An Unhappier Singularity:
The Ongoing Maelstrom of Gwen Shamblin Lara's Cultism
By Rev. Rafael Martinez, Director, Spiritwatch Ministries
The cultic movement calling itself Remnant Fellowship, once led by the now tragically late Gwen Shamblin Lara, based out of Franklin, Tennessee now stands at a crossroads in its checkered history. Our last major site article that was specifically written to trace Remnant's development into the fully blown machine of religious abuse it has become was back in 2005, so the need for the writing of this one has been a long time in coming. It's certainly not inclusive and no such article can be. Only the Books of Life at the Judgment Seat of Christ can tell the whole surreal story but with our work concluding on the HBOMax documentary about Lara and her cultism, we believe it's important to provide additional commentary on all that's been swirling around in her cultic whirlpool - or maelstrom - for well over the past twenty years. Documentaries paint bright colors with broad strokes over a canvas of their own composition. However, since the sources of their inspiration came from our direct research and media contributions collected over 20 years as well as that of scores of victims we introduced them to and who also finally approached them, we believe that our work here will help answer a lot of the questions that yet remain about Gwen and her religion.
Spiritwatch Ministries has been at the forefront in helping expose Remnant's evildoing, a wickedness foisted upon her followers as “Mere Christianity" when nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve built upon the early warnings of the Midwest Christian Outreach, another discernment ministry located in Northern Illinois, to collect and develop the body of evidence and testimony we have compiled on this website that has brought light upon the darkness of Remnant for so many. We're thankful for the blogs, videos and podcasts of so many people in more recent years who have recognized the crazy of Gwen and Remnant and brought long needed attention to their ultimately aberrant work since the documentary came out in May, 2021. Our alerts and articles have been major sources for them, even if our ministry was largely invisible and uncredited. The chief satisfaction in all of this for us is that all of the attention focused upon Remnant has exponentially increased the amount of warning about Gwen's wretched legacy. More people have heard about Remnant's cultism than ever before and that's definitely the best we could hope for, even if a lot of it is unnecessarily snarky, sensational and even hateful. Some of it came of the plain opportunism Remnant's cultic grotesquerie offered for many podcasters, budding media meisters and other vloggers to draw upon juicy bits of content creation that's sure to make viewers stop and hear their take on the cult itself. Regardless, we're glad that such material will help arrest the growth of the cult and even be used to free from bondage those impacted by Remnant. We offer our take here to fill in a lot of gaps in the overall narratives that have arisen from these efforts and hope it will also help those in need of this insight, hoping it may help in the healing of victims and the deliverance of those still tenaciously clinging to Lara's cultism.
For Gwen and her whole Remnant culture have become a serious social blight in Middle Tennessee, causing the destruction of marriages, families and inflicting religious abuses by socially deceptive means that can only be described as the workings of a dangerous and mind controlling cult. You can read more about this in our first article this writing is meant to update through the link above. In the midst of their shared brotherhood and pride of accomplishment in the creation of a religious community in a secular world, the disruption that Gwen's Remnant dogma has inflicted upon the larger society in the name of their so-called "Message", the capital M clearly heard in their member's swooning testimony, are irrefutably and firmly documented.We got involved in the course of our countercult ministry while we resided in Cleveland, Tennessee in the year 2002. We'd been hearing of the controversies that Gwen Shamblin's rejection of the Trinity in 2000 had highlighted but were involved in ministry there and didn't follow it closely. That certainly would change when I began to be approached by several individuals whose families and marriages were in crisis and were under severe spiritual duress. They requested my spiritual counsel for the emotional and personal turmoil they were suffering which I readily offered to them as I would for anyone else who calls, visits or emails me requesting help. As a pastoral counselor and a licensed minister, I routinely provide this for all who ask for it and started taking phone call after email after phone call etc. Our attention turned from the Tennessee Valley's snake pits of cultism towards what appeared to be another one which was well dug into the affluence of Middle Tennessee's Williamson County.
These individuals who contacted us came from all walks of society from literally every part of the country, from New Jersey to Washington, Southern California to Texas and Florida. The core issues revolved around their marriages and family circles that were dissolving for a variety of reasons and their desire to resolve the issues and save their relationships. Some were wealthy and some were poor. Some were members of churches and some were not. Some were finding ways to cope with their troubles and some were very clearly despairing and losing hope of resolution. Some were the grandparents, the spouses of couples who were separated, and couples who were struggling to stay together. All had found no help through other sources of counsel and as a pastoral counselor concerned with the stability of communities, I did my best to assist with encouragement, observation, reflection and prayer for the people involved to work through their problems. Any family crisis has its own elements of personal instability, yet I learned pretty quickly that no matter where they were, these families were all facing the same difficulties that could be all traced back to a central source of contention. This common factor was disrupting every attempt to resolve their relational struggles.
