The Long Road from Jonathan Edwards to Steve Lawson. Aged Sultans and their young harems.
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun”.
Ecclesiastes 1:9
In this article I will discuss things that I believe have been grossly overlooked regarding the endless stream of horrible scandals and abuses coming from Grace Community Church. What has been causing these scandals and why they never end and will never end. I was a member of this church for about 10 years. The last 2 years I practical only attended the Sunday fellowship groups held at the TMS building and skipped MacArthur’s messages because of the stupidity of its contents. When I left the church I cut all my ties with everyone I knew in this church and didn’t visit their websites or Facebook pages because I was utterly disgusted at the things that I had seen with mine own eyes. I do not consider this as a Christian church by any stretch of the imagination. My article will be blunt and brutal, so I do not recommend people to share it on their pages unless they want others to be exposed to uncomfortable shock therapy.
Americans, specially those in GCC, like to endlessly talk about topics and dance around issues. When something can be said in 5 minutes they end up talking about it for hours, and for some reason they call this “articulation”. Therefore they knew me as the “straight shooter” guy, or the guy who is “off the charts”, or, “Mr Controversy”.
I guess there has been an objective reason to the “madness in my methods” approach. I am a businessman and I am forced to be a good steward of my time, since time is money. I have fixed it so that I have my own business and I depend on no one for anything. I answer no human being and I can say anything I want and I am not afraid of losing my job or being sued. I have no job to lose. Even in my business dealings when I have business related phone conversations I keep all phone calls below 2 minutes. If it passes 2 minute limit it means it’s a sign I am wasting my time and I hang up the phone. My average business phone calls are 1 minute 25 seconds, approx. I am never concerned about losing any deals or business partnerships because there are 10 times more deals that I have every day on my desk than I can manage and I see everyone as being replaceable. I am really never emotionally attaching myself to any deals or partners. Ok, enough about me, that was just some courtesy introduction for those poor, sick, and downtrodden exiles who have fled the hellhole called GCC.
If you think this introduction is bad it’s just going to keep going down from here.
Much has been written about Steve Lawson’s sins and their coverup by Sun Valley (Grace Community Church) and Dallas (Trinity Bible Church). And it has become abundantly clear that for a long time there were alarming signs from Dallas to Sun Valley that Lawson was living a not so secret life of adultery. And of course, Phil Johnson’s very sloppy efforts post crisis and GCC/TMS’s narrative shaping team are hard at work trying to retroactively buy insurance policies by claiming ignorance … doesn’t help at all, it more often than not verifies the claims of critics that everyone knew what had been going on for years but were terrified to publicly and loudly say anything for fear of being unemployed by losing their church job and starving to death because they live in Kabul where there are no other available means to make a living. And the more heretic-in-chief Phil Johnson gets on the internet and uses his fat fingers to type things, the more he incriminates himself and makes himself a punching bag for his young and energetic critics.
Many former GCC and Trinity Bible Church members, who have left these churches disillusioned and who have familiarity of the church politics and MacArthur’s praetorian guard tactics, know well what has happened and how things have gotten to this point with the Lawson incident. However, since they themselves were a product of these theologically illiterate churches and have no grasp of America’s Protestant development in the last 400 years and how it has produced nephilim-like monsters like JMac, Lawson, Morris, Evans, these young people therefore can not theologically articulate the reasons of such men’s diabolical behaviors and they keep asking “why?”.
Plus, these noble young men and women, having come from these infantalizing and ambition destroying churches, don’t seem to understand the business realities and dynamics of the behavior of such nephilim.
First things first.
“Money is the answer to everything”
Ecclesiastes 10:19b
Basically, everything in life starts with money, says Solomon, and those of us who are old enough and live down here on planet earth(and not on planet fantasy) can confirm this fact from our practical observations and real life experiences. Everything starts with the stomach, from the food table. And those who tell you money is evil and money shouldn’t define or decide anything, those are the people who will most likely rob you blind, those are the ones who will make every effort in their sermons (or motivational speeches) to make your eyes focus on heaven so they can empty your pockets.
