The Body Explains Itself
Original Art by Vibedout- NYC
Listening to what survivors have to say is probably the best way to understand this cult, but internal documents are also revealing. We’ve gotten our hands on a trove of religious text written by The Body’s leader that provide some insight into his mind.
The complete set of documents would be overwhelming to release at once, so we’re choosing two pieces as an introduction. The first is a page of scripture from the early days of the church. It’s quite a fantasy being spun, but this is actually one of the most coherent pages in the library.
What sticks out is that the leader is referring to the group as Sought Out. While former members generally refer to the church as The Body, the organization has gone by a few names. If you look up Sought Out ANPC, Alaska, it’s obvious this was the name used for tax reasons to get a religious exemption. The other thing that sticks out is that leader is a maniac.
The next document was written in 2020. This came in the form of an email, and it’s the only such transmission we’ve found with the cult leaders distinct vocabulary in it. The story behind it is that a member of the Australian branch of The Body was questioned about their beliefs from someone they were attempting to recruit and they forwarded this text to their target.
This is quite long, and what stands out above all is how little is actually explained the religious word salad. It’s the kind of thing you might imagine would come from a group that can’t explain itself honestly.
The first few sentences were written by the member in Australia, but the true author picks up the slack soon after. A copy and paste error in the original email and a noticeable tone shift make this obvious.
Here’s the text in full:
[A response to a question:] You asked me last week what my church looks like. Innocent enough, but it sure lit me up. It made me notice a very prominent feature of our church: it is always growing. It isn’t the same from week to week. The Spirit moves how He wills, so some new aspect of the Word constantly opens up, for a week, or 2 or 10; then another. So the church is elusive to describe. Yes, YHWH is the same yesterday, today & forever, but not us – or we had better not be, since His thoughts are not yet our thoughts & His ways not our ways, & that is not just unfortunate, but unacceptable. We are 3-year-olds trying to “colour Him in”, & we keep going outside the lines; so just like a 3-year-old, we better keep learning how.
And isn’t any living thing always becoming something else? So why go for a static picture of a living body of believers? If you can get that picture, & it does sum them up, are they living? Someone from 200 years ago, seeing a modern parked car, has no clue what he is looking at. He has to see it moving. & so with a church: if it is truly alive, you have to watch it – better, be in it - to understand it.
But do we really believe that? Or do we cut the church too much slack? This is what I am exploring. I am not judging the church in general, but coming to grips with my own ignorance about this. I’ve always known that growth is desirable; but essential? Not till now. This is big news to me. Any statement of belief, any explanation of any church, HAS to include that it grows, in numbers, but even more, that it grows into YHWH.
In case I sound like I have gone all liberal, inventing new doctrines at will, let me say that the Word is my only touchstone. I currently spend an hour & a half a day in it, & I police that time rigorously. Would I do that if I only “move by the Spirit”? I am not bragging, but demonstrating how highly I regard it. There is truth nowhere else, & nowhere else can I measure what I may think is the truth.
But the Word is only Logos, the written Word, not Rhema, the living spoken Word, which alone gives life [2 Cor 3.6]. Even the Word says that it & the Spirit must agree. They work together, each with their own specific & limited contribution; the Spirit gives Rhema, then the Logos indicates which spirit just spoke, Elohim’s or satan’s. & since only the Spirit will lead us into all truth, any individual or group in tune with Him will always be progressing – in accord with the Logos but finding it constantly expanding.
If the wilderness journey is our pattern, we cannot believe otherwise. Israel took to this constant movement reluctantly [“we want to go back to Egypt!”]. But after enough years of trying to live in that settler mentality, only to have the Cloud keep moving on so they had to drop everything to catch up, it would have penetrated that they had to let go the idea of remaining static, & instead keep one eye on that cloud [“I’m going hunting”. “How long?” “A few days.” “What if the cloud leaves while you are gone?”]. That is us; we, like they, “confess that we are strangers and exiles on the earth” [Heb 11.13, modified]. We are always moving on.
Or are we? Whereas Israel almost had to change from settler to pilgrim, we CAN resist moving with Him, & stay put instead. Why else be constantly warned not to do so? Everyone knows churches should grow, but are we sold out on it? Is it “a house should have a coffee table” or “a house should have a roof”? Is it an accessory to us, or an essential, such that a church not growing may not deserve the name?
