The Summer I Accidentally Joined a Cult

The summer before my senior year of high school, I joined a cult.

It was an accident, I promise!!

This is a little different from what I usually write, but stick with me and I promise it comes back around to the thing I talk about most.

Here’s what I need you to picture: a youth group diehard, about to turn eighteen, fresh off my very first kiss ever, bright leggings and flower crowns daily. To say I was a hardcore evangelical is an understatement. I believed, with my whole chest, that becoming a missionary was the highest calling a person could have.

I decided to go spread the gospel in South Africa for a month with a little tiny (kidding) group called Teen Mania Ministries, under their short term missions branch, Global Expeditions. You may also know them from Acquire the Fire. I honestly don’t remember how I heard about these trips other than I was an evangelical teen in the early 2000s and it was part of the ecosystem.

Lucky for all of us, that’s the only detail I can’t remember because I have always been an avid journaler. Which means every thought and feeling my 18-year-old self had during my little culty stint is catalogued forever.

Let me take you through it…

I didn’t know a single soul, but it felt like everyone else was already well acquainted. Everyone going anywhere in the world first funneled through Texas for “training.” By training, I mean we learned how to tell our testimony and run a Vacation Bible School, over and over and over again.

There were teenagers as far as the eye could see. We slept in massive tents, rows and rows of bunk beds, and it was June in Texas, so it was hot. But that’s not what I remember most.

What I remember is the feeling of being dropped into a commune where everyone already knew the words. They had chants. They had prayers they all knew by heart. And I stood there, unsure, mouthing along to things everyone else could already say in their sleep.

The one thing that was abundantly clear: we were soldiers for Jesus, going out to fight the good fight. It was all very rah-rah, march for the Lord. I wanted to feel it. I wrote that I must have barriers up or something because I wasn’t feeling anything other than uh-oh.

Then we boarded planes and scattered across the globe.

My group was headed to South Africa. We were going to an area called Diepsloot, a place we were told was essentially a squatter camp. The leaders called what we’d be doing “hut to hut” ministry. It took three days to get there, with a layover in Paris and plane rides that felt like they’d never end.

There were 63 teenagers on our team, split into three groups. Over the course of an entire month, the leaders never learned my name. It was very strange, and I very much felt like a kid on a trip, not a person to the people in charge. The leaders were always off on their own and I didn’t feel much of a connection or bond as a group. I had been on many missions trips before this and you usually left feeling like family. That was definitely NOT the case here.

When we finally landed, we were allowed to call home to say we’d arrived safely. We were timed. We got one minute. One. My family didn’t answer, so I left a voicemail fighting back tears, because somewhere deep in my gut a voice had already started whispering: what have I done?

That first night, in a freezing cold bunk, a leader came in and told us we weren’t allowed to shower in the morning. We had to get up and shower right then, and it had to be cold, because only a few people got warm water, and it was not us. I laid in that bed heaving sobs, ready to go home, and we hadn’t even started ‘ministry’ yet. But still, I kept telling myself I must not love God enough because how could I feel this way?

Every single day, all month long, we had the same breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’d come straight from hot, hot Texas and was wildly underprepared for how cold South Africa was going to be. They made us buy bags we could fill with hot water just to survive the night. (The money we’d raised to get here somehow didn’t cover staying warm?)

We got a hot shower every three days, three minutes long, timed, and yes, they told you to get out when your time was up.

Emily at 18 loved a worship service, helping someone fix up their home, and feeding people who were hungry. But the part where we passed out tracts and cornered strangers about Jesus? That was never me. And that was the whole job.

Picture this: a big group of very white Americans walking through a squatter camp, letting ourselves into people’s homes, asking if they knew about Jesus, and then asking them to pray with us. So much of it was looking for people who appeared to need healing, because (surprise!!) at training in Texas, we had been ‘taught’ how to perform miracles with our prayers.

I felt it in my body before I could name it. A pit in my stomach. This feels icky.

At the end of each day, we’d come back together and tally up the souls (yikes). AKA count the brand new Christians. Can you believe how many people we’d just saved from hell?!? And surely, surely a group of wealthy Americans showing up at your door had nothing to do with why you might say yes. Right?

I had such an ick about the ministry but the rules, omg the rules.