If you want to understand John MacArthur or Steven Lawson then follow the money.
When I am invited to speak at investment and real estate seminars I start my speech by saying ….
“There are 3 most important things in this life,
1. Money
2. Money, and
3. Money”.
Of course I am somewhat using exaggeration to make a point. But this is basically true in every situation. This is the point that I couldn’t communicate across to Hohn Cho back in 2009 when I left GCC in disgust and indignation. Back then I was in the same youth group (meat factory) with Hohn (and some others who are reading this article) where he sometimes preached, and I ate food with him several times. And coming from Eastern hemispheric traditions, breaking bread with someone is making covenant with that person so I still loved and respected Hohn. But Hohn had written me an email after he had read my online criticism of JMac after I had left the church, and Hohn sent me veiled intimidation and humiliation mixed text. Hohn was a product of GCC and had already become poisoned by their teachings and mafia style methods. I was absolutely furious at Hohn’s email and wrote him that the reason I hadn’t already driven a peg thru his brain and nailed his head on the wall was because I had high respect for Korean people, and that if he really loved his new wife then he would take her and run as fast away and as far away from GCC as possible before he had become totally damaged and before he had destroyed any lives and marriages there. I also wrote Hohn in detail some of the abominations that I had seen going on in GCC, things that are even not found among unbelievers. So Hohn was without excuse. Hohn, just like the rest of us, being young and inexperienced didn’t really know how real life worked and didn’t appreciate the dangerous situation he had put himself and his wife in.
Some brief background to help the readers.
MacArthur didn’t grow up in a wealthy family. In fact, they must have been so poor that when JMac was a teenager he was tempted to rob a convenience store and was caught and thrown in a jail in Glendale, CA.
Now, JMac over the years has accumulated over $200 million dollar wealth by his business acumen, crowd control skills and advertising genius. And, christian sentiments aside, we have to give it to JMac that he is a brilliant businessman. He is actually the most successful businessman I have ever known.
And brilliant businessmen who rise from the ashes must show brutality and callousness in order to become THAT wealthy. Stupid people do not accumulate that much wealth by being kind and spiritual and loving and patient and willing to be wronged.
When I first read Hohn’s post departure article on ChristianityToday I couldn’t but marvel at his naiveness. Hohn probably didn’t understand the full financial implications of what he was asking JMac the other nephilim around him to do. By asking the church (owned by JMac) “to make it right” with Eileen Gray Hohn was asking JMac to walk away from his $200 million dollar wealth (back in early 2000’s it should have been very clear to all of us when David Gray didn’t show up to teach us Bible study in the library basement since he had purposely overdosed on drugs so he wouldn’t show up at his child molestation court appearance and face the music).
A man(JMac) who was first in his family’s history (going all the way back to Noah) who made it to $1 million wealth and then multiplied it by 200 is going to give it up for the sake of truth and integrity ?
Everyone with a brain the size of a peanut should understand that “making it right with Eileen” would not end with Eileen, it would just be the beginning of the end for GCC, JMac, TMS, TMU, GTY. All of these JMac controlled institutions would be buried alive, and very fast.
Of all the people, Hohn, being an attorney who lives in Los Angeles, should know that there are 27,000 attorneys in LA, that is more than in all of the country of Japan. And many of those attorneys haven’t even paid half of their quarter million law school debts, and they would be more than willing to freely take these easy-to-win church abuse cases with an army of witnesses and paper and text trails. And in these situations, with such massive organizations, once you start opening one or two cases they start to quickly multiply and snowball into a massive avalanche that eviscerate everyone in their paths. And where the corpse is, there the vultures gather for feast.
Did anyone actually believe MacArthur was going to voluntarily allow himself to be on the menu ?
