The "Great" Commission of Gwen Shamblin and Remnant Fellowship

The “Great” Commission of Gwen Shamblin & Remnant Fellowship:

< PREVIOUS

Part 4

NEXT >

Removing Specks, Ignoring Logs

The Great Confrontation

We met with our senior pastor (one of the elders) and gave him a glowing report regarding the Remnant Fellowship church, and the powerful teaching that we had encountered there. We shared our excitement about being among a truly repentant body, and our concern for our church, because it seemed that so few were truly sold out for God “heart body soul and mind, 100 percent.” We also expressed concern because it seemed that there were members of the congregation who were openly living in rebellion to God, and that this did not seem to be addressed, either stridently from the pulpit, or in any form of church discipline. We asked our pastor to study the Remnant Fellowship materials and study them out with us.

In truth, I was hoping our pastor would study the passages, and agree to go over them in depth with us. He is a reputable New Testament scholar, and something didn’t feel right about what we were saying or bringing before him, but I didn’t know what. All I had to go on were some vague misgivings about Gwen Shamblin’s intentions. The only thing that I could put my finger on were my disagreements with the way she interpreted some passages of Scripture, and that she never seemed to want to discuss other legitimate ways these passages could be interpreted. But she had handed me her thoughts in a three ring binder in which she backed everything up with Scripture after Scripture. She had the Word of God on her side, supporting everything that she said. All I had was a feeling. In some ways, I hoped that my pastor would reveal to me what it was that I was missing.

We left that meeting without a lot of hope. Our pastor listened intently, but didn’t say much. He agreed to go over the materials in detail. And the elders agreed that we would meet again in the near future. Although that sounded promising, we were sure that, eventually, we would get the reaction we had been warned about; the leaders would close their ears to this message and refuse to listen to the truth that God’s Word had revealed. Nonetheless, I had an odd, almost guilty feeling in my heart. Both of the men I had just challenged with faulty leadership had actually been very kind and fatherly to me for as long as I knew them. It pained me to have to be the one to bring them such a tough message.

Over the next few weeks, we prayed that God would reveal the truth to our church eldership, and that they would see how, not only were there many in the church in rebellion to God, but that there were aspects of their own lives in rebellion to Him as well. We felt that we were being humble, but pride was running the show. There were some in our “little fellowship” that felt we had done our duty, passed on the warning, and that now we could leave that church and start somewhere else. Where we would go was a matter of debate. Some of us felt we should start a Remnant, New York City. Others (including myself) thought that if we were going to leave our present church, we should get to know the people at Remnant Fellowship a little better before putting ourselves under their authority. We didn’t want to make the same mistake we had already made, and wind up in a church with disempowered shepherding. However, I was still hoping that things would turn around at our church, and that we would find some common ground with our church elders.

We had a second meeting with our pastor and the elder who had attended the Remnant Weekend. We reiterated our concerns, again appealing to the compelling fruit of the Remnant Fellowship, and asked if he had read the materials. He had, and shared with us that what he saw in the Remnant Weekend lecture notes was “not the gospel.” He stated that, in his opinion, while there was a positive message of obedience to God, that the gospel of Christ had been distorted, and that there was a strange absence of reliance on the cross of Christ. He stated that the teaching seemed to emphasize man by man’s own efforts trying to do what God wanted him to do, rather than God working through people. It was difficult for us to hear, or even accept, as indoctrinated as we were with the message we had received at Remnant Nashville. After all, we had been prepared for the fact that the leadership at our church would not want to turn from their sins. Wasn’t this just confirmation of the prophecy we had received in Nashville?

We responded with the challenge that these things were being taught in our WD and Strongholds classes, and that many lives had been changed. If what we were teaching was wrong, why were we still being allowed to teach it? To our surprise, he agreed with us. He stated that we could no longer hold these meetings at the church, that the church would no longer sponsor them. Challenge accepted!

Before concluding that meeting, we told our pastor that if things did not change in our church, we felt called to leave. Before our impending “exodus,” we requested that the elders study out this issue with us in the Bible (perhaps to give us one last chance to convince them, perhaps so that they could convince us). We proposed setting up a regular study of this issue with all of the elders and all six members of our group. I don’t know to what degree this request was realistically considered by the elders. Looking back, I wish they had accepted the challenge.