The evidence is clear. I went through the main Protestant statements of belief. The necessity for a church to grow isn’t in the Anglicans’ 39 Articles, & they haven’t noticed the omission for 457 years. The Presbyterian Westminster Confession of 1648 says the individual will grow, but not the church, as does the Bapt
ist 1689 Confession. Individual congregations usually only talk about growth in terms of numbers, & most are not even experiencing that, let alone growing in knowing Him.
Moreover, nothing has been added to those confessions of faith since; so they don’t say that growth is essential, & it hasn’t been happening, if those distillations of all they hold dear are anything to go by. They have not been deepening their understanding of the “faith once for all delivered to the saints”. Even the American Constitution has amendments.
In contrast, this growth is the heart of the plainest explanation there is of how churches function, Eph 4.11-16. It looms large in the descriptions of the early church in Acts [& what does it tell us about our own state, that that pattern for our own churches is usually dismissed as “the church needed a kick-start to get it going, so YHWH did something extra for them”. WHO SAYS?? WHY WOULD WE THINK THAT?? Where does it come out of the Word? Rather, it’s a rationalization of our own sad state].
So, an accurate picture of a living church cannot be defined by a snapshot. It requires a video, constantly shooting its goings-on. But even that is not enough. Would a video of a sunset fully describe it? Wouldn’t you have to be there, in it, to know what it‘s like? So with a vibrant church; you have to live in it, to “get” it. Seeing & especially experiencing the dynamics reveals a dimension beyond any description. We dissected frogs at school, to learn what they were like; except we didn’t. We learnt a few basics. The minute the scalpel went in, we had a carcase, not a frog. You have to watch it live, to know it.
So it was for me in my encounter with this body of believers of which I am part. My first contact was static, via phone calls & emails, & that left me with suspicions about it – who are they, what do they believe, do they conform to the pattern in the Word? But then I spent 5 weeks in it, & my attitude changed completely – I SAW how they functioned & that it WAS in accordance with the scriptural pattern – even more than I had seen anywhere else. In fact, my Father even prepared me for that revolution, so he was “in on it”. Sitting in Sydney airport, waiting for the plane, I had this sudden “thought” [a prompt from the Spirit]: I may encounter something valuable over there but I will miss if I let any objections to what I see overshadow whatever else I notice [which was my usual approach to strangers: rate their beliefs before I “let them in”]. So, He said, I had best leave disagreements aside for the time, not conceding but not arguing, so I am free to see whatever else may turn up. I can deal with the objections later, or even ignore them, taking only what is beneficial, because why should I make a big deal over objections with a group I am not even part of? I even saw a distinct picture: I don’t complain about the bone in the chop on my plate, but get on with eating the rest, leaving the indigestible bits aside. Now, I can tell you, that wasn’t me changing my approach; I got spoken to. There was nothing in me already leading me in that direction, with just the final touch put in it there. I had never thought that way before in my life. It hit me, complete, out of the blue. He advised me to “clear my palette” for what other “tastes” I might find.
That “taste” was how that body actually functioned. The dynamics would not have gotten through to me, had my static picture of them not been put aside for a time [“FOR A TIME”. I know I walk a dangerous line, here, easily dismissed as having exchanged an experience for the truth. Go back to the 4th paragraph. I sure did examine my initial hesitations about the church - & found most of them to be either misunderstandings of what I’d seen or else my own view on what ought to be, not from the Word at all].
And wasn’t this Philip’s response to Nathaniel’s static snapshot of Yeshuah, taken on the basis of him coming from Nazareth? But what was Philip’s response? He refused to argue at that level; he simply said, “Come & see”. He urged him to experience Yeshuah for himself, not assess him at a distance. & wasn’t that what turned Nathaniel round so radically? So it was for me; in fact, it made such an impact that I wanted to be there & get involved in what I had observed. So I did it, selling up everything & moving halfway round the world, just to be part of it, for keeps [I thought at the time].