You guys are cracking me up when I read some of your naive tweets regarding things such as dignity, honesty, truth, accountability, and other such non sense. Exactly, these things are non sense when it comes to demonic individuals like MacArthur and his elder board and TMS. Those things are only virtues when it comes to true christianity. And if someone believes that GCC is a christian church they need to have their heads examined.
Revival vs Reformation
As for Steve Lawson, this man is a product of the phenomenon that happened in 1720-‘s and 1730’s America (he wasn’t merely a “reinvention” by MacArthur). That is when the phenomenon of The Great Awakening happened. The great awakening was shaped by the preaching of Jonathan Edwards, and Lawson studied and wrote about Edwards, and herein lies Lawson’s problem. Edwards was the most dangerous person that has ever happened to American christianity. He himself was surely paedobaptist, which was good, but unfortunately he did much to destroy the paedobaptist traditions and beliefs, and Christianity in America.
He would go from church to church and preach to people that they aren’t Christians at all and everyone needed to question their salvation. What this did to people was all those young people who were born in Christian families and were taught the right doctrines from their childhood and who loved Jesus and obeyed Jesus, BUT, who at the same time were going thru transformational youth crisis, which we all go thru as our hormones and personalities develop, all of a sudden they were made to believe that they were not Christians at all and they needed to REPENT REPENT REPENT (familiar? GCC, MacArthur, Lawsonian methods) and become born again and be baptized by water again.
Certainly, one bright spot of the Great Awakening was that it shaked the dead orthodoxy that hang over New England churches of that time. It’s a testimony to the fact that God can use even bad things to improve his church. But in general, for one good thing that the Great Awakening accomplished it inflicted 1000 other evils on the church. Anabaptist heresies advanced rapidly and christian parents stopped baptizing their children.
A modern example of the effects of great awakening of 1700’s … when I was at GCC I would hear from young couples referring to their newborns as “pagans”, which was pretty shocking and dehumanizing, a wicked thing to say. How can people be so vile, cruel and stupid at GCC ?
And yet it was one of many dehumanizing things of this satanic church, not the only one. And if people at GCC insult their own newborn children like that, you can guess how they will treat others.
Our children are our covenant children, and we tell them that “kids, we are going to heaven and you are coming with us”. There is no democracy here. We pump christian propaganda into their heads and hearts and souls every day. And as parents are, so are their kids. You can tell a lot about people by watching their children.
But as far as revivals are concerned, there is no such thing in the Bible. There is reformation in the Bible, not revivals. The difference ? Revivals are short, they happen fast, they are emotional and charismatic. They start fast and they end fast. They don’t require any hard work, no cathechising, no slow learning hard intellectual things, and it’s anti intellectual by nature.
Revivals are like sex, the best part is just before it ends. Or you could say religious revivals are like masturbation.
In contrast, biblical reformation takes a lot of time, it’s slow, requires a lot of reading and learning. Luther didn’t start a revival, he started reformation by decades of reading and studying and learning and hard work. Revivals bring in multitudes of people over a short time. Reformations are very slow and very few people become part of it, but they are lasting.
The terrible effects of 1700’s great awakening are still today with us. It created the Baptist movement, the charismatic movement, and it created John MacArthur, Steve Lawson, Robert Morris, Tony Evans and other such demonic individuals who are busy destroying human beings and marriages. And what is the reason of their popularity ? Why are such men so popular over and against the local preachers of small churches ? Because these revivalist pastors have mega churches which are well oiled cash producing machines, and they build classy modern impressive buildings and sound systems and have large choirs.
Moreover, these men never shepherd their local churches and never attend to their needs.
They have “5 shiny sermons” and they go around churches and conferences and preach these 5 shiny sermons for 5 weeks and they greatly impress their listeners. And then they go to other conferences and churches as guest speakers and preach these same 5 shiny sermons and impress other multitudes. Hence their popularity.