Exhortation to Stand Firm

Throughout this entire process of meeting with our elders, various members of our group had remained in constant contact with the leadership at Remnant Fellowship. I had been encouraged to write to them to update them regarding our meetings with the elders, and after our first meeting, I emailed Jayne Fiedler (a counselor and psychologist who works on the Weigh Down staff, and a confidant of my wife), Joe Langsdon (a deacon for Remnant Fellowship), and the Northeast team for the Weigh Down Workshop. I informed them how the meeting had gone, including our pastor’s response. I received the following responses from Joe Langsdon and Jayne Fiedler. An email Joe wrote, dated July 9, 2001, included the following:

Please stay on the path that God is leading you down. Don’t be swayed. Don’t look to the right or the left and don’t look back. Follow the fruit. Stay strong. You are in our prayers.¹³

Also on that same day, Jayne Fiedler gave us her answer to our pastor’s concerns about the theological soundness of Remnant Fellowship doctrine.

God bless you my Friend in Christ — Stand on God’s Word and be firm-God calls us to obey, to DO His will, to repent from sin and HE gives us the ability to DO these things — it is then our choice as to whether we crown self or crown God Almighty — as you correctly stated, it is not the “flesh” that takes credit for these things, it is our willingness to die to self-will and our willingness to demonstrate this death by our loving obedience and submission to His Lordship ...the CROSS is THE most central aspect of Weigh Down materials in that it is only through Jesus Christ [sic] death that we even have this opportunity to approach the heart of God the Father — ONLY through Christ (who is our perfect model for death to self) can we know that it is possible to lay down sin, to obey wholeheartedly and to surrender self...¹⁴

These emails were so reinforcing, and reminded us that this was a spiritual battle. God was calling us to obey, and we needed to do His will in this confrontation with our church leadership. At the same time, there was a part of me that wanted to control the information flow from our group to the Remnant Fellowship leadership. I was not the only one communicating with Nashville, and I knew that my wife and her co-coordinator were giving regular updates of what was going on to various friends and associates at the WD headquarters. Something about that made me nervous, because our group had not decided to join Remnant Fellowship at that point. I certainly didn’t want to give them the wrong impression. We had decided in prayer as a group that whatever God wanted us to do, He would reveal it to us all, and that there would be no doubt.

Throughout the process of meeting with our pastor, we were also asked by David Martin to set up regular conference calls so that he could keep tabs on how we were doing. I recall having one conference call with him, Joe Langsdon, and a couple of other men from Remnant Fellowship. We also had a group conference call with all six of our group in New York and Gwen Shamblin, David Martin, Joe Langsdon, and a few other Remnant leaders. On most of these calls, we usually informed them how things were going with our meetings with our pastor; they always encouraged us, and they agreed to pray for our conversations with our pastor.

During these calls, some of us also asked questions about Remnant Fellowship, because it was still unclear concerning who was in charge of the movement. When we were in Nashville, David Martin had made a statement indicating that although he was a church elder, he submitted to Gwen’s authority as a prophetess. Furthermore, we were taught in Nashville that the church that God wanted would submit to the “global authorities” which he put in place, similar to the global authority that the apostles seemed to enjoy in the Book of Acts. Since I came from a church tradition that emphasized the autonomy of the local church, this was odd to me.

It was very important for me to nail down the parameters of this global authority. In the back of my mind, there was still the question of character; frankly, I just doubted the maturity of the leaders of the movement, given the example of the two elders. When in Nashville, I had hardly been able to interact with David Shamblin, one of the founding elders. He seemed uninvolved with the ongoing activities, at least that weekend. And David Martin, one of the other elders, seemed to indicate that he took his leadership cues from Gwen. What seemed to constantly revolve in my mind was whether this was truly how God had set up this church, or whether Remnant Nashville had been set up to accommodate Gwen Shamblin’s need to be in control. While I wanted to believe that they had the best of intentions, I couldn’t shake my doubts about integrity; I just wanted to make sure that there was nothing deceptive about what we were being told. More and more, I began to be the only member of our group who had serious doubts about the Remnant Fellowship in Nashville. Other members of our group began to become anxious to join their movement. I think that many wanted to join Remnant quickly because we had received so many nice calls, cards, and emails from members of Remnant Fellowship. All the attention and encouragement was intoxicating! It was such a contrast from the suspicious looks and “cold shoulders” we were getting from some of our current church family. Also, we were constantly being urged to get under God’s “rightfully appointed” authority, and that outside of that authority, we would be outside of His will, and prey to deception.

