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Breaking
Free
(From the Mason’s Website)
From The Daily Nation, Wednesday, January 19, 2000
(The Daily Nation is a newspaper in Kenya)
The church in the article below is one of the many churches established by
Lloyd L. Goodwin. This church-- like the other churches in the Goodwin
organization-- looks to the Des Moines GAC for leadership. In fact, you can
see below that their church building looks almost exactly like the Des Moines
church building.
 Breaking
free
Spouses torn apart as church loyalties
clash
by Kaplich Barsito
Beneath Zablon Mukoshi's warm smile and
bright face lurks extreme frustration -- his wife is loyal to another man, a
pastor.
Zablon says that his wife Alice cannot
do anything without the clergyman's permission. She has to seek the
permission of her pastor to travel with him to their upcountry home.
It is not just Alice. The Rev. Alois
Rutivi has a spell on many other women. Mukoshi claims Mukoshi himself used
to follow Rev. Rutivi with a fanaticism he only discarded two years ago when
he broke away from his mental captivity.
Mukoshi left the church seven months
after their wedding in November, 1997. He still lives with his wife, but
feels that he has lost her to the church. Now, as he celebrates his escape
from what he terms a manipulative cult, there is nothing he can do about the
hold the man of God has on his wife.
Alice used to work for the Rev. Rutivi
before she met and wedded Zablon Mukoshi. Mukoshi claims that like other men
who have married in the church, he had to get the approval of the pastor
before he proposed to Alice.
 "There the pastor has the final word on
whether you will marry a particular woman or not," he says.
He misses the company of his wife as
she is involved in church services most of the time. "But what is worse
is that on Sundays, my wife leaves a three-month-old baby at home in the
morning and arrives back well after 8 pm."
Alice says her husband wants to drive
her out of the church she has been part of since 1986 when she was in
Standard Eight. she will not let it happen, she vows.
"There is no way I will leave
church and backslide (fall back) from salvation. My husband backslid six
months after our wedding and left the church, I will not do the same."
she said in a telephone interview yesterday.
Alice says her husband should not use
the excuse of their domestic problems to besmirch the church.
But what kind of marriage does the
couple have?
Couples are not issued with marriage
certificates when they tie the knot in the church. Those who have defected
claim this is a scheme by the leaders to maintain control over the couple.
"Without the marriage certificate,
your marriage is not legally recognized and you are at the mercy of the
minister," says Mathew Musau, who was a missionary with the church. He
has since left and started his own church.
This and differences over matters of
doctrine are what made me leave the church, says Mukoshi.
The Gospel Assembly Church has a
vice-tight grip on its 800-member congregation, so tight that the worshippers
are cut off from family and relatives. Musau says the church programmes at
the church are tailored to ensure that people are so involved that they have
no time to see friends, relatives or visit other churches.
"This is one of the many ways used
to have a hold on the lives of the members," he claims.
There was no freedom to mix with other
people, he says. You had to call and inform the pastor who you wanted to
visit and why. The pastor had the power to veto any visit, which he deems not
good for the member's spiritual well-being. Mukoshi gives the example of a
couple which disagreed, the church recommended that the wife goes and lives
with a church elder and the man ordered to pay for her upkeep.
George Ongoro, who was a member of the
Gospel Assembly for 15 years before he quit two years ago, says: "We
were taught and we believed that we were the only people of God in the whole
world. To us, there was no salvation in any other church."
And for one and a half decades, Ongoro
regarded other churches and religions as destined for hell and took pride in
the fact that his denomination of 3,000 people worldwide were the chosen
people who would go to heaven.
At what cost?
Members are encouraged to make heavy
financial commitments. People have sold off property and taken loans to give
money to the church because the leadership says so.
Ongoro had to take a Sh50,000 loan to
donate towards the construction of the church located in Nairobi's Ruaraka
area. He took two years repaying it.
"When the construction work began,
many people were financially stripped bare. Others sold houses and cares to
give money to the church," he adds.
In this church, says Ongoro, people are
ruled by fear of what can happen to them if they leave. "I know of two
women who became mad after leaving the church in the mid-1980s. If one is not
properly counselled, he or she can die after quitting."
The faithful are taught that God will
judge them if they abandon their faith in the church.