This common factor was the influence of Gwen Shamblin Lara’s mandates for submission to her as the central authority figure over the marriage and family and demanded by the spouse or child who was her disciple and member in her Remnant Fellowship church where the church culture is completely subject to her control. The non member spouse or parents would find they were being required by their Remnant loved ones to fully relinquish direction of their finances, their time, their spiritual direction and their lives to the church’s agenda. Lara has created a worldview within
Remnant that basically views anyone and everyone not following the dictates of her “message” as evil and morally bankrupt. She requires obedience to her spiritual direction through a tightly controlled hierarchy of church leadership known as “the authority line” within the group. For families and marriages with already established identities and autonomy, this toxic influence of Lara and the Remnant society has been universally found to be an undue and destabilizing influence by those not in the Remnant church. It has created tremendous amounts of friction, strife, tension in families already in crisis through an established pattern of intrusion into them. The picture to the left was sent to us by a survivor who wanted to graphically illustrate how many of her family cut ties with her when she and husband declined to join them in Tennessee at Remnant. She is deplorably not alone.
Gwen was developing a thought reforming process stemming from her Weigh Down principles that literally became a mind controlling indoctrination of everyone under her influence who remained. She readily engaged in changing Remnant behavior by controlling Remnant thought. Viewed as a “prophet” divinely inspired by God, there was no claim or compulsion she could set forth that could be questioned or disobeyed. Who can question the authority of a prophet of God? With such authority firmly set within the movement, she achieved her goal to dominate, even manipulate, her followers who let her do their thinking for them. The whole Remnant culture revolved around the social settings and customs Lara created under the cunning guise of Christian fellowship that was a full blown catechism of coercion. Remnant members became completely recast after the image she wanted them to conform to. Completely trusting her and having their own agenda that saw value in cooperation with her demands, it was inevitable that a loyal core would remain and even somehow recruit others over the years to the same bondage.
Flush with her delusional Remnant vision, she immediately christened, in classically cultic fashion, those who agreed with her as real "saints" or loyal followers and all others as puppets of Satan. Evil was everywhere her Remnant-anointed authority was not respected. She'd declared war on everything not subject to her control and that spared no one - especially family who did not bow to her mandate. Her example was ominous and yet was all too familiar. Her inflated ego, charismatic bearing and encompassing vision of a new world order she impressed upon rapt and unquestioning followers was shared in startlingly similar cultic worldviews of toxic yet undeniably powerful figures like Jim Jones, Brigham Young, David Berg and Ellen White who led their own sectarian disciples captive into depths of cultic extremism seemingly no different from Shamblin's work.
Gwen's Shot Across The Bow : 2002
I learned immediately the first evening I met some of the victims of Gwen Shamblin how cultic her leadership was.
I was hastening back into a private meeting at a church in Tennessee from a parking lot. I was asked to attend a gathering of several devastated families of the first Remnant members in October 2002. This was a meeting where Don Veinot, the president of Midwest Christian Outreach and Adam Brooks, a former Weighdown member had organized and asked me to assist with. I had gone back out to my car to get something and I stopped, as my spiritual hackles rose while I stood in the chill fall darkness and looked around the tree and bush covered landscaping around the church. I could sense someone was there, that I was being watched from multiple angles. I knew they were there and all around hiding. I closed the door to my car and walked in a way that clearly communicated by body language that I was aware of someone being there, slowly and carefully and gazing around to where they might be and reentered and said nothing but to my then wife Joy that something was very wrong outside.
We'd find out later that Gwen had sent several of her college student aged members out with video cameras to actually spy upon the gathering. They were sent to gather surveillance footage by videotape of the gathering through the church's windows and record who was coming in and coming out. It was an unbelievable fulfillment of the apostolic warning of Paul in Galatians 2:4-5 about the stealthy and underhanded way imposter "Christians" work. The testimony of a former Remnant board member, writing about this paranoia is that it was instigated by none other than Gwen Shamblin. This account verified my suspicion that someone indeed was there. She and her sycophant leaders bade these young people to do her dirty work which she had no stomach to do herself. They reviewed these videos to ferret out the identities of those they could see in them to declare them enemies to her new "system," regardless who they were - with all the consequences it would bring, no matter what families were divided. The account at the link above provides some truly dark details about Shamblin's unscrupulous and warped example.
After an evening and a day of learning of her methodically malign influence that had led to family division, hungry children and marital discord, it became clear that in her Remnant world, it would truly be Gwen's way or the highway. We were aghast. People were just expected to bow to her authority and submit to it or be steamrollered by a loss of employment, a son or granddaughter and of course, as she'd dictate, all connection with truth and God. Person after person sought counsel with us. Nobody wanted to use the "c" word, but it came out regardless and there were those who slumped in despair there who realized their children and family were indeed caught up in a cult. The next day, Gwen's sister who was attending that weekend arose to haltingly and tearfully apologize on behalf of the Shamblin family for her sister's errant ways. "We do not approve of this. This is not the Gwen we know," she lamented. It was an electric moment filling a rapturously silent room full of people that confirmed that there had been, at one time, a "Good Gwen" whose generosity and warmth once were extended to all. It sadly showed she was now trapped in a gilded wilderness of her own choosing, leading blinded disciples after her by a cultic mind control that chilled and ossified the soul. It was another tragic loss of a soul to the power of self-deception and her descent had company, far too many of them.
