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Read an extract from Beyond the Gates of Gloriavale by Rosanna Overcomer.
It was Fervent’s opinion that Elijah and I loved our children too much. He had taken to repeatedly reminding me that Jesus had forsaken his mother and brother. One day God might ask me to forsake my children, he said, so I needed to be prepared. A few times he asked me, ‘If you had to choose between the church and your kids, who would you choose?’ That might sound like an easy question to an outsider. It’s not if you believe that forsaking God will bring about your children’s damnation.
I was told all the time that my husband was going to end up just like Phil Cooper. Phil was one of Hopeful’s sons. He had left the community as a young man years ago, and became increasingly desperate to get his wife and their five children out too. After several failed attempts, he came up with an elaborate scheme in which a friend impersonated a police officer in order to apprehend his wife when she was on a trip outside the community. But his wife was never able to break free of Hopeful’s control. She left her children behind with Phil and returned to Gloriavale. Now, the leaders often warned me that Elijah might try to kidnap me and the kids. ‘Are you going to make the right decision?’ they’d ask.
I was also in trouble with Fervent because I had refused to put Isaac in the childcare centre. God had given me this baby as my responsibility, and I wanted to care for him myself. Elijah supported me in this decision, so I had started taking Isaac with me to my job in the ladies’ office, where I did food ordering and meal planning for the community. Every morning after breakfast, Fervent lectured me on how I was being selfish. Then one day, he let slip that because Isaac wasn’t signed in at ‘Babies’, the community wouldn’t get paid for him.
Until then, I hadn’t realised that our childcare centres were funded by the government and were paid according to the number of children enrolled. The idea that we were separating babies from their mothers at only two weeks old, simply for the money, unsettled me deeply. When I continued to keep Isaac with me during the day, Fervent suggested I could sign him in at Babies and then take him away again. This felt immoral in a way I couldn’t ignore.
It was around this time that Elijah’s sister Obedience became engaged, even though she didn’t want to marry the man that Hopeful had chosen for her. Elijah and their father backed her up, urging Obedience not to go through with the wedding. Somehow, Obedience managed to get away from the community for a few days. She went to stay with her Aunt Maria and Uncle John, another of Hopeful’s estranged sons. Since leaving Gloriavale years earlier, they had bought a bach at Lake Brunner, not far from the community. Elijah’s sister Heavenly also happened to be visiting John and Maria at the same time. Elijah and I managed to go and see them in secret, taking Elijah’s work vehicle and making an unscheduled detour to the bach.
While I was catching up with Heavenly, John and Elijah had a long conversation, and John told Elijah the truth about why his father had been sent to prison.
This is how we learned that Hopeful had been charged with sexually violating young people aged between twelve and seventeen. Most were girls, but one was his son Phil — who testified in court that his father had masturbated him when he was seventeen years old. Hopeful was originally convicted on ten counts, but this was overturned on appeal. In the retrial he was charged and convicted with the three most serious offences, including forcefully inserting a wooden object inside a nineteen-year-old woman on three consecutive days, claiming he was helping to prepare her for marriage.
When Elijah told me about this later that night, so many things made sense. And yet we desperately wanted Hopeful to be innocent. Elijah went to his mother, Serene, who confirmed that what John had said was true. A woman in Serene’s circle had testified in court that Hopeful regularly molested young women, inviting them for ‘single-girls nights’ in the spa hut, where he would ‘teach’ them how to please their future husbands. We later heard that Hopeful blamed that woman for his conviction.
Night after night we wrestled with this awful discovery. The Bible said that a leader of the church should be blameless. We went through the books of Timothy and Titus, and found many instances in which Hopeful and other leaders would not qualify to lead a church.
Our list of questions was growing. First, and most important, we had to know the truth about Hopeful. Second, we wanted to know why we had to follow the Bible to the letter on certain things — particularly those teachings relating to the subservience of women — but were allowed to ignore plenty of other biblical practices that had clearly become outdated. We also had questions about headscarves, unity versus uniformity, marriage, child-rearing, sickness and healing, the gifts of the spirit, all of which prompted more Bible study. We recorded everything in my red 7-mm-lined exercise book.
We fasted for three days together to make sure that we were not committing the sin of pride. We prayed together morning, day and night that God would show us if we were wrong for having these questions. During those three days, our desire to know the truth only got stronger, not weaker.
And so with a prayer and a plan, our list in hand, we went to talk to Hopeful.
Extracted from Beyond the Gates of Gloriavale by Rosanna Overcomer, available now.
Beyond the Gates of Gloriavale
by Rosanna Overcomer
An explosive memoir from a survivor of Gloriavale about how she and her husband walked away from the controversial and secretive religious sect with their young children.
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