& before you conclude I may just be gullible, I wish you could talk to someone who knows me well. Theological analysis & precision has always been a big deal for me. I led much of the fight against women’s ordination in the Baptist Union, so loyal to the Truth that the immense opposition didn’t bother me. I helped set up, run & contribute to a quarterly journal whose theme was that we can’t settle the issue without a greater loyalty to the Bible. I was always a theological blood-hound - & even a Rottweiler! For anyone to make such a radical move, geographically, theologically & spiritually, is unexpected enough; but for someone like me?? It would be wise to be slow to dismiss what I am saying.
And as a second witness, I was not alone. Another member had the same introduction to it. Like me, he grew up with a high-protein Bible diet, ready to identify error when he saw it, but unlike me, didn’t have that check from the Father to “go easy” on the body. So on his first visit, to a night of us helping a member build his house, he was actively looking for ways to dismiss us; & might I add that he had another compelling reason for taking that tack, enough for anyone to feel as he felt, which I won’t go into now. He found some issues during the evening, being a builder himself, watching a bunch of amateurs; but all the objections got blown away when we sat down as a body afterwards & went over what the night brought up spiritually. He had never seen anything like that before, neither the action nor the mindset that produced it. Who ever heard of any church doing something like that? Like me, he saw us in action, & it changed everything. He also joined us, & 5 years on, he still talks about how that turnaround came.
Why were he & I affected this way? Because we got to see, up close, what it was like, & that was enough to overcome the objections. We saw life, a commitment to grow through everything, even through daily events, even a work party, & we both wanted in.
My point? No description of any healthy church explains that church. Like food, like scenery, you have to be involved with it, “eat” it, see it for yourself, to comprehend it. Even with 9 years’ involvement in that church, I still find it hard to describe. It’s too organic, too dynamic, to submit to intellectual analysis. There is a theological underpinning, parameters beyond which it does not stray, but they ARE the foundation, & who lives in the foundations of a building? They are there, & essential, but mostly out of sight. Too much else is going on.
Whereas any organization that CAN be defined by its statement of beliefs, just its foundations, is static, & is not experiencing the ongoing growth that walking with the Spirit ALWAYS produces. Grace is not to excuse & validate our current state, but to move us on from it. So to what extent IS it a church?? The Spirit brings growth & growth brings radical, constant change. Didn’t Yeshuah [Jesus] say that the wise scribe brings forth out of his treasure things both old AND new? & he doesn’t mean it’s a one-time event, so the newness never stops. Didn’t he say that any believer [& therefore any body of them] has rivers of living [literal Greek: “moving”] water flowing out of him/them? Not a dam; a river. Not dead, but living. Not still, or even trickling, but flowing.
The nature of our faith is not that it has a shape, but that that shape is constantly being renovated – not the faith once-for-all DELIVERED to the saints [Jude 1.3], but how we RECEIVED it. Receiving that faith is Chinese whispers – it gets garbled along the way. So, it has to be cleaned up. So even to ask what a church looks like is to mistake a work in progress for the finished product. It means the asker can never understand it properly – not just because whatever he is told will get out of date, but also because he shows he thinks statically about a dynamic being, so he won’t “get” it that that changing IS part of its essence. What it thinks about the Bible, YHWH, sin, man, the end times, etc, matters, but it is not the whole story.
But any organization that CAN be defined thus isn’t in step with the Spirit, so it’s sadly deficient, however orthodox its doctrines & practices are. The Spirit leads us into ALL truth [Jn 16.13], which will never end, so such an individual, church, denomination or movement will eventually be left behind, even if it begins in Him. This necessity to be always growing into YHWH is much talked about but SO underrated.
So there is no use trying to arrive at a definition of us – or, at least, relying too much on it. Even if I lay out our beliefs, a critical component remains hidden, even if it is expressed. The evidence is that when I laid this aspect of us out for you, you saw it as me playing word games, dodging you, when I most certainly was not. I told you a significant aspect of who we are & you took it as a denial of core basics, even when I didn’t get to any of our other beliefs, so you never had a chance to see if we had moved off the virgin birth, authority of Scripture, necessity for the blood, etc, etc, etc. You just assumed we must be off-centre somewhere because I began with a belief which is not in classic statements of belief.
