized one. They rent a large space in an expensive area. They throw parties in the parking lot. The sound and lighting and video equipment is top notch and there is a lot of it! Also - the pastor and his mother have two very large houses in once again a very expensive area! The congregation is not that large! It is not exceedingly small but I just cannot believe the size of the congregation is supporting those operations without one or two or more very significant benefactors (which may exist). Also - pretty much the entire staff consists of the pastor's family and young adults from the most long-standing inner circle of church which is roughly only 20 years old! I realize people bequeath large sums of money in their wills to churches but this church is so young how blessed they would be if someone that had passed had already done that. Additionally, this is a high-income area and maybe there a number of generous givers in the congregation but it would take 100 tithing families on $200,000 salaries to hit the $2M in revenue they say they received. When I look in the buckets, if I assume every envelope is $200 and then make a rough calculation of the cash and assume some people auto-draft or text to give I still fall FAR short of the $40k per week they say they take in. And then, you say if they bring in $2M per year why not buy a church? The pastor is always preaching Malachi 3:10 to get himself a church built. Well, let me tell you, you can rent a church without opening any books or undergoing any audit but you cannot buy one unless you pay cash without doing those things. Furthermore, if this is a criminal conspiracy why would you park millions of cash rather than keep it liquid it unless you have billions you're working with? Oh, did I mention the pastor's brother who had a blue collar job his whole life is the accountant? SO I am highly suspicious of fraudulent government contracts or else someone has a very lucrative business and is laundering money and the whole church is a non-profit front. So in that case they are spying to look out for undercover investigators or moles of other varieties.
Anyways - it is entirely possible I hurt pastor's neice's feelings and he said to his military buddies 'let's get him!" and so they did and I am the only victim ever. If that is the case - I am 100% perfectly happy to allow the Lord to seek my vengence if any is due, and walk away, go on with life, and forgive and forget as I believe Jesus commanded.
However - if one of these suspicions is true, I should go forward. If there is some dirty paper trail that creates fraud I should offer what I know to the authorities. Even if they are simply trying to weed out the pedo's and adulterers and have good intentions, there are many victims unaware and maybe even a few aware (hence bodyguards) and should be stopped. I can tell you this has severely impacted my life, my psyche, my emotions, my relationship with God and in that case I think God put me there for a purpose, to make it stop.
I am also skeptical anything would come of me filing report. What would the local police do? Is the FBI going to believe there is substance or even care if they might believe me? Maybe it's just small potatoes to them or else they simply would not believe me or the church might have members strategically placed in almost every applicable agency aimed at protecting them if the fraud suspicion is true. Any words of wisdom?
So here it goes..
In the Spring of 2015 I started attending a new church, the church is in Northern Virginia and claims 'non-denominational' but has all the markings of Pentecostal such as speaking in tongues and the 3 baptisms and the pastor attended a Pentecostal seminary I believe.
Well, tbh I loved this church from the outset very much. The music was outstanding, everybody was super friendly, and it seemed very 'new age' in the sense few people wore suits or ties (most keep it pretty casual) and the band was like a rock/pop band rather than organ music with hymnals. EXACTLY what I wanted so I started regularly attending, early on I answered the sinner's prayer, soon after was baptized, and by Fall/Winter 2015 started volunteering as an usher.
Everything was going exceptionally well, I was new to the area and trying to find a group of people to connect with and in the Spring of 2016 they started doing small groups. The pastor's niece, only a few years younger than me invited me to her small group and became quite flirty with me. Well, skip all the nitty gritty details, things went awry in the communication dept. and we never even went out and she seemed quite upset. Thereafter, the pastor seemed to give me the impression he had a serious problem with me and probably wanted me to leave. He would give me nasty looks with sort of a snarl, etc. but I was hopeful it would all pass as most things do and kept attending, and his niece invited me back to her small group for the next session and hoping things would smooth over I kept attending.