In contrast, the faithful shepherd of a small local church has to deal with marriage and family and a host of other issues of his local congregation, spend time with them, do the difficult task of praying for them and admonish them, and then he has to write 2 new sermons for Sunday, and another 2 NEW sermons and studies for the weekday Bible studies and men’s meetings. And obviously these sermons aren’t as shiny as those of the above pastors. These small church pastors can not compete with those celebrity pastors, just like the aged wives of celebrity pastors can not compete with young christian college females for the affection of their ever traveling husbands.
I joined a small faithful church and within the first 3 weeks the pastor visited my house. I was stunned. And even more, he is available 24/7 whenever I need him.
I have his personal cell phone number and he responds promptly.
Go and ask GCC members who have attended this church for the last 30 years and try to find one whose house MacArthur has visited or who has visited MacArthur’s house. They will think you are crazy to even ask such a question. It’s really an unconscionable thing. Does a billionaire visit the house of a thousanaire? That would be such a strange thing. Even blood siblings separated by such a great chasm in their finances don’t visit each other or have meaningful covenant relationships with each other.
“Money is the answer to everything”, says Solomon, specially when it comes to understanding GCC-Lawson-TMU-TMS-GTY evangelical industrial complex.
But it’s clear that the local small church pastor can not compete with the likes of Steve Lawson and MacArthur. The small faithful church pastor has to individually deal with a divorce case over here, an adultery case over there, another sin or problem issue over there.
GCC Cases.
By the way, these cases aren’t exceptions at GCC, they are rather the rule, it’s baked in the cake due to above mentioned conditions.
When I was attending GCC they had taught me and others that christians don’t divorce and divorce at GCC and in the local universe that MacArthur had created and lorded over is something very rare. So, in 2007 my friend’s sister at GCC was going thru marriage problems. They had two small kids. She was a godly woman, he was a permanently unemployed lazy bum, whom Paul calls worse than a non believer who wouldn’t provide for his family. I knew both of them personally. So one Sunday morning right after MacArthur’s sermon JMac is standing at the front taking questions from a line of sheep who are lined up to ask him questions. I was standing with my friend close to them and I saw she was talking to JMac asking about her marriage situation. JMac advised her that she can divorce him.
The very next Saturday morning I am at a 7 am men’s meeting led by none other than Bill Shannon. And then I see this woman’s husband joining us for the men’s meeting. I am stunned. What is this guy doing here ?
I approach Bill Shannon and tell him that this guy has destroyed my friend’s sister’s life and he can’t be here with us. Bill Shannon sternly rebukes me and tells me that he knows him and “he is a very good Christian”. I can tell you now, at that moment if I had a knife with me I would have stabbed Bill Shannon. I couldn’t even concentrate on what men were saying in that study. After the study I walked to the parking lot, sat in my car and broke down in tears. I felt my whole world collapsed. I am a man and I am sitting there in my car weeping. You could say I was being Hohn-Cho-ed.
3 months later, when this couple was already divorced, I saw them in GCC courtyard right after church service standing 10 meters away from each other with lots of people in between them, and their 2 little kids would go back between the father and the mother. This is the mess MacArthur’s ministry had wrought. It was an unbelievable sight to behold.
I asked one of the GCC leaders what is going to happen now, and he told me “nothing much, they are free to find a souse for themselves”, just like that. And when I asked him, if they each find their own spouses and stay in GCC, how are they going to look at each others’ faces during Sunday morning services ? He was forced to admit that “I guess maybe some people have no shame”. Well, no it’s not them who are shameless, it’s MacArthur, his wife and children and the elders and stuff who are shameless bastards, who have created this sick unhealthy environment which makes GCC look more like hell than heaven.
And then as I got to know more and more people I saw a lot more such devastated lives. Conservative husbands and wives (GCC members) with 3-4 little kids divorcing.
There were some weeks when I saw 2 divorces in that one week.