The reason we are on the move is because He is constantly causing us to revisit beliefs we already have, to go deeper, higher, wider, longer with them [Eph 3.18]. And until our focus is only Him, He always will, because even the most orthodox theologian is a heretic somewhere, not yet fully grasping the faith as it is. What else is the whole of Eph 4.11-13 aimed at, except that we arrive at unity of THE faith [not “faith”; the Greek is “THE faith”], which means we aren’t there yet? How can we exempt this perpetually ongoing pilgrimage of discovery of the Word from the “exceedingly abundantly more than all we can ask or even imagine” of Eph 3.20-21? One produces the other.
This process will be unsettling and even resisted if our allegiance is to what we believe, not to Him; hence, a belief which is shown to be off-centre throws the mind into unrest, since our minds are stayed on it, not Him. Unlike Israel in the desert, we are not yet fully conditioned into the cloud being the only constant in our lives. They knew that no place was ever going to be home; only He was. We don’t fully get that yet. So our beliefs are always being re-visited, tweaked, cleaned up – not the Word, which is always the same, but our perception of it. Don’t get me wrong; sin will always be sin, salvation will always be salvation, the blood will always be the blood, & so on. But for example, the purpose of Passover is for us to see, every year, more of how we have underestimated the power of that blood, misunderstood how to apply it, still substitute our own works for its work, etc. He Himself told us to revise it annually, perpetually [Ex 12.14] – not do a ceremony & call it good, but relive it, re-examine it to find what I never noticed about it before. It is yet another chance to move on.
Growing is not our sole feature, but it is a major one. Haven’t you noticed that I always have something lighting me up? I don’t dredge it up just for the occasion from what I already know, just to have something to say. I always want to grow, so I push myself to reflect. I don’t just hope for it. So what I contribute to a get-together is never prepared first. It is brewing in me right then, coming out of the oven even as I speak, sparked by what I’ve been considering or by what someone else has just said. Even if it is “old”, it is also new, because I challenge myself, right then & there, to see more in it than I have before. I always look for something to say & I always make sure it is “devotional”, not “theological” in intent, even though it includes theology. A couple of Sunday afternoons ago, some took me to be criticizing the group when I asked how we can reconcile being sold out to the gospel with having busy lives, but I wasn’t. It was a genuine question. I was asking myself as much as anybody else, because I don’t know the answer & I need to.
I refuse to stay the same. I am always looking for something new to bring out of that treasury in me. Even something as unremarkable as being asked what I believe produced all this, & I have still gone nowhere near laying out all that my church believes! I could add another 20 pages, easily, & none of it a stale reproduction of “the party line”, but fresh ways to see those beliefs. The chance to grow by it would be too irresistible to avoid. Back in 1974/5, I spent 18 months writing about 200 letters, 2-6 pages each, to my first girlfriend, then 20 years writing a sermon a week word-for-word, so I learnt to write conversationally, & this is the “tool” I use to consider Him & His truths. So, in the past 9 years, I have written 490 “essays”, anywhere between half a page & 10 pages each, mostly 4-5 pages – for myself, not others, to expand some “stray thought” that hit me, or something someone said, or something in the Word I noticed. I know it is a prompt of the Spirit, so I pursue it. That’s better than one a week every week. Then add the verbal explorations I try to make a part of every conversation I have with believers & even unbelievers, plus contributions to the texting app the body uses for its communal considerations, & that’s quite a bit of newness all the time. So how can anyone hope to get a complete grasp of what I “look like” when I am constantly developing? & likewise, our body of believers - just last Sunday, at our body meeting, we were given 3 aspects of the Word to chase up, & more again at the Thursday men’s meeting. How can that approach fail to produce constant growth & change?
So no-one can “get a feel” for us through a definition. Any description will soon be out of date, & can never encapsulate us anyway. Might as well define a house by its colour, when it is so much more. Even this very response to you is clarifying things for me – not only about the body, but how our whole walk ought to be. So I am growing right now. As soon as I started writing, I knew I would. This began as a letter to you, a page or 2 at most. But I almost immediately saw it as yet another offer from the Spirit to explore yet another issue for me, not to argue with you, so I changed focus, to getting insight into my faith. The reason it is so long is not to try to overpower you, but to “think out loud”, & this is how we do that – making points repetitively, mustering all the reasons why. I have even given this document its own name [“What Does My Church Believe?’”] & I’m saving it in the folder I have for things I write. So thank you for Number 491!