So far, not too terrible, but then stranger and stranger things started occurring. The pastor would make seemingly out-of-place remarks in his sermon that would catch my ear as strangely coincidental in that they seemed to be specifically directed towards me in a thinly veiled manner. I thought "wow crazy coincidence"! But they kept happening, and by the 3rd or 4th time my mind was racing.
You're probably wanting an example, so let me use a slightly hyperbolic example. Let's say today you google: "Do rainbow colored unicorns have humans as pets and is their favorite food shepherd's pie?".
Now Sunday in church the pastor mentions rainbow colored unicorns and something about shepherds pie! MAN that will get your head spinning even once, but it is slightly less obvious than that (okay they were quite a bit more subtle than rainbow unicorns eating shepherds pie and a man of average iq might not have connected the dots or at least not as quickly as I did but I am actually quite intelligent and I did connect them rapidly) but nevertheless I withheld judgement until it continued to happen and I could no longer deny that the string of coincidences were not coincidences at all. So if you are wondering how could this be, let me tell you this church is in Northern Virginia and has a very heavy population of military and other federal employee personnel so without too much thinking it seemed obvious either someone in the congregation is in the intelligence/surveillance community or they have a connection.
Now this continued for quite some time and I learned that they had uncovered an online forum account - 100% anonymous - not this one but they probably knew about this one as well, it was one that was somewhat quite the opposite of this style forum where things often get quite incendiary, lascivious, absurd, and otherwise foul. I did not post those messages and many people use it for general discussion it is really supposed to be discussion and humor intertwined, but there is that foul undertone so I decided well I want to know 100% are they really surveiling me and how far does this knowledge spread? At this point, I believed he thought I was unaware his comments were directed at me or the surveillance that was taking place . So I started posting regularly, usually there was no mention of the church or anything related. I would make just general posts to throw some shade, and sometimes I would post something with some intent to see if it would illicit any noticeable responses, occasionally when I thought the opportunity presented itself to stay perfectly in the context of an already on-going thread I would throw in bits about the church or the pastor. So what I deduced was 100% they were spying on me and it was not just the pastor and a crony or two that knew about it, but that there was wide-ranging knowledge within the inner-circle members of the church. I was part of their gossip circle now. Okay so the obvious thing to do now is just leave, right? Okay I'm a little different, I wanted to see how much I could learn so I literally invested about another year or so of my life confirming my suspicions that this was going on and also trying to see if I could get clues of the source and also if this was something they frequently due or was I simply the victim of attack because I apparently hurt the pastor's niece's feelings?
I cannot say I figured it all out, I can only say I am 100% confident this was going on and happening to me, however, these are my 'probable suspicions':
- They regularly surveill on new members, however, normally nothing is said or done. My interaction with the pastor's niece elicited an emotional response from him, he seems to have terrible impluse control with no five-finger filter (I also share these proclivities so I will offer him a nod in that department). One of the biggest tells that led me to this conclusion is the pastor is constantly followed by a body guard. You can't really tell because it's not a big man dressed in a black suit open carrying a 9 mm or anything, it is generally one of the members of the staff or volunteers who is in the military. So, I suspect, I am not the only one who has ever found out and the pastor ffears physical retaliation. I also know this is not a new thing, because I did meet one person who had attended this church maybe 5-7 years prior to me for a short time and when I asked him why he didn't stay he mentioned the bodyguard thing. Actually, he kind of alerted me to it, it isn't 100% noticable unless someone makes you aware. They just kind of follow him around staying off to the side, but if you take a look he always has someone near him before he gets off the stage and walks around with the congregation. He also throws out mentions of there being concealed carrying guards mixed within the ranks of the congregation every once in a while, presumably as a deterrent to any would be retaliation.