Gwen's feral declarations in the past included her warning that all who resisted and disagreed with her Remnant vision were demonic enemies. This antisocial delusion of hers truly set the stage and the tone for the future. Her politely public tuts she made to the press about her difficulties stemming from misunderstanding were smoke screens of bright color that veiled a deep seated viciousness and hatred toward her perceived enemies. She'd sent a clear message that according to her humble perspective, any moving forward to oppose her was going to be a fight against God. I realized that Gwen Shamblin had deliberately and purposefully set herself up for a warfare in a conflict she had created out of her own delusion - part of the worldview of any movement that sets itself against all around it and tries to corner for itself an anointing of divine exclusivism from which nothing good comes..
A Scripture came to mind as we drove back to Cleveland that morning:
For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ: whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame—who set their mind on earthly things.
That weekend confirmed that Gwen Shamblin had made herself an enemy of the Cross of Christ and had thrown her gauntlet down. We purposed in our hearts that we'd answer her challenge and contend for the Faith and we never looked back.
2002 to 2009: The Battle Lines Of Gwen's Array
It’s been a long, hard and costly struggle for the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as well as the expose of Remnant falsehood. Gwen and Remnant twist the simplicity and gracious mercy of the Christian faith into a religious legalism that destroys heart, mind and soul. The "salvation" Remnant pushes is the successful completion of frequent bodily inspections that Remnant members must happily submit to in an attempt to prove their "purity" by lack of cellulite and genuine appearance -- not the trust in more weightier issues like God's grace and faith in Christ alone but of compliance to a Remnant code of conduct that approximates these virtues and a genuine relationship with Him which falls far short of the Gospel standard as spelled out in Ephesians 2:8-9. Part of our own contention with the heresy of the Remnant religion has included counseling of those impacted by its false doctrine and the false teaching drawn from it as well as a lot of prayer, Biblical examination of her abusive teaching and a lot of endurance in reachingout to victims and abusers alike. But looking back, there’s nothing we’d do differently. We’ve stood by every assertion about their nefarious doings we’ve made because they are based upon factual truth established by a long established documentation of their claims and actions as well as the testimony of many, many witnesses. There’s nothing we are not ready to repeat in a court of law with nothing but the inconvenient and unvarnished truth to back what we say, something Remnant lawyers have found out to their displeasure. As to our summary on Remnant, the cult’s current trajectory in recent years has taken some serious richochets and bizarre twists. We'll now review the first decade of its existence as it established its identity as a haven of deception.
As indicated, Gwen's energy was poured into cultic industry which continued from her 1999 Remnant Fellowship creation onward. Her control and manipulation hardened almost daily as she freely indulged in the micromanagement of her flock and the creation of a religiously centered business empire. It was during her first efforts to impose her Remnant values forcefully and rigidly upon her flock that she developed her base of moral support, a willing consumer base for her pricey Weigh Down product line and an ad hoc control through underlings of the entire new religion. Not content with scattered Remnant chapters across the nation, Gwen began to pitch to her flock the need to support the building of a new parochial church system based in Franklin and a need for the scattered Remnant to "come home". Complete with it's own sanctuary, fellowship and a massive networking of congregationally-supplied resources pooling the energies of all of the "exiles" she could compel to move to Tennessee, the "Remnant Nation" was born and nurtured as she launched her church. The building was finished in 2004 using "volunteer" labor drawn from the membership and during this same time, under Gwen's rigid control, her Remnant flock were mobilized to create an insular Remnant economic collective called Exodus Industries, with cottage industries involving a variety of food service, financial and home improvement businesses. There was networking among established Remnant members to help "out of towners" find work, homes and resources to help in their transition. Not long after this, Remnant began their now infamous wedding planning "ministry" that became a big source of income mustered from church members who were expected to utilize their services. Gwen's seemingly never ending reinforcement of her Weigh Down philosophy continued through endless retreads found in one curricular course after another as hawked online, within Remnant and in her never ending attempts to market them through the mass media where ever her weight loss testimonials could find her purchase.
All of the energy, sacrifice and finances Gwen could squeeze from her flock kept them constantly busy, on the move, ever engaged in effort or enjoined in a "godly play" meant to bind them to one another and of course, her authority over their social lives. Church festivals, Weigh Down coursework, continual weekend socials and summer time camps for children as well as families were organized. It was an endless time of busywork aimed at reinforcing Remnant ideals and morality and making the group cohesion greater by spiritualized socializing. That is the mark of any cult, to keep its membership always involved and preoccupied and never allowing them privacy or even time to stop and think about the propriety, truth and substance to what they were committed to support, full speed ahead. Her drive to create a firmly controlled congregation involved, as in other cults, a demand for purity, an absolute obedience and a compulsion for community taken to the most extreme manner possible and all of these activities were part of her agenda to keep them in line. Hundreds of people and scores of families moved to Tennessee, many living 2 families or more at a time in individual single family homes. Her conference call connections with her members soon were replaced by logins to member accounts set up for them to view their first webcasts by streaming audio in 2003, as well as daily doses of a 24/7 channel of Remnant instruction and music as created by Gwen's son Michael Shamblin. It was an immersive environment that no Remnant member could stand free from and not be counted as somehow suspect. You were fully in .. or not at all. Men wanted to keep their wives and family? No problem! They just had to get with her plan for them.
