Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Broken Faith Inside the Word of Faith Fellowship One of America's Most Dangerous Cults by Mitch Wei ‘One of America’s Most Dangerous Cults’ Insists It Wants to Spread God’s Love: What Ex Members Say Really Goes on Inside. John Cooper was only a toddler — “a little tiny kid” — the first time he remembers hearing Jane Whaley scream at someone else. “I was freaking terrified of her,” Cooper tells PEOPLE of Whaley, the co-founder of Word of Faith Fellowship in North Carolina. “I was sitting in a chair, and I was so short I couldn’t even see over the chair in front of me. We were in a sermon and I remember her screaming so loudly into the microphone,” Cooper says. “The volume of the noise terrified me. But that’s my first memory of her is her at the podium, just screaming at this woman in the congregation that she was upset with,” he continues. “I didn’t even really know who she was at this point. I was just like, ‘Who is this lady?’ I was probably 2 or 3. And then I, over time, learned — ‘Oh, this is Jane.’ ” Cooper is far from the only one who won’t forget her name. Whaley’s church, which she co-founded with her husband more than 40 years ago, has long been shadowed by allegations it is a dangerous cult that ensnares its members and evades justice. Church officials adamantly deny this, comparing accusers to bigots and heretics who have conspired together to defile God’s name. “God is a god of love, God is not a god of abuse. He loves us and he doesn’t allow us to be abused,” Mark Morris, an attorney and minister at Word of Faith, said in a 2017 video posted by the church “refuting serious media lies.” He said the church’s other responses had been twisted or ignored by reporters. Various members have been prosecuted for fraud, assault and other alleged crimes, however. In July 2014, some 20 years after he first joined, Cooper became the first in his family to “escape” the church. • Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up for PEOPLE’ s free True Crime newsletter for breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases. The sixth of nine kids born to Rick and Suzanne Cooper, John was 18 months old when he, his parents and his siblings joined Word of Faith in 1993. All nine have since left the congregation, but some of their relatives remain. The bruises of the abuse they say they suffered have long since healed. But the memories remain — and Word of Faith is very much still active, with the 80-year-old Whaley still presiding. “Unlike some other cults that have been written about — the People’s Temple, Jim Jones, David Koresh — those are all gone, right? Those cults have disbanded because of things that have happened; they’ve ended in tragedy. But in this case, this cult still continues, and law enforcement is still looking the other way,” investigative journalist Mitch Weiss tells PEOPLE. He and Holbrook Mohr, a fellow reporter at the Associated Press, are the authors of Broken Faith: Inside the Word of Faith Fellowship, One of America’s Most Dangerous Cults , published in February. Written in three parts, Broken Faith is a detailed account of Word of Faith’s history and practices — including what multiple ex-members described to Mohr and Weiss as coercion and control, violence and manipulation. “That’s what’s really disturbing,” Weiss says. “You have children that are being abused, continue to be abused, and it seems like nobody — the people with the power — [is] doing anything to stop it.” According to the AP, a federal prosecutor was once recorded saying, “We had a horrible time trying to make cases against them. For whatever reason, it was always something.” A former district attorney in the area echoed that, telling the AP in 2017: “Don’t take this the wrong way — and I knew people were being abused down there — but you just got tired going against them.” The AP previously reported that two local prosecutors were members of the church and gave coaching to other members during law enforcement investigations. John Cooper and his family are some of the former members who decided to speak out and are profiled in Broken Faith . Others include Matthew Fenner, who said he was beaten for being gay; Suzanne’s niece Danielle Cordes, whose own account of child abuse was investigated when she was 10 years old; and Jamey Anderson, who said he was abused and held in isolation for a year. In 2017, after an AP article written by Weiss with some of these accounts, the church released a statement denying any stories of abuse. “People like to focus just on the physical aspect … and that is very vividly striking for people and they want to focus in on that. But for me, I would’ve rather been spanked or punched or beaten or whatever than put on what they call ‘church discipline,’ where you’re basically isolated for potentially months at a time — in some people’s case, years at a time,” John tells PEOPLE. “That is a lot more psychologically damaging to a kid. And that definitely still goes on.” Both John and his mom, Suzanne, 59, talked to PEOPLE about their experiences with Word of Faith, which was started in 1979 by pastor Jane Whaley and her husband, Sam Whaley, in Spindale, North Carolina. According to reports, the membership grew over the decades to some 750 — with another 2,000 congregants internationally. Multiple members of Suzanne’s extended family are still living at Word of Faith and participating in the church’s teachings, including sister Cindy Cordes; Cindy’s husband, Steve Cordes; two of their four children; and Cindy and Suzanne’s nephew Justin. Their sister Shana Muse and her other kids have left, as have Cindy’s other two children, including daughter Danielle. “I still hold out hope that they may eventually get out,” John, who is “not religious” now, says of his other relatives. “If I could say anything to my family, I guess I would say, ‘Be strong and trust your own judgment,’ ” he continues. “When you’re in there, you give up your own judgment — you give up your own moral compass of knowing what’s right and wrong and defer to what Jane says is right and wrong. [But] if I sat face to face with my family, there’s nothing I could say that would help them understand how bad of a situation that they’re in. It’s something people have to discover for themselves.” ‘It Seemed Like a Loving Place’ The Coopers’ journey to Word of Faith began in the ‘90s in Georgia, where Suzanne’s then-husband, Rick Cooper, was a pastor. She was pregnant with her seventh child when she and Rick moved from their home in Darien to Spindale so Rick could attend the Bible school at Word of Faith, where their children would also be enrolled. “For the first year or two,” Suzanne says now, “it just seemed like a loving, nice place.” “They talked about doing the will of God all the time, and they talked about rebellion and about specific issues, such as how you dressed. And they talked about how we shouldn’t wear bathing suits,” she says. “And I listened and some of it made sense.” “I did want to learn more about God,” she says, “so I did listen, to just learn about it.” Jane, who had been a math teacher before starting Word of Faith, was not always volcanic. Suzanne has one memory in particular: She cut her finger while cooking and mentioned it in passing to Jane over the phone. “She took the time, when I left church that night, to take my hand and look at the cut and take me to go get a Band-Aid and put it on my finger,” Suzanne says. “It seemed a little over-loving, over- … I don’t want to say shepherding , but that’s the best word I know.” Over the years, Suzanne, Rick, John and the rest of the Cooper family — Jeffrey, now 37, Lena, 35, Benjamin, 34, Peter, 32, Chad, 29, Blair, 26, Adam, 23, and 15-year-old Jaclynn — say they realized the truth of the church they had chosen: not only the “pure manipulation” Jane could wield over them but also the abuse called “blasting,” a form of prayer intended to drive out evil. (Church members insist no such form of abuse is tolerated.) According to the Coopers and other former Word of Faith Fellowship members interviewed for Broken Faith , “blasting” was usually carried out by many congregants surrounding an individual who had broken a rule in a way Jane or another senior church member deemed unsavory. “There were a ton of rules” and “brainwashing,” John says. “Blasting” could involve anything from screaming, beating, choking and being held down to being “thrown through a wall” — which John tells PEOPLE happened to a cousin. (“There’s never any abuse,” minister Mark Morris said in the 2017 church video.) In "Broken Faith," investigative journalists dig into the secretive Word of Faith Fellowship church. Journalists Mitch Weiss and Holbrook Mohr spoke to Salon about their book on the controversial enigmatic church. By Mary Elizabeth Williams. Published April 2, 2020 4:00PM (EDT) Shares. This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.