*UPDATE: Yesterday a man called, threatened me, and had a list of ultimatums including erasing my blog and apologizing. I refused. He threatened to sue me. We have lawyers too and are only striving to get the truth out there, never to hurt people. Those from Liberty do not want these stories getting out, claiming that this should all be handled in private. But this is the only way we have gotten their attention at all and they still will not contact us. We will not back down to people who think they can scare us, who think they can bark at us and get us to jump. We are getting the truth out there one blog post, one status update, and one conversation at a time.
This blog is for the silenced, the marginalized, and the victims of the many types of abuse that the leadership and members of Liberty Church in O'Fallon Missouri have inflicted on their members and any who opposed their love for control. These are the stories of the witnesses:
Natalie's Story
"My first encounter with Liberty was in 2006. I had some friends that went to Liberty Church and had invited me to be their guest to a retreat to Logan Valley. I was about 13 at the time. My first views of everyone and the church were really great. I thought they were very nice, welcoming, warm, friendly, genuine, and very loving. That summer, I attended TFC every week. I started to notice there was a lot of weirdness about girls and boys interacting with each other. Mike Bond noticed that my friend and I (that I invited, who happened to be a guy) were apparently spending too much talking together. He brought us aside and told us that what we were doing was inappropriate and that we needed to hang out in separate groups, him with just guys and I with just girls. Mind you, we happened to be sitting talking around the other TFC people. Not off secluded by ourselves. The following week after one of the outside games, we came in and were about to have worship. I happened to sit between two of my fellow youth group friends (two guys) and was moved later to a different seat and was told " a girl cannot sit between two guys. If there are two girls sitting between two guys, it was fine, or if one boy was sitting between two girls, thats fine as well." ..? Okay, that makes perfect sense. Now, these rules only seemed to apply to some of us. When it came to Pastor Vaughan's kids or any other pastors kids, they were not obligated to follow these same "rules". Were Vaughan's daughters not in a band and doing worship with all or majority of males? I witnessed them at camps as well being able to go off with male friends and able to sit with them or between them. I kinda got the impression that the pastor's children were an exception and were perfect in the congregation's eyes. When we had talks and debriefings with Mike Bond, there seemed to be a lot of "If you are not with us, you are against us". I kept going to youth group, church, and retreats for 3 years. In all of those three years, I witnessed a lot cliques being made, gossiping between the groups, and the church shunning certain people and their families and encouraging others to do the same. At one point there was a young lady who was un married and became pregnant that was a member of the church, and they wanted everyone to shun her and her family, so they did. Not exactly what Jesus would do now would he? I do not understand why a church that proclaimed so much love and mercy act this way towards people. The family I started going with to the church with stopped going because of some confrontation between them and David Vaughan. They had gone to him about a concern on how he said we should act and how they thought god would want us to act, All Pastor Vaughan had to say about that was basically along the lines of, " How dare you question me and this church?!" he did not want to hear a word about it and didn't take the time to help them understand where he might have been coming from in his sermon. Because of this, a lot of really nice families left Liberty Church, as did I. I don't hate or dislike any of the Liberty members, but I don't find this church or a lot of its members to be the most godly, loving, or christ like as they try to make themselves out to be."
Do you have a story to tell? Has Liberty Church hurt you? Email your story to petertkintz@gmail.com and I will have it posted!
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