In the midst of the abusive Remnant agenda and the naked leveraging of authority and control over compliant slaves, human life did still go on. Many former members testify freely to finding a certain contentment and even fulfillment during this time of their lives. We've always acknowledged this: as in any cultic movement, it wasn't all a complete chamber of horrors continually. For many of them, it was the first time of being meaningfully involved in the creation of a community of faith that helped them find a place to channel their gifting and their heartfelt desire to serve others and to serve God as they saw Him, even if many of thedemands made on them were authoritarian and ungodly intrusions into their lives and even consciences. Remnant members came to join the movement with good intentions, arriving as idealists trying to create a new Christian world order that would save and deliver humanity from its sinful excess and full blown rebellion against His will. They made friends, new relationships, wept with one another, raised one another's children, sang and prayed together. While it was all horribly focused upon the exaltation of a blonde dietician from Memphis as a fearless prophet from God, the socializing, sharing and caring was from their hearts and for one another. It was as close to the proverbial human utopia as they'd ever been, and many left and to this day still mourn the loss of the dream as it turned to nightmare.
Shamblin's ambition to consolidate and magnify her temporal authority wasn't limited to her heavy handed church leadership. She had plans to create a church academy on the premises to hone a new generation of children under her Remnant vision that for several reasons did not materialize yet its failure energized her homeschooling emphasis that was thereon advocated in church circles. It was also found in 2005 that the new comers to the area Remnant had "attracted" were being mobilized as voters for elections to install a Remnant member into office on the Brentwood City Council. The member lost but the church's growth continued as more out of state Remnant members fell to the Tennessee membership's love bombing and Gwen's influence and moved into the area. With Gwen's direction accepted as the final word on the finest details of living she would be approached about, her influence continued to grow as she helped pick wedding colors, advise people to stop taking medications, and end their relationships with spouses who would refuse her authority. These were the salad days of Remnant authoritarianism which were virtually unquestioned and enthusiastically embraced by members as their dutiful obedience to God's will as expressed by Remnant leadership.
But Remnant's progress endured a jarring reality check from 2003 onward when the Smith murder tragedy took place. Despite their polarizing influence, well hidden religious abuse and ongoing division of families and marriages, Remnant had largely escaped scrutiny of their doings when the death of Josef Smith after years of child abuse by the hands of his parents, church members Joseph and Sonya Smith, changed things. They were arrested and charged with acute child abuse and then were convicted in court 4 years later in Georgia of being guilty of beating their child to death. No one was louder in their defense of the Smiths then Gwen Shamblin who would finance their court defense, launch a website protesting their innocence,and even send contingents of Remnant members to sit in the courtroom during the trial as moral support. It didn't matter that the Smiths were found guilty of their son's death, Shamblin's delusional apology for her errant members became the party line the rest of Remnant was to follow and to this day, they still view them as martyrs for her "truth" who are wrongly jailed. The Tennessee Department of Children's Services were involved in trying to assess if such abuses were occurring and nervous Remnant parents were supplied a list of "10 Action Points" instructing them how to respond to visits from DCS officials. This is how real it got for Remnant who, rattled yet unfazed, continued to support their "prophet" even after the Smiths lost every appeal they launched.
Our ministry continued to ex-Remnant members and their families in a variety of online venues as well as a lot of pastoral counsel, not to mention the creation of our critical articles upon Gwen's influence and practice. Pretty soon, Weigh Down recruiters found themselves being asked direct questions by prospective recruits about the lifestyle choices and religious teaching and influence that they were being drawn to which couldn't be easily answered. Increasingly, they'd find many people initially drawn by Weigh Down ad print to join a class suddenly bolt from it as much for it's divisive and judgmental tone as much as the first testimonies and Biblical analysis we offered on our site. Other media coverage and critical articles helped as well. These emails below are a sample of the dozens we've received from that time frame from ex-members as well as others direly impacted by Remnant:
I am now finally back in _________ and am trying to get back on my feet. Your postings have helped me get out of RF and I know the truth, I "sold everything" to be a part of this church only to find myself in a foreign country with nobody because they said I would not submit to authority. Please email me back so I can help you with any info you need.