Now the question is WHY? Why do they spy on new members? Is it simply because they can? I will admit, I'm curious, I will look people up on facebook and see what info they've made publicly available. If I want to know someones age I will google "first name last name city state whitepages" and frequently whitepages.com will have that person's age listed (honestly high accuracy there, kind of freaky). I will look things up in the tax record if I'm curious how much someone paid, etc. However, using Google or Facebook or tax records is not the same as using government surveillance tools and certainly the gossip and weaponization aspect are entirely different matters and you would think a congregation of sincere Christians would realize and not allow this.
So I have had many hypotheses but I have 2 that stand out:
1. This is a heavily military-concentrated population and adultery is rampant in the military I have heard. Also, a large number of kids, so they are trying to weed out adulterers and pedophiles before they can do any harm. I can see how they could rationalize this as 'righteous' up until the point they weaponize and gossip someone such as myself who is neither of those (although I do like nature), however, I still think it's wrong. It's an abuse of government power, and it is your job to guard your marriage and your kids in more traditional and legally acceptable manners.
2. I suspect fraud. As an usher I noticed, the offering buckets, they were very light! Is everyone on auto-draft? What is going on? Also, on the flip side, the expenses of the church must be crazy high! I would estimate $1.5M+ of expenses per year. They have a huge staff! 10-15 people I would guess and for a congregation that size a staff or 3-4 would seem much more appropriate. They have 2 buses, including one large one and one smaller sized one. They rent a large space in an expensive area. They throw parties in the parking lot. The sound and lighting and video equipment is top notch and there is a lot of it! Also - the pastor and his mother have two very large houses in once again a very expensive area! The congregation is not that large! It is not exceedingly small but I just cannot believe the size of the congregation is supporting those operations without one or two or more very significant benefactors (which may exist). Also - pretty much the entire staff consists of the pastor's family and young adults from the most long-standing inner circle of church which is roughly only 20 years old! I realize people bequeath large sums of money in their wills to churches but this church is so young how blessed they would be if someone that had passed had already done that. Additionally, this is a high-income area and maybe there a number of generous givers in the congregation but it would take 100 tithing families on $200,000 salaries to hit the $2M in revenue they say they received. When I look in the buckets, if I assume every envelope is $200 and then make a rough calculation of the cash and assume some people auto-draft or text to give I still fall FAR short of the $40k per week they say they take in. And then, you say if they bring in $2M per year why not buy a church? The pastor is always preaching Malachi 3:10 to get himself a church built. Well, let me tell you, you can rent a church without opening any books or undergoing any audit but you cannot buy one unless you pay cash without doing those things. Furthermore, if this is a criminal conspiracy why would you park millions of cash rather than keep it liquid it unless you have billions you're working with? Oh, did I mention the pastor's brother who had a blue collar job his whole life is the accountant? SO I am highly suspicious of fraudulent government contracts or else someone has a very lucrative business and is laundering money and the whole church is a non-profit front. So in that case they are spying to look out for undercover investigators or moles of other varieties.
Anyways - it is entirely possible I hurt pastor's neice's feelings and he said to his military buddies 'let's get him!" and so they did and I am the only victim ever. If that is the case - I am 100% perfectly happy to allow the Lord to seek my vengence if any is due, and walk away, go on with life, and forgive and forget as I believe Jesus commanded.
However - if one of these suspicions is true, I should go forward. If there is some dirty paper trail that creates fraud I should offer what I know to the authorities. Even if they are simply trying to weed out the pedo's and adulterers and have good intentions, there are many victims unaware and maybe even a few aware (hence bodyguards) and should be stopped. I can tell you this has severely impacted my life, my psyche, my emotions, my relationship with God and in that case I think God put me there for a purpose, to make it stop.
I am also skeptical anything would come of me filing report. What would the local police do? Is the FBI going to believe there is substance or even care if they might believe me? Maybe it's just small potatoes to them or else they simply would not believe me or the church might have members strategically placed in almost every applicable agency aimed at protecting them if the fraud suspicion is true. Any words of wisdom?