We were allowed to give side hugs to the opposite gender for three seconds, no longer, or oops, we might cause those poor, poor boys to stumble. We couldn’t sit next to boys on the bus. We couldn’t talk to them for long. There was this strange, constant obsession with keeping us apart.

Letters from home were printed off and handed out at the end of each night which felt like a little lifeline. Until one night, when I was pulled aside. The leaders told me they had read through all of my emails. Amanda, the girl in charge, looked at me and said she didn’t think I should receive them anymore, because they were going to distract me. Why? A boy I liked was emailing me.

She handed me the stack of letters and I ran outside, heaving sobs into the cold. I felt so violated, judged and embarrassed. Someone had smuggled a phone in, and I borrowed it, called him crying, and told him to please, please stop emailing me because they were reading every word.

Between running VBS, sharing our testimonies, and telling people about the grace of God, a girl who was part of our group smoked a cigarette. She was put on a plane and sent home. The irony of her traveling across the world to tell strangers about the endless, unconditional love of Jesus and then one rule is broken and she’s simply gone…

Another girl got really sick. Truly sick. She begged to go to the hospital but they wouldn’t take her.

And then there was the day, out in the camps, when we were talking to a group of people and a drunk man turned to one of the boys in our group and said, “If you believe this, you’ll kiss me.” Our group leader sat in the corner and said nothing. So the boy did. And all hell broke loose and we were told not to tell a single person what had happened.

I look back on all of it now, and more than anything, I want to lean down and whisper into that innocent girl’s ear: you already know. You know it deep in your body. This isn’t right.

Because I did know. Over and over and over, I wrote in my journal: I don’t like this. I want to go home.

And every single time, in the very next sentence, I took it right back: I must not trust God enough.

When I read through these pages now, all I see is conditioning. A young girl was absolutely stripped of all trust in herself, because she was taught to “trust the Lord with all my heart and to lean not on my own understanding,” which sounds gentle until you sit with what it actually trained me to do. It trained me to distrust myself. To treat my own intuition as a threat. Every time my body handed me the truth, I’d been taught to hear it as a crack in my faith instead. So I overrode it. I called my own knowing a sin, and I kept going.

I buried most of this for a long time. Fifteen years, if I’m honest. I pressed those memories down somewhere deep and just never opened the box.

And then one night I turned on Prime Video and saw that an entire season of Shiny Happy People was about the cult of Teen Mania, the larger organization behind Global Expeditions, the group that sent me halfway around the world.

I went digging after I watched the documentary series. Teen Mania was, at its height, one of the biggest Christian youth organizations in the country. Millions of kids went through the rallies and tens of thousands went on missions overseas like I did. Years earlier, an MSNBC documentary had already featured mental health experts calling its methods textbook “thought-reform.” The worst of what came out centered on the Honor Academy, the yearlong internship in Teen Mania, where former interns described being fed baby food after hours of forced exercise, locked in a coffin, and served cat food. And the whole thing was propped up on kids raising their own money, right up until it collapsed into bankruptcy in 2015, more than five million dollars underwater.

After learning all of this, I went into a tailspin. Fifteen years of feelings and memories came rushing back. I dug out my old journal and I read it again.

And I felt something I had never once let myself feel about that summer: vindicated.

I knew. Even at eighteen, freezing and homesick in a bunk on the other side of the world, my body knew the truth the entire time.

I just wasn’t allowed to believe her.

I am now.

Motherhood is a crash course in trusting yourself. From the very first night home with a newborn, it’s instinct, instinct, instinct. Nobody hands you the answer, you just have to know, and then trust that you know.

And I showed up to that crash course a few steps behind.

The belief system of my childhood, the one that was handed down and then imprinted onto me, taught me that my instincts were wrong. Sinful. Evil.

My gut wasn’t to be trusted and my own knowing was a threat to override. Becoming a mom felt like being engulfed by a wave of self-trust. I didn’t get to say no, because now I had to learn how to swim, whether I was ready or not. Almost five years later I am still teaching myself to trust my instincts and at the same time I’m trying to teach my kids to trust theirs.

I’m still learning, still growing, but I’m not where I once was.

And neither are you.

Here’s to healing for ourselves and for our kids.

Here’s to learning to believe the truth we already know deep inside.

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