My counselor told me today that another client of hers was searching for a church in Brentwood. She told her several she had visited and mentioned she may visit Remnant. My counselor – shook her head (no) and told her to check them out. The next visit she said she had searched internet and found Rafael’s site and read many things about them – this informed her and she will not be visiting! You are helping! Every once in a while you actually hear about one your Spirit Watch has spared the agony! Keep up the good work!
It also makes me yet again grateful to you, Rafael, for all the work, research, time and heart you put into exposing the darkness of Rf. Getting the great prophet angry must be a sign that you are hitting a nerve and on the right track, no?
I just wanted you to know that prayers are answered personally since you've been such a major part of keeping my strength strong and helped me learn so much with your Trinity Studies.
Rafael, as always thank you for your constant, steadfast voice of reason in this small corner of a bigger world.
Certainly it must have been the greatest of frustrations for Remnant to pour the energy and time it did to cast its nets into the media waters of the Internet, only to find their catch dart out of reach because of a Spiritwatch article or post. Even as Gwen mustered her flock to "testify" in video after video in the same contrived and stilted manner about their "permanent" weight loss and their alleged "freedom" as they followed the "Message," we received these emails without any solicitation. We knew that we needed to keep on keeping on no matter where the path would lead. We have no apologies whatsoever in upsetting any apple cart Remnant tried to peddle where ever we could.
2006 was the year that the terrible dual impacts of Hurricane Katrina and Rita swept New Orleans with disaster. It was also the year that Gwen's cultic penchant to use current events to her advantage was in full display and she delivered a prophecy after Katrina's destruction that another hurricane would come and destroy it completely. The imagery of the aftermath filled with death, misery and sorrow for thousands of residents became a global horror viewable by all with a television and the gutwrenching accounts of the fight for survival brought a nation to mourning. But compassion wasn't Gwen's concern - she spent most of her time raving about the sin of New Orleans afterwards from her Remnant soundstage and that its failure to repent was to result in its complete destruction with the next hurricane. I imagine she felt like a Jonah prophesying against Nineveh, flush with her self-anointed oracular powers, and that she eagerly awaited the annihilation of the city. After all, that's what a "prophet" would do: expect God to fulfill her oracle!
But when Rita came and failed to destroy the city and only added to the pain and loss of the survivors there, which was duly flashed to her TV screen and those of the world, she decided to disappear for a couple weeks. The prophet had prophetically pronounced a divine stroke of judgment that never came. No one would say where she went and she didn't speak again on it when she returned from her exile. Gwen's silence was as deafening as her spuriously false prophecy and while her flock didn't ask questions (because they knew better), they were understandably and invisibly jolted again by yet another brazen effort of mystical manipulation aimed at reinforcing a pretensive authority over them that she didn't really have. Cult leaders can only gain power from those who give it to them and Shamblin was no exception. The tarnish on her prophetic seal was dutifully overlooked by all.
Feeling the heat all around her, with the Smiths being convicted, and her marketing of her religious tech being frustrated by our revelations of her cultism, Gwen's losses in her bottom line of commerce continued to fuel her desire to see our ministry shut down as we were easily the biggest target she felt she could finger for her wrath. That same year, Gwen banded with 66 other members of her church in the filing of a lawsuit for alleging I was willfully and maliciously engaged in defamation of them all. In March, 2007, my legal team successfully argued that the suit should be dismissed as meritless and the judge agreed and dismissed it. While slander and libel are the verbal and written aspects of defamation, the court found we had engaged in Constitutionally protected freedom of speech. We hadn't slandered or libelled anyone.
My military service was to defend and protect our way of life as well as the constitution of the United States. I gave part of my life away to give Shamblin and her associates their freedom to call good evil and evil good .. and I wasn't about to let her deny me the freedom to call her wickedness out for what it was according to truth, Scripture and experience.
I'd heard of a prayer chain ongoing in Remnant circles that entire morning of the court hearing pleading for Remnant to call up on God to compel the judge to come down hard on me. A supporter in the court room kept us apprised of their frantic texts and emails. When the judge dismissed the suit, the chain went suddenly quiet and then shifted to talking about something else entirely different. The prayers of Remnant didn't go very far. In the meantime, even as went to court we successfully had two interventions that helped Remnant members reconsider their involvement with the cult and were aiding several families in their own child custody battles against Remnant ex-spouses who were fighting them in divorce courts. We continued to help document Gwen's bloody handed meddling that contributed or even directed the marital dissolution as well as the established history of parental abuses we knew of. We didn't stop for a moment and pressed onward trying to rally all the resistance offered to her that could be done in the media, in the courts and among those who needed encouragement in the midst of an unimaginable tragic sorrow that Shamblin's influence became.