Oh, and one day I am sitting with a bunch of Crossroads local bible study students at a Downtown LA restaurant at 11:00 pm. There were about 25 of us. And one of the guys started praising TMU and how reliable their students and graduates are as marriage candidates. And I told him in front of others that the divorce rate of TMU graduates is %55. There was party crashing total silence. Everyone looked at me with shocked faces. “Did this guy really just say that?”.
“Ok, how do you know”, came the challenge question ? Oh, Bill Shannon was once teaching a statistics class at TMU and he had given his students project assignment to do divorce statistics of TMU graduates, and it hadn’t ended well when they discovered it was %55.
Since MacArthur has the habit of saying christians don’t divorce and %99 of his church are true christians, one scrupulous LA reporter had gone and done research on TMU graduates divorce rates and had presented the facts to MacArthur.
Bill Shannon’s project assignment was meant to prove the “unbeliever reporter” was set on maligning good Christian people at GCC. It ended up confirming what the man had found, and they quickly buried the project assignment results.
For obvious reasons there are no stats of GCC member divorce rates but from my personal first hand observations the rates are as bad as the national average or even worse.
GCC actively believe that men are “reason” and women are “emotion”. Those who have been part of this church will attest to this.
It’s only women who get emotional. YEAH ROGHT. Men are the higher part(brain) and women are the lower part(feelings). This is pure Greek paganism.
And hence men are the strong ones and women are the weak ones. Men are stable and women are unstable, so the teaching goes at GCC and TMS and TMU. This kind of attitudes are like a freight train rushing into the church life and destroying marriage relationships.
Practical life shows us that women are much stronger than men, they live longer than men because they have more stamina than men. Women are not more emotional than men, women are more stable than men and more protective of their home. They don’t take foolish risks. Women are the conservative and stabilizing force in society. Men are often given to emotional highs and lows.
Case 2
Eschatologies that lead to poverty and orgies
Another person that I knew, who was a TMS student and Bible study leader, was trying to train his 2 year old toddler kid to sit still in church for 1.5 hours on Sunday morning. And how did he do it ?
At his home he would sit his toddler in a chair and physically restrain him with his both hands around that toddler for long periods of time. The kid would cry and cry and cry and scream and get exacerbated by his abusive TMS, student father.
If in the past you heard about child abuse at GCC and didn’t know what it looked like, this is what child abuse looks like. These things aren’t isolated incidents, this type of child abuse behavior is endemic at GCC. This is absolute violation of Ephesians 6:4. And as Jesus says, it would be better if a millstone was hang around these people’s necks and they were thrown to the bottom of the ocean for causing these little ones to stumble.
And stumble they did, as massive number of kids raised in GCC abandon the faith when they grow up.
Back in those days I was a young 20 year old with no kids and didn’t understand the gravity of these crimes. Now that me and my wife have precious little kids, sometimes I lose sleep at nights thinking back of those GCC days. I am still sometimes having nightmares when I have those flashbacks, specially the child abuse incidents. I have no good memories of that cursed satanic church and people.
And this particular guy’s “submissive” wife, who had given birth to this child, would just stand there and watch and do nothing to protect her child, because the husband had authority and the full backing of GCC leaders. She knew what would happen to her if she complained, GCC elders with JMac’s leadership had already made numerous examples of other protesting women for everyone to see and fear and “shut up”.
And of course the husband was also emotionally abusing his wife all the time. They would go on having 4 kids. The endless abuse caused her to become seriously ill, she lost a lot of weight and was weighing 90 lb. Their marriage was destroyed when she ended up having sexual relations with multiple young Jewish men, yes the very “chosen race” that endlessly gets idolized by GCC. The chosen race which is supposed to save the world.
In this case some might blame the husband, others might blame the wife. But these 2 were normal people before they joined GCC. It was JMac’s designed system that totally twisted these people and destroyed their lives and marriage.