So, the best picture of us that you could want is this: a group of people whose statement of beliefs is just one facet of who they are, & even if accurate, is likely to mislead if left in isolation from what would be seen by living among them. & I am claiming emphatically that EVERY individual/group who claims to be Christian must be that dynamic – not straying outside the Word, but always finding new depths within it. Read Phil 3.7-14 & see how on-the-move Paul was & how determined he was to stay that way, perpetually restless, never satisfied, not even with as much as he had, convinced rather that he hardly had anything, even throwing what he had away so it wouldn’t distract him with an artificial contentment [v7-8] & determined to never stop going after even more - THIRTY YEARS after his conversion! He truly had eyes only for the Cloud.
Then read the body punch in v15: EVERY believer, especially the mature ones, ought to be just like that, just as dissatisfied, just as focused on what is yet to come, just as dismissive of whatever – WHATEVER – they have gained thus far. Because that IS maturity – not, as we think, “fully developed; having reached the most advanced stage in a process”. He redefines maturity for us. Christian maturity is a settled decision to NEVER grow up, NEVER feel like I have gotten ANYWHERE, but always look for somewhere else to go. How foreign his notion of “Christian maturity” is to ours.
In fact, isn’t he having a dig at those who feel mature, or even part-mature, suggesting they haven’t a clue? & saying it once is not enough; he tells them [us] again, just 2 verses later [“do what I just told you I am doing, & do what you see others do, the ones doing what I just told you I am doing”]. Add to that that he had already repeated himself about his own lack of “maturity” [vv 12,13]; don’t you get the picture that progress is way up the list of priorities, that what I don’t know matters more than what I do know? Isn’t attaining a certain “shape”, however correct, & then settling into it, the very antithesis of true Christian orthodoxy? “Orthodox” means “conforming to the traditional beliefs of a religion” [Oxford Dictionary]. But that is the definition of heresy! Because we don’t adhere to doctrine as such, but to the living God; doctrine flows out of that relationship, constantly being refined by the Spirit, with the Word as “quality control”. He is the foundation, not it, & that is not a cute word-play, but something we overlook to our loss. So we never stop knowing Him better - & not intellectual knowledge, but that of Mt 7.23.
& it has always been that way. It’s a pattern at least 4000 years old. We have been pilgrims ever since Abraham [Heb 11.8-16; note the present tense in v14 – we are still after it even now. & v16 does NOT say that city is “in heaven”; it refers back to v14, to a current pursuit]. The Exodus, wandering, IS our walk, isn’t it? Even in the Promised Land, the end of the road, there is ongoing war to claim what was given to us [Josh 1.2-6]. & even after that was achieved, the prophets were constantly on their backs to change, to repent – still no letup. Not because the people were bad, but because they were human. & the apostles were just as attentive to their “flock”, if Acts & the NT letters are any indication. As were the elders of the various churches – just see what Paul gave Timothy & Titus to pass on. & look what would qualify Timothy, in 1 Tim 4.15: that he was gaining, not what he already had. They were all committed to seeing growth, change, so they were constantly addressing issues, & at depth, not superficialities [“meet earlier so you can fit in Sunday School before lunch”; “how about you buy a church bus?”; “the church isn’t being cleaned properly”]. They were always cleaning up churches’ THOUGHT, enabling transformation through renewing their minds, not just adjusting church budgets & the like. Any modern minister this committed to genuine growth in his church would be run out of town, so far have we strayed from that pattern.
But why would our journey be any different to theirs, any less packed with urgings to move on, & some pretty pointed correction when we refuse? So, yes, no man, or church, or any organization, is to be assessed by what they know, but partly by what they are learning, & especially by whether they are learning at all.
This may sound like our church has have given itself permission to wander all over the place, inventing new doctrines to suit the occasion. No; the Word is primary. I know everyone says that, so the only way you can know that it is actually true of us is, again, to mingle instead of clinically observing. That may sound a sneaky attempt to “recruit” [to use your word], but I am not inviting you to join us. I am simply saying the best you can do is withhold judgment without “paying a visit”. It’s just a plain statement of fact: you can’t know us from a distance. So, be slow to jump to conclusions in the absence of evidence. But we are not strange, as I hope I have shown. We are what normal is supposed to be [at least in intent; we do get caught in wanting to remain the same].