So this legal setback certainly ramped up the pressure on Gwen Shamblin to keep her cult more focused on her direction and control than ever. Her belief that one was rendered "pure" before God if they met a completely arbitrary weight standard infected the church congregation in a bold willingness to descend into ever deeper aberrations of behavior. Her false teaching about this "purity" is what encouraged this since, if you were at the right weight, you'd "arrived." Some of the children of Remnant, unable to tolerate the crushing pressure for perfection, turned to drugs and alcohol as escapes from the pressure they faced on every hand to comply with Remnant control over their lives, including what vocation they were to choose and who they were to date and marry. Some became quite familiar with the justice system in Williamson County due to DUI arrests while others ended up being raked over the coals of shame for seeking counseling and psychiatric care and prescribed medication from those outside the church and beyond Gwen's disapproval and her own "therapy". Increasingly, Remnant's Saturday nightly post-church service socials became alcohol sodden affairs that led to drunkenness and lascivious behavior that was indulged in as quietly as possible, which at times seemed unnecessary when no less than Michael Shamblin, the son of Gwen Shamblin - and others - were found engaging in affairs and other immoral activity without any accountability.
The church fellowship hall became a dance floor every Saturday night after church and it was from such boozy gatherings where drunkenness fueled a sampling of the fleshpots of Remnant's carnality, as earthly as anything in the world owned by "Satan", as Gwen characterized it. Even as Michael and others shamelessly engaged who they would in their "pastoral duty", other Remnant men and women, struggling with their bad marriages and inner temptations found themselves in compromising situations and were ferociously disciplined by ruthless shepherds. This is a dimension of life barely touched upon and kept deeply hidden by Remnant but it does in fact exist. The "Way Down" documentary brought into sharp focus the particularily unsavory moment in which MIchael found himself with another trophy mistress, another married Remnant wife of another member, who'd been trying to leave the cult and who was entangled in a child custody battle with her ex-husband. His affair with her turned into a serious mistake, for she found in his infidelity an opportunity for deliverance: after threatening him with a full on public disclosure of their afternoon delights if Gwen's financial, legal and moral pressure didn't let up, she suddenly was able to gain full custody of her child and leave the cult.
In the spring of 2009, several members of Remnant's leadership confronted Gwen and their peers over the gross immorality and hypocrisy over it, no longer able to remain silent on Gwen's toleration of a double standard regarding congregational sin. Remnant had become what they all had supposedly left behind in the "counterfeit church" and were no better in the end. The internecine conflict ultimately would lead to their departure from the church, which sent even more shockwaves through the Remnant nation. They were well known and respected figures whose testimonies had been long accepted and whose authority was as equal as that of Gwen's loyal lieutenants like Tedd Anger and Patrick Stites. It took an emergency church meeting called by Gwen to spin the incident as a shocking display of rebellion against her godly authority, never of course referring to her private defense of her son's infidelities as similar to the lapses of the Biblical King David despite which God still "blessed" him, much less any acknowledgment that David's sin of infidelity and murder would result in God's judgment upon his baby son who would die after his sin was revealed. It was hastily packed away from public consumption as another test of God's Remnant and further evidence of the need for the whole church to purge itself of sin. With an applause that was perhaps louder than it should have been, the incident was closed.
The aftermath of this leadership crisis was immediate. Shamblin's governance of Michael suddenly had an iron fist to it and his presence in Remnant became an exercise of the slow fade. His drinking as well as his weight increased from that point on, which was another obvious transgression of Remnant's "law", and he never again exercised the authority his position as a Shamblin bought him in any great way. He was a leader who no longer led and his worship leading was supplanted by others, and to show how far he'd been banished, a 2018 Remnant Fellowship webcast episode devoted to spotlighting Remnant's music never once mentioned Michael, who had been the father of their hymnody and sacred music used to propagandize and bolster their faith in the Remnant vision.
Again feeling the heat, and apparently the need to divert the aggrieved focus of a disillusioned Remnant Nation to something more faith building, Gwen Shamblin and Tedd Anger launched another personal lawsuit in the summer of 2009 charging slanderous device against myself in yet another attempt to come off as an embattled martyr of the Remnant faith and a champion of their cause. Their case was once again dismissed at our request and even though they would go on to appeal this decision to the Tennessee Court of Appeals, they readily agreed with the lower court decision and let it stand in the spring of 2011. All of this occurred after I gave their lawyer Samuel Harris a quarter to help pay for his car parking meter on the streets of Nashville as we encountered them walking to the court house that morning. He never did pay it back, by the way. But he ultimately would be disbarred for fraudulent legal shananigans of his own so I guess that's a bit of justice in itself.
2010 - 2017: The Seven Years Of Famine
From 2010 onward, even as Gwen and Tedd fought their losing battle appealing the dismissal of their second lawsuit against me, the media outreach of Remnant continued to accelerate. She continued to Internet radio and streaming video sites were emerging as well as their expanded usage of YouTube, Vimeo and the occasional "Rebuilding The Wall Tour" where Gwen and her Weigh Down associates would rent a venue, decorate it and invite everyone to hear how right everything was in the Remnant world (barking out claims such as "Our Marriages Are Strong"; "Our Festivals Are Holy To The Lord"; "Our Leaders Are Godly"; "Our LIves Have Changed" as part of the three ring circus of testimonials they'd trot out for anyone to hear).