(Oh I forgot to mention, this guy’s Bible study overseer was none other than Jim Stitzinger, the guy who was teaching at TMS, was an elder at GCC, and who had multi-year sexual relationship with a young lover, until he was eventually caught and silently and stealthily removed from his GCC and TMS positions).
Back in 1990’s and early 2000’s there wasn’t much internet or access to information. So these people could have been somewhat excused for not knowing they were heading over the cliff. But in 2024 there is a lot of readily accessible information for all GCC members and they can read and analyze, everything is at their fingertips. And this makes every current GCC member culpable of the guilt and sin and crimes they commit by being part of this church. So, I have no compassion for any GCC member, MAY THEY ALL GO TO HELL. None of them are victims anymore.
There is much more I know and could write to make you sick, just as I promised on Twitter that I would make you sick. But this article is getting too long.
I would just briefly mention couple more things.
- Majority of people attending GCC live in permanent poverty. This has two reasons. One is their end time premillennialist eschatology. End of the world is near, everything is going from bad to worse and other such bullshit that make people to be religious pessimists. If the end of the world is near then why struggle to achieve great heights and wealth ? This is why majority of GCC members are broke as shit. They live in the wealthiest city of the wealthiest county in the world with all modern 2024 tech and opportunities and yet they are poor. They have no property investments, no businesses or anything meaningful. The second reason is the piety, or the false piety that they produce in people. The world is out there is sinful, try to separate yourself from everything out there. The safest job is a job at the church surrounded by christians and a crappy salary which can only cover your monthly car insurance. They don’t want to do the “dirty work” of engaging the world and making connections or making friends with unrighteous mammon, as Jesus Himself instructs. Oh, GCC members want to be more righteous than Jesus. Just in case.
- There are certain things that today’s young bloggers discussing GCC are unfamiliar with because they took place one time ago, before they were born. During his 55 years of “ministry” JMac had done several successful palace coups, after which he solidified his dictatorial status and also learned how to intimidate or prevent any future rivals from becoming equal to him in the church. One case was with Larry Crab, a very popular elder, and JMac kicked him out. The second one is Gary Ezzos, another popular guy. In the Ezzos case Phil Johnson helped JMac in scandalizing Ezzos with the same slanderous and cringy tactics that he employs nowdays. Except nowdays there is the internet and he instantly gets anal-ized (or sodomised) by intelligent and young critics who see thru his deceptions and sinful methods.
- Have you ever asked yourself, why are/were JMac and Lawson and Riccardi and Johnson and other filthy souls so focused on messages of “repentance” and personal piety ? There are so many more diverse subject of the Bible they could preach on, such as law, history, entrepreneurship, and so much more. The purpose of putting %90 stress on the subject of repentance and piety is intentional and calculated. It’s to make their followers dumb and weak and guilt ridden, so that they can manipulate them easier and have them give up their wealth easier for the “gospel”, which in this case happens to mean strengthening JMac’s financial portfolio of $200 million dollars.
This article is certainly a depressing read for many. It wasn’t easy for me to write this as it brought back many painful memories. I didn’t write this to help GCC members to escape their eventual destruction. There is no escape for them. People bound up in such demonic cults almost never get out. The above guy whose family and life this church destroyed is back in the GCC and adores the church and adores JMac after all that happened to him and his wife and his children. And if THAT guy is so blind and stupid after all that he went thru then there is no hope for the rest of GCC members. I only wrote this after seeing some former GCC members whom I personally knew write their grievances on Twitter and I noticed there was a lot they weren’t aware of about how things work at GCC and why so much evil keeps being perpetuated. And I hope this article will shed some light on those dark corners and they will avail themselves of my article.
Also, I am not afraid of anyone at GCC attacking me. The moment a single one of them says something that I don’t like or even farts without my permission i will start spilling the beans on 10 times worse and ugly things about GCC. Let them dare to say anything. It will be my joy to do so.