[Ohio]

As I was leaving the Recovery system in 2005, reading the stories (e.g. Ingalls, So, Mallon, Anderson, etc.) of others who had successfully exited, one glaring observation stood out to me -- the Recovery as a whole is abusive on all levels. I had read about and witnessed first hand far too much real "bully behavior" from all areas of the program. I had long been instructed that much of this was simply "our unique way to perfect the brothers."

Nothing I have learned since then has changed my early conclusions. Despite our endless claims to be Philadelphia, the church of brotherly love, the opposite was mostly true, especially when it came to the leadership in the Recovery. Brothers in the Recovery have never learned how to treat one another according to our Lord's commands recorded in the scripture. When it comes to the leading brothers, mistreatment is the norm, not the exception. The pattern of abuse was learned from the top down, with WL himself as the source, the archetype of how not to treat other believers.

I still remember my shock within when one time brother Hope asked me if there was a single verse in the N.T. to justify our methods of public shaming and humiliation. What? It has to be in there somewhere! We had for so long prided ourselves in returning to the pure word, doing all things according to the scripture, and yet in the most rudimentary arena, how we treat one another, we were verse-less. The best we could do was to repeat the story of the mannerisms of some missionary sister in China.

Once we were able to discard the basic respects afforded one another, so much more of scripture was eventually discarded. Temper tantrums were not a loss of self-control, but a portrait of genuine honesty being expressed in the spirit. Lawsuits were not abject failures as Paul warned the fleshly Corinthians, but noble vehicles of righteous action reserved for those, like Apostle Paul, who were fighting the good fight of the faith, by appealing to Caesar. Similarly financial improprieties, moral lapses, and so forth were all covered up and justified by new Recovery "discoveries," without scriptural justification, and based on "new teachings."

On a personal level, the predictable response to those who might question these abusive means, was the expected, "aren't you a man, is not the divine dispensing enough for you, what are you here for anyway, did not our Lord suffer silently opening not His mouth, etc.?" For a people who boasted so much of partaking of the divine nature, we were so sorely short of expressing love to one another, the very centerpiece of God's nature.