Leaving Babylon:
Our Departure From the “Counterfeit Church”

In early August, things came to a head with our pastor. My wife, who worked for over three years as his office manager, had begun to find the interpersonal pressure with him to be intolerable. The theological differences we felt were just too vast! They mutually agreed that they could no longer work together; consequently, she was fired, and left the office that day. We had one more meeting with our pastor, to inform him that we had changed locations for our Weigh Down and Strongholds classes, and to express our disappointment that he had fired Maria. He answered back that he could not have someone working under him who did not believe in what he was doing. We informed him that we were also disappointed he had not made any effort to study the issues with us. And we wanted to know whether there were any intentions on his part to make changes in our church.

He and the other elder present stated that he felt that we were trying to force the issue and moving too fast, but also that they felt that the message we wanted to bring to the church was flawed, and that they would not make room for it. We again challenged our pastor to compare the fruit of Remnant Fellowship with the fruit of our church. He responded with a statement that would stay with me for the next few months. “I know that the fruit of their church seems attractive. But, there are different kinds of fruit.” Our pastor pointed out how other Bible-based movements, in their desire to produce good fruit (evangelism, for example) for the Lord, had perpetuated spiritual abuse on their members and displayed “another kind of fruit.” These movements betrayed that man was behind them, because they had decided that the ends justified the means. “Remnant Fellowship seems excited and fervent about obedience and holiness. But it’s an excitement that seems to be based on man’s efforts, and when people are behind it, it eventually gets twisted. Mechanisms get put in to control people, and suddenly you have something very different.” Despite the outcome of our meeting, those words kept turning over in my mind.

That was the day that we left our church. Maria and I wouldn’t return until we were made much wiser.

From that point on, our small group began to meet as a small church three to four times per week, worshipping, praising God, and reading the Bible voraciously. We would devour whole books in one sitting, and looked for every opportunity to get together. We prayed over and over for God to reveal the next step in the journey for us. We began to follow the Corinthian model in our worship, each one bringing a verse or a song or a thought to share with each other. And always, nearly every time we met, we would discuss whether we should join Remnant Fellowship. Our group was seriously divided on this issue; most felt called to join Remnant. The two of us who had met with our pastor and elders felt that we should spend more time with them, perhaps even take another trip down to Nashville to talk over some issues with the leadership there. One thing Gwen had taught us was to scrutinize the leadership we were under. We felt it would be a mistake to not scrutinize them as well, as we knew them much less well than the leadership of our previous church. Gradually, the debates between us on the issue began to dominate our time together. I started to feel that I was the only one who seriously felt doubt about the decision. I was in an uncomfortable position. The main doubts I harbored were about Gwen Shamblin herself. How do you question the leadership of a movement that you are thinking about joining? For some reason I sensed she would be unapproachable on this issue.

Finally, the discussions in our group became too much, and it became clear that I was the only real holdout. We had been told several times we needed to get under a “true authority,” and begin to feel the benefits of tapping into the “true Head.” At the Remnant Weekend Gwen likened getting under a true church authority to tapping into the true heavenly brain, where that brain, not our rebellious selves, was in charge. Other members of the group were truly beginning to feel restless, and I was stalling. I agreed to take all my questions to Gwen in one final question-and-answer session, and settle in my mind once and for all how I felt about joining Remnant Fellowship.

On September 9, 2001 we called Remnant Fellowship to set up another conference call. We felt an urgent need to settle the issues, and although they were busy with shipping out Weigh Down Advanced, they agreed to have a conference call with us on September 12.

Before we could have this conversation, though, we woke up to the horrific events of September 11, 2001. Our city was shaken to its core when the World Trade Center towers fell to the ground. We could see the towers from our apartment window, saw the smoke and could see that they were no longer standing, but we couldn’t believe what had happened.
Compounding our fear was the fact that one of our group was a New York policeman stationed near Ground Zero. For hours after the attack he had still not called his wife. We prayed nonstop, afraid that he was dead, until he finally called home a few hours later. Again, we traded many calls between New York and our new spiritual friends in Nashville as they agreed to pray for our friend.

For the most part, their calls were a comfort. However, we noticed a disturbing trend among many members of Remnant Fellowship who were quick to label the attacks and resulting tragedy as acts of vengeance from God on our country for being so sinful and unrepentant. To say the least, it was insensitive. We still had no idea who or how many of our friends, Christian family, and coworkers might still be unaccounted for. Maria and I felt sick when we heard their interpretation of the event, and blatantly told them so.

ENDNOTES

¹³ Email correspondence received from Joe Langsdon, Deacon at Remnant Fellowship Nashville, July 9, 2001. Email on file. [BACK]

¹⁴ Email correspondence received from Jayne Fiedler, Counselor at Weigh Down Workshop and member of Remnant Fellowship Nashville, July 9, 2001. Email on file. [BACK]