Sarah Jones - Call Me Evil, Let Me Go

If, for example, they had a problem walking he would firmly take their hand, pull them from their seat, and then half drag them forward and back in front of the congregation at an ever-faster pace until they were almost running, claiming loudly throughout that Jesus had cured them. The mood of these meetings was highly charged and intensely emotional, and the sick, their loved ones and many members of the congregation would almost always weep.

I noticed that Black was careful not to claim that he did the healing himself, but the way he spoke and behaved made it easy to assume that Jesus was using him as the conduit for the ‘miracle’ to take place.

It was my job to record these traumatic sessions, edit them and add any necessary sound effects, and produce a half-hour CD that the Church could sell to the general public. To make sure I encapsulated the essence of the occasion, I had to spend a lot of time studying how Black worked and what he said. As a result I became acutely aware of his techniques and choice of language. His voice was constantly on my computer’s speakers (I did my editing with some software I had bought) and, almost imperceptibly, he gradually lost his hold on me. As he did so I began increasingly to think for myself. This isn’t as easy as it sounds because for so many years I believed Jesus used Black to talk to us and express His wishes. I felt that God Himself was eternally grateful that Black was alive. This gave Black massive power and inhibited a very ordinary person like me from questioning such a man about any area of his life.

Once I developed some distance I watched and listened to him more objectively and became increasingly cynical about his ‘miracle cures’, particularly as I would also often have to interview these sick people after their sessions with him to get some words of testimony from them. This meant I saw for myself that his claims that they were cured weren’t true. Although some managed to walk or run with Black in the heat of the moment, their problems always returned a couple of days later.

Because I had to edit Black’s sermons I became very familiar with his expressions and speech patterns. I listened as he ruthlessly criticized people who weren’t in the Church, dismissed those who were getting old, peppered some sermons with sexual innuendo and regularly made serious allegations, often of a sexual nature, about individuals, most of which I didn’t believe at all. My job was to make the sermons respectable for public consumption. I made sure I deleted his sexual innuendo and slanderous comments. Ironically, spending my formative years in a strict cult had left its moral mark and I didn’t think it was right for any Christian to talk in such a negative way about any individual and it was certainly not how a religious leader should think, let alone behave.

The finished CDs were meant to enhance Black’s reputation and bring in new members. They were also a useful source of income as they were sold in the Church shop or sent out via mail order from the Church catalogue. Bit by bit, my resentment spread to other areas of my life and once I began to question Black’s behaviour I started to resent and reject the Church’s overall control of what I did, said and felt. For example, I couldn’t watch TV soaps because Black described them as evil. Nor was I allowed to listen to secular music, either modern or classical, as Black said it contained evil spirits. The exception was the music of Bach, whom Black described as being a true Christian. Instead, Church members were encouraged to spend their spare time listening to CDs of him preaching.

Peter and I even had to ask permission to go on holiday. Not that we went very often. We were too busy working for the Church, and besides had no spare money. Like all members, we were expected to hand over tithes, which were at least a tenth of our gross salary, to the Church, give additional amounts for ‘special occasions’ and pay hefty school fees. I couldn’t even freely choose what I or my children wore. Respectable women of the Church weren’t allowed to wear trousers, a skirt above the knee, or show even a hint of cleavage, and the children had to be dressed in tweeds and blazers like little adults.

My birthday was approaching and, as happened every year near that time, it was an opportunity to take stock. I felt that in many ways I had grown and matured, but in others I was still being treated like a child. It annoyed me. I didn’t want to be told what I could and couldn’t do and how I should think any more, but working out how to change this was too big a reality for me to contemplate. I just knew I couldn’t carry on in the same way. The main problem was that I had so little experience of making decisions. Most people learn about decision-making gradually as they grow up. But I had been emotionally pummelled into obedience during my most formative years by Black and other senior members of the Church. I had almost no control over my life or my children.

Not that I dared mention what I felt to a soul. I couldn’t confide in Peter, who, when he wasn’t working long hours at his day job, spent his time at the Church, or in a single friend, as anything I said would have gone straight back to Black, and I was terrified of him and the power he had over me. I badly needed to explore my fledgling thoughts. I wanted to find out if anyone else felt the same as I did and, like me, longed to be comforted or reassured. Instead I bottled up everything deep inside me, kept my inner turmoil completely hidden and somehow dealt with it all myself. It was particularly difficult as I’m naturally gregarious, but for the moment to behave differently seemed as difficult as swimming against a tidal wave. Even if you slightly criticized either an ordinary member of the Church or one of the elders, everyone got to hear about it and you could be ostracized. The prospect was too awful to contemplate and I likened it to solitary confinement. I couldn’t risk that as my whole life revolved around the Church. I had barely seen my parents or my sister during my years away and didn’t feel close to them. I had no other adult contacts outside – everything of my pre-Church life had been severed. I had nowhere to go. Nor, I realized when I thought pragmatically about my situation, did I have any money of my own.

It was a huge struggle but I managed to keep my thoughts to myself until one day, about five months after Paul had been beaten, I was on my way to the recording room after I’d taken the children to school, when I bumped into another Church member, Susan. We started talking and she daringly grumbled that she wasn’t allowed to go on a holiday when she wanted to. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘This place is just like a bloody cult.’

I had never heard the Church described like that, and it had never crossed my mind in all the years I had been at Tadford that what I was trapped in, and controlled by, had the characteristics of a cult. I wasn’t even absolutely sure what a cult was. I didn’t say anything to Susan, because my head went into a complete spin and alarm bells began to ring so loudly in my ears I felt I would explode.

When I calmed down a little I remembered that there was a Christian bookshop in town that we weren’t allowed to go to. Black had told us it was evil because it was run by Christians who weren’t members of Tadford. Perhaps, I thought, the answers to the thousand of questions that were flooding my brain could be there. I rushed into the recording room, which was in a small room in the church.

My friend Kath, who had been at Tadford for just over a year, was helping out that day and was already hard at work editing the recording of the recent spring conference. Instead of saying ‘Hello’, I almost barked at her, ‘Pack up. We’re going out.’ We locked the room and when I whispered our destination in her ear her eyes opened wide, but she saw how intense I was and didn’t say a word.