 Ongoro says he is all celebration for having
finally broken free of the church and its teachings. "I thank God that I
left and I continually pray for those still there."
But Ongoro says having been in the
church for all those years, he has realized that the level of deception runs
deep and the current leaders may not even be responsible for it.
"Even the Rev. Rutivi needs help. He
joined the church like anyone of us and was taught the same doctrine, I thus
cannot point an accusing finger at him."
Another former member of the church who
left last year is grateful that he was able to leave. "It was one place
where the teachings were so systematic that you did not realize that you were
a captive until you quit," says the woman who did not want to be named.
Yet another past member, speaking on
condition of anonymity, says he quit the church last year after 13 years. He
has vowed never to attend any organized church service which is led by a
pastor.
"I will only participate in a
church led by elders as required by the Bible and not by a single
individual," he said in a telephone interview.
Pictures:
Zablon Mukoshi (extreme left) explains
how he left the Gospel Assembly Church in Ruaraka, Nairobi, seven months
after wedding Alice (left). Above is the couple's daughter, Deborah. (Zablon
Mukoshi's picture by REBBECCA NDUKU)
The Gospel
Assembly Church in Ruaraka. Inset is the church's spokesman, Clement Kaula.
Denomination relies to defectors'
accusations
It is all lies, say church leaders
By Kaplich Barsito
What does the church leadership say
about the accusations of high-handedness levelled against it?
"It is all lies," says the
Rev. Rutivi. "These are people who have left the church and you can
expect them to justify their departure."
The fact that Musau has started his own
church, says the Rev. Rutivi, is clear testimony that he left because of
other ambitions and not because something was wrong with the church. The Rev.
Rutivi says it is not true that his church claims to be the only one sheltering
the people of God.
"We have never said so and we
cannot preach it because God has called different churches for different
reasons. Each church is called to fulfil a particular purpose," the
clergyman says.
Clement Kaula, the spokesman for the
Gospel Assembly, is firm that the church has no unseemly practices.
"You have talked with me for the
last half-hour, do I look or sound brain-washed?" he asked after an
interview at Utalii Hotel.
He admitted that people have sold
property and even taken loans to give money to the church "But out of
their own persuasions and conviction and not coercion of any nature.
"We tell the members to pay their tithe
(10 per cent of their income) which is compulsory according to the
Scriptures. They can also give a free-will offering of whatever amount they
desire," he says.
Kaula says each time there is a need in
the church which requires money, like the putting up a building, members are
asked to make donations.
On allegations of doctrines which have
destroyed marriages, Kaula says a woman has an equal right to determine her
place of worship as a man. "If a husband decides to leave the church for
whatever reason, the wife should not be forced to abandon her faith to follow
him."
Kaula says they do not match-make for
those who want to marry. "Unless, of course, someone is shy and asks a
church elder to assist in approaching a young woman in the church, then that
will be at a personal and not official level."
The claims that the church is out to
wreck marriages is false he says, because sustaining strong marriages is at
the core oft he church's teachings.
Gospel Assembly does not control
people, cutting them off from relatives, according to Kaula. All that the
church does is to give them spiritual nourishment. The strong attachment they
have to the church is a show that they are happy, the spokesman says.
He admits, however, that marriage
certificates are not issued on time due to administrative flaws in the
church.
"We normally do not issue them on
the wedding day because we like to type them nicely, so we tell people to
come for them after a week. Sometimes they come and find them not
ready."
He says it is not true that the church
uses the absence of certificates as a way of controlling marriages.
Couples who have since left the church
are free to collect their marriage certificates, Kaula adds.
Webmaster's thoughts:
I'd like to comment specifically on Ritivi's quote:
"It is all lies," says the Rev. Rutivi. "These are people
who have left the church and you can expect them to justify their
departure."
What Alois Ritivi fails to note is that this is a commonplace occurrence
for the Gospel Assembly Churches, yet it is NOT commonplace for other
churches. In other words, most people that leave a church do not accuse it of
being a cult, or using controlling tactics. For example, how many Lutheran
ex-members or Methodist ex-members or [insert almost any church here]
ex-members do you know that have accused their church of being a cult simply
to "justify their departure"?
When one examines the logic of Rev. Ritivi's statement, it is easy to see
that it doesn't add up.
The bottom line is that usually where there's smoke, there's fire.
-MDD
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