New Life Fellowship - The Story of a Cor...

New Life Fellowship - The Story of a Cor...

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New Life Fellowship - The Story of a Cortland Cult

Note: I am intentionally not revealing names of anyone involved with New Life nor of any associated businesses beyond myself and the pastor. I consider most everyone else to have been victims of this leader and will not expose them to further embarrassment.

Note 2: The following account including its conclusion posted elsewhere in this group may not be reproduced or shared anywhere or to anyone outside this group without permission from the author. Please respect this, thanks.

In another thread about the old Love Inn (now Covenant Love Community Church and School) on Rt 13 in Freeville, I mentioned that I was a member of its satellite church New Life Fellowship in Cortland (originally Cortland Covenant Church). Several people there urged me to tell the story of this quirky, insular church that for a brief time caused quite a stir in the Cortland community.

I am qualified to tell that story because I was not only a member of N.L.F, but for most of my time there, part of its leadership. I say that to my shame because of the harm the church caused in a number of people's lives, and also in the greater community. I have learned and changed much since then, so perhaps this account is in part my penance to the beautiful people of Cortland. At any rate, it's a small piece of Cortland history that deserves to be told, and I don't think anyone ever has written it up.

This will be a long post, and may even become several parts, so its only for those truly interested in the religious history of Cortland, or the vagaries of human nature in general.

In the early 70s my wife and I began to hear about what sounded like an amazing alternative Christian community forming in Central New York. When it's founder, Scott Ross, published his biography Scott Free, we devoured it and moving to Love Inn (as it was called at the time) became our dream. In 1977 on a visit I secured a job in Cortland and we moved up, settling in Cortland because of my job.

The story of Love Inn that leads to New Life Fellowship in Cortland began when New York City radio disc jockey Scott Ross found Jesus after traveling down to Virginia Beach to see Christan T.V network 700 Club founder Pat Robertson. Knowing Ross needed to get out of the rock-and-roll lifestyle that had taken over his life, Robertson offered him a job with the 700 Club.

Soon Robertson sent Ross and his wife Nedra (one of the original Ronettes) to Ithaca to take over management of a chain of radio stations he had just purchased that spanned across upstate New York. Driving by Peg Hardesty's dairy barn on Rt 13 one night he had an inspiration to start an alternative Christian community in the area. Soon he knocked on Hardesty's door and convinced him to sell her the farm.

Over the next year Ross recruited young, disillusioned Christians and other outcasts to help him remodel the barn into a lovely, rustic sanctuary and performance space. Scott and Nedra's vision was to have a community centered around excellence in the arts. He started preaching about “kingdom excellence,” the concept that God's people should be the best at everything, including the arts.

Over the next several years Love Inn attracted artsy and progressive young Christians from around the world. They launched a theater and dance company that produced original works and toured nationally. Eventually, gifted guitarist/songwriter Phil Keaggy made it his home base, bringing even more notoriety to Love Inn in the contemporary Christian music world.

In the early days, Love Inn was a sort of commune, with many of its members living in the barn. Eventually though Ross came to feel that many of these residents were freeloading, and he started to set out rules. After a while only the Ross family lived on the property (in a beautiful log home the church built out back) and members were required to have their own residences and jobs.

Along the way Love Inn had evolved from being a Christian community/arts center/commune to becoming a full fledged independent church. But the independent part was not to last for long.

Ross became associated with Christian Growth Ministries of Fort Lauderdale F.L. C.G.M was a union of five prominent itinerant evangelist/teachers in the nascent Charismatic (neo-Pentacostal) movement then sweeping much of the evangelical and even Catholic church. The C.G.M teachers taught that every Christian needs to be directly discipled or “shepherded” by a more mature Christian. Hence their movement came to be known as the Sheperding Movement. They began to each personally disciple a select group of prominent pastors. Each pastor was to disciple the elders in his churh, and in turn the elders discipled groups of the adult males in their churches. In larger churches there would be a pyramid structure, with multiple layers of discipleship groups all leacing up to the pastor, and then the pastors submitting to higher pastors (sort of like bishops in traditional churches) and so on up to the five teachers in Florida.

This submission was to be in every area of life. A man was expected to have open to his discipler his job decisions, his finances, his family life, and even his marriage and sex life. A young man in the church could not ever marry a woman without their shepherds' approval.

When my wife and I moved to Cortland with our infant daughter in 1977, Love Inn was in the midst of that radical transformation. As part of the changeover, L.I changed its name to Covenant Love Community Church. The concept of “covenant” (a solemn contract of loyalty) between the church and God and among the church members themselves was a key concept of the Shepherding movement. Along with the teachings on personal discipleship submission, it was the source of much that would become controversial about these churches.

Soon after arriving, we were introduced to Paul Freed. At 27 he was already one of the leaders at C.L.C. He asked us to join him with a small group of C.L.C attendees who lived in Cortland as C.L.C had asked him to found a satellite church in that city. There was already a small satellite church in King Ferry. We agreed, and soon began having our Sunday meetings in a member's finished basement in Cortland.

Not known to us until much later was the real reason Freed was asked to move to Cortland to found an offshoot church. His arrogance had made him a pain to the other C.L.C leadership, but his natural charisma meant people would follow him. So they decided to use him to help the church grow, but at a convenient distance.

Cortland Covenant Church, as it was known in the beginning, began to grow rapidly, and soon was too big to meet in a home. Because of mandatory tithing from all members, and even bigger giving strongly encouraged from wealthier members, the church soon had enough funds to purchase 16 Church Street (depicted at the top of this post) as its new headquarters.

One of the things the Shepherding movement encouraged, and Freed capitalized upon, was the forming of “kingdom businesses.” These were indlependent enterprises that were to hire only Christians (and mostly or often exclusively Covenant church members). One of the C.C.C-spawned businesses was a construction company. Under their guidance, and with the labor of mandatory (for all adult male members) Saturday morning work days, we extensively remodeled 16 Church Street into church offices upstairs and a school downstairs. Not long after we built a large building behind the house that would b the church sanctuary and additional classrooms.

Another key teaching of the movement was “kingdom excellence,” the idea that God's people should do everything above and beyond the ordinary. This was rooted in the more fundamental kingdom or dominionist theology of the movement, the idea that the kingdom of God was not something we were to wait for in heaven, but something we were to build here and now. In this teaching, Christians would eventually come to rule the entire earth, and Jesus would return not to snatch his church away, but to preside over an already functioning earthly kingdom.

So everything we did was supposed to reflect this kingdom excellence. Members were expected to keep their homes and even their vehicles in immaculate condition at al times. Men were even encouraged to carry fancy Cross pens and luxurious looking Daytimer pocket planners like executives, even common laborers. It was an inside joke in the movement that the sign of a truly covenanted man was not his heart but his Daytimer and Cross pen.

At the church level, we put in countless hours to make 16 Church Street a showplace. But only a few outsiders ever saw the lavishness of Pastor Freed's office, with richly carved wood paneling and custom build book shelves and expensive antique furnishings.

Another key teaching of the movement was the importance of authority. We were taught that how you responded to earthly authority, and especially to any authority over you in the church, was how you treated God's authority. It was never said explicitly, but the clear implication was that questioning your leaders was like rebelling against God. You can imagine the abouse that could lead to, and as you'll see from my story, that's exactly where things went.

Freed took a liking to me and observed that others liked and respected me, so he rapidly promoted me in leadership, until I was one of the original set of elders of New Life Fellowship, which the church became some time after moving to Church Street. The name change is significant, because it was done to intentionally differntiate us from our “mother” church Covenant Love Community. Almost immediately after moving to Cortland, Freed began to plot how he could separate our church from being under the Freeville church. His goal was to raise himself up to Scott Ross's level, to become one of the national “bishops” relating directly to one of the five Florida teachers. Everything Freed did during the 15 years I was with him was motivated by his sense of self ambition and desire for power and notoriety.

Eventually I would come to know more about his past that went beyond the carefully constructed story he told all of us. The part he did want us to know was that he was the eldest son of the founder of Trans World Radio ministries, back in those days one of the largest Christian missionary organizations in the world. T.W.R built massive short wave networks covering the globe to broadcast gospel programming into every country. Paul Freed saw himself as being born into Christian royalty, and destined for the kind of greatness and notoriety his father had achieved.

Continued at facebook dot com U.R.L

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