In one such glitzy matrix of web graphical testimony, their web designers perhaps unintentionally revealed just what really was energizing their movement's transformative power:
Despite all of Gwen's high extolling and gesticulation to the heavens supposedly meant to glorify God ("Ohh, GAWWwwd .."), you can see where her focus really always was meant to be - upon the personal influence of her movement, not the transforming power of God's Spirit that sanctifies and changes a real believer in Christ. The ad blurb showed how Remnant's attention was to be upon the socializing contact with Remnant social circles that imposed change upon her "Remnant." You were called to "Meet The Remnant .. members share how Remnant Fellowship has changed their lives." (emphasis mine). It was the indoctrination of the group that shaped them, the culture that turned them into clones of one another. It was her cultic social engineering that everyone was going to praise. The utterly narcissistic sterility of this completely escaped their review.
This self-anointing presumption was carried over into their new "You Can Overcome" programming on YouTube. Started in 2011, these were video productions churned out weekly for several years that were essentially church services and special webcasts recorded live in the Remnant Fellowship building that actually looks more like an infomercial soundstage than a church sanctuary. By that same year, Remnant's community building more fully incorporated their longstanding practice of "shepherding", in which Remnant leaders were assigned a number of Remnant members who would be accountable to them for all spiritual matters. This had been slowly implemented since Remnant's beginning but it was in the years after the 2009 crisis that the cult's leadership put a subtle reemphasis on the role.
A Remnant shepherd worked directly under the authority of a member of the senior leadership, within a tightly controlled hierarchy of authority exercised over church members by leaders. This questionable practice was essentially no different and just as damaging as the kind of ruthless top down manipulation found in other groups like the International Churches of Christ, the Xenos Christian Fellowship and the New Apostolic Reformation. In these specific kinds of shepherding settings, however, this "accountability" was actually a finely tuned mechanism of control and compulsion that didn't stop at piety but would routinely dictate how Remnant members were to live and think in matters of conscience and personal choice. All flagging obedience to the Remnant merry go round was ruthlessly reemphasized before members by their "shepherds", and the function would be expanded more so as the decade wore on.
Due to the legal challenges we had endured in our defense against Gwen, her Remnant disciples and Tedd Anger, we'd become saddled with a staggering amount of legal expense. Donations to our legal fund didn't begin to cover them and we believed they should be paid by those who made us incur them. So in 2011, I sued Gwen and Tedd for compensatory and punitive damages as a result, wanting my lawyers to get paid and for justice to prevail. We filed these papers demanding a jury trial and were entering the discovery phase in 2012 and getting ready for the case when abruptly in 2013, my lawyers were contacted by a lawyer for Shamblin wanting to settle out of court. Of course, the terms of the settlement were to be kept confidentially and they would admit no wrong in so doing. Of course.
But they did indeed settle and finally did admit to learning an expensive lesson: that defamation is not what our ministry engages in and that we indeed could call them what they truly were, a cultic movement that harms and destroys lives led by a cult leader who wanted to dominate lives with impunity. The settlement accomplished our goal to get my lawyers paid. It also helped me move back home to Northwest Indiana and have one whale of a wedding reception with my new wife Elizabeth, after my first wife Joy abruptly abandoned and then divorced me in 2010 to immediately remarry an old flame she'd carried the torch for during our marriage. I couldn't let that painful interlude distract me, however. Spiritwatch Ministries continuied in the land of the "Christmas Story" and began to help victims of abusive groups locally and in the Midwest.
The power of truth is a potent thing and there have been no further legal actions from Remnant since then .. so far.
Sadly in 2012, Gwen's daughter Elizabeth Hannah's unexpected loss by sudden infant death syndrome of her 5 month old baby son Henley became another warped opportunity for Remnant to abusively flex its punitive and intrusive influence over the Remnant Nation. Not long after the child's death without even so much as a public announcement or mourning among the Shamblins, the inevitable "blame game" began. In cults, the mind control principle of "mystical manipulation" is visible when a cult's leadership uses a manifestation of natural origins such as adisaster or a personal setback to indoctrinate their followers as a sign of divine direction of even judgment. In Remnant circles, God's favor on them had been lost due to "sin in the camp", some kind of immorality that brought God's judgment resulting in the loss of the child. In groups like Remnant during times of crisis there is placed an exalted context and cryptic interpretation of these kind of tragic events that affect them. They sought to place a spin on anything around them so as to put some lesson or significance to them. This is how they corner their self perception and control information so as to reinforce their authority (one bite "past full" is sin, the lack of weight loss is a sign of rebellion, thunderstorms are signs of God's judgment as well as cardinals being signs of God's favor and an unexpected bonus or success is God's blessing).
