At age 16, Matthew Fenner sensed that stability and acceptance in his life were missing.
As a teen he’d come out as gay, and his mother didn’t accept it. She’d also lost her job and struggled with the onset of multiple sclerosis. His parents had divorced; there were financial problems at home.
“I kind of had a moment where someone was actually just listening to what I was saying,” he says. He enrolled in the private church school for his senior year, and his mother and brother officially became church members with him. “I liked the idea of a fresh start,” he says
But his dream of a new beginning would become a nightmare.
Begun in 1979, Word of Faith was a secretive sect that embraced a traditional evangelical doctrine — and its founder and pastor, Jane Whaley, saw demons everywhere. “If you have a cold, it’s because you have a demon,” Paul Ditz, an attorney familiar with abuse allegations against the church, says inPeople Magazine Investigates: Cults,which airs Monday, July 8 at 8 p.m. ET onInvestigation Discovery. (An exclusive clip is shown above.) “If you are questioning Jane, it’s because you have a demon.”
Peyton Fulford
Fenner did not publicly question anything at first. He had been sold on the private school’s academic mission, and wanted to please his mom, who thought the church might be beneficial to him. But in Word of Faith’s practice of “blasting” prayer — where church members scream and allegedly punch and choke others under the belief this will exorcise perceived evil thoughts or acts — he came to sense a physical threat that one day would be turned on him.
“They look for people who are in a moment of weakness,” Fenner tells PEOPLE. “If you start kind of deviating or don’t live up to what they say, they make you feel like you’re ungrateful, or not thankful for the things God gives you.”
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Word of Faith Fellowship pastor Jane Whaley.Lucky8 Production
Matthew Fenner, at left, and Danielle Cordes.Peyton Fulford
The incident lasted more than two hours. “I began to get scared for my life,” he says.
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Cordes watched it unfold before she was called over to join in — and she panicked. “I knew if I tried to stop it,” she says, “I would be the next one in the circle.”
After the night ended, first Fenner, and then Cordes, fled Word of Faith, leaving behind family members and others within the church who subsequently turned their backs on them.
Then the district attorney’s office got involved, and the sect’s abuses and inner workings were thrust into the open.
People Magazine Investigates: Cults, Word of Faith, premieres Monday, July 8, on Investigation Discovery (8 p.m. ET/7 p.m. CT).
source: people.com
