POLITICAL POWER AND PROPHECY

Mark Graeser certainly used political power to exert his will and carry out Karen Anne’s prophecies. Graeser fired (or prompted to resign) at last four people who had been CES staff, including the CEO Dan Gallagher, Jeff Blackburn, Rachel Collum Darr (all fired) and Matthew Johnson (resigned).

Prophecies given by Karen Anne and others were often directed against board members who opposed Graeser. For example, Graeser wrote, “... there are other clergy whose character and behavior should be evaluated in the process– even possibly found disqualified for ministry for a while. Dan, John, Gary and Karen have all had serious character issues revealed during this ordeal, both prophetically and experientially” (p. 8) and mentioned other “prophetic warnings” against board actions (p. 2).

While the Graesers may not recognize it, they were running and promoting a theocracy.

Graeser noted that when he described a prophetic dream he had about Gallagher, John Schoenheit said Graeser was “using prophecy like a club” (p. 3). Prophets used prophecies to instruct BOD on how to handle personnel and followers. The goal of prophecy was to “protect the ministry,” but in practice it was actually used as a lever to protect the power of incumbent leaders. When prophecy drove away Elizabeth Lynn this was actually a political success, since some leaders saw her as a threat.

Ironically, CES seemed to have predicted this in their book Prophecy: Understanding and Utilizing the Manifestation of Prophecy. The chapter “The Gift Ministry of a Prophet” chided people for not constantly looking to prophets for direction in every situation in their lives, saying “Are we afraid that bold prophets would be dictators?” Perhaps if the CES board was more wary of prophets like Karen Anne becoming dictators, the crisis would not have mushroomed as it did.

While all this came to a head in 2006, the roots of it go back several years before. Other CES supporters left, or were pressured to leave in recent years. For example, two couples who were advisors to the board, Dave and Sue Carlson and Don and Laura Stone, were pressured to leave CES.

Theologically the crisis can be traced even further back– to 2000 when Mark Graeser attended an Advanced Deliverance Seminar and to1993 when Karen Anne and the board attended basic and advanced training in personal prophecy with Christian International. Both of these practices have done a lot of personal damage to individuals over the years, of whom Elizabeth Lynn is the most public example.

It is ironic that CES began partly as a reaction to the authoritarianism of The Way International-- yet it is just as authoritarian as TWI was. CES is run by the six member Board of Directors (BOD) much like TWI was run by the three (now five) member Board of Trustees. The BOD is not elected by CES members and is accountable to no one.

When Graeser was president he used his bureaucratic authority to fire staff he thought were a hindrance. He also used prophetical counsel and personal prophecies to exercise authority over individuals. They used the term “multitude of counselors” from the  Old Testament to rationalize allowing power to be wielded by a small clique of only a half dozen people. It is hard to imagine how five or six could be considered a “multitude.”

Graeser’s house cleaning is much like the housecleaning TWI founder V.P. Wierwille did just after he started the first Way Corps. Wierwille decided that the love of God did not work, and he had to “put teeth into the ministry.” He eliminated the first Way Corps and prominent early leaders such as Peter Wade, Steve Heefner and Dave Anderson. He introduced the “Way Tree” as a means to impose his control on everyone in TWI. Although Wierwille did not use personal prophecy as the Graesers do, he still claimed to work by divine revelation. He claimed God spoke to him audibly and told him he would teach the Word as it had not been known since the first century, and Wierwille said he taught the first Power for Abundant Living classes “by revelation.”

CES involvement in MOMENTUS, a Large Group Awareness Training (other LGATs include est and Lifespring) also influenced how CES worked and how its leaders interacted. They acquired concepts rooted in pop psychology such as “boundaries” and “consequences” to manipulate people. Confrontation was also a key feature of Momentus and CES (Elizabeth Lynn says John Lynn called it “spiritual aggression”). Leaders also used the Momentus concept of  “victim mentality” to pressure people to change behavior.