For one of the "Remnant royalty" to lose a child is tragic enough, but some sort of purpose had to be divined in it all and in a group given to obsessive self-criticism and open judgmentalism, the wheels turned furiously within to understand what this was about. Obviously, the Shamblins were perfectly sinless and "pure" so this could not have been caused by fault of their own. The answer did not take long to be sought - by the gauging of the morality of the Remnant itself. As testified to in the second episode of the "Way Down", there came a mass wave of interrogations across Remnant that probed each member to find out if they were the "one" who might have offended God and for them to confess their sin. Yet another chill fell across Remnant in which the "sin" had to be identified and removed from the Remnant "camp." Beyond this search for a new enemy among the faithful, nothing else was said and within 48 hours after Henley's death, he was buried with no ceremony .. and no public or private mourning allowed.
The unspoken questions about her grandson's sudden death certainly were all around for little five month old Henley died on the last day of the Remnant Passover feast, at the height of the highest holy day in the cult's worship calendar. The Passover was a commemoration of ancient Israel's deliverance from Egypt that finally came when Yahweh's death angel struck down every firstborn male among the Egyptians in a single night even as Israel dwelt in their homes where the blood of lambs were smeared on the door to provide a signification that they were God fearing. Why would God smite Henley on the final day of Passover? Gwen's "look within" she enjoined on everyone certainly could possibly have escaped her as well. Certainly, her instinctual search for a scapegoat kicked in, but the plain truth that a stubborn perception that the favor of God appeared to have been lost was something that could not be shaken easily. Remembrances of her court losses in combatting Spiritwatch Ministries, her inability to mobilize a political victory that would supposedly aid her church's planning growth, the conviction of the Smiths for murder and many other instances in which she should have triumphed over opposition were certainly no comfort to her in that bleak hour.
Perhaps a final straw for Gwen's inner toleration of the dissonance of failure was the limit that her ongoing sham marriage with her husband David would take, despite a marital relationship of over three decades that contributed to it. Her marriage to him was first presented during the years after Remnant formed in 1999 as one of the “seven” original members who formed it according to Remnant lore. Later, as the church began to grow and more female members came aboard, she was known to regularly lament over the difficulties he supposedly offered. Accounts of furious arguments at Ashlawn between Gwen, her children and David over the whole Remnant venture were rife. it was well known that he did not approve of her Remnant church initiative or mixing religion with her Weigh Down business and that these set the stage for their many highly energetic disagreements over it. He started to drop out of any participation in services very early on in the church's existence after having been a musician there (after which he would leave when his wife came up to preach).
Soon, David would have nothing to do with Remnant thereafter, even though he was nominally Gwen’s head of household and a listed leader. The marriage soon became a union of convenience. David was supplied a stipend of sorts to use for his own leisures, for investments and latitude to develop friendships of his own from among the men in the church who were there. And while he disapproved of his wife’s mingling of Weigh Down and Remnant activities, he apparently enjoyed a comfortable income flow derived directly from it. He disagreed with it, but enjoyed what the Bible calls “filthy lucre” for many years. He had investments, property and a leisurely social life that were a dubious firewall between him and the cultic inferno he helped start and did nothing to stop.
Accorded with every honor that the husband of the prophet would get, his obesity defied every declaration about purity Gwen had been railing on for years. One can only imagine what a marital life under those circumstances could possibly be like, given the fact that Remnant legalism's architect was be sharing a life with a man whose corporal existence was, by her determination, a personification of rebellion and disobedience. Every marriage is a personal union with its own unique tenor, and the Shamblins were no different. They apparently had arrived at some kind of relational detente, and had effectively turned their union into a distant partnership, with little regard for one another as they went about their separate existences broken only by interactions with grandchildren and the dutiful attempts at being "family." It was often reported by ex members that Gwen wished David would die so she could be free of him during her commiseration with other women. What he thought of her isn't known, but perhaps the Good Gwen he once cherished was who he had in his heart and mind. Possibly David hoped beyond hope to somehow recapture a life with her. Either way, the literally sham marital arrangement (no pun intended) lurched its way through their lives and this primal, foundational emptiness in their lives must have become almost intolerable in what was a seemingly irreconcilable dead end.
So the cracks in Remnant's culture were beginning to show in ways Gwen couldn't effectively spin or whitewash any longer. Her work began to creatively stagnate - aside from her release of her three "History Of God" books during the 2010's (all of which had been written several years in the past but never published), Gwen's output of Weigh Down curricula were simply more reworking of her "Weigh Down Workshop" book, Gwen did not create any further original curricula with the same luster. Her "Zion Kids" curricula issued in 2013 was the last series that had anything original to present in her never ending need to indoctrinate the young generation there, as it was aimed at channeling attention back to her "History of God" books as well as provide "teaching that will inspire your school-aged children to find God in everything", as the ad blurb gushed.
Even as she launched the "You Can Overcome" TV series, the content was simply a series of endless retreads of live recordings of talks she had had with panels of Remnant members in what were essentially infomercials about her Weigh Down program with occasional episodes that explored the vocation, creativity and testimony of her well vetted and thoroughly approved guests. Her church calendars came and went, organized socials conducted and family camps held, and aside from their inevitable tread to extol the virtues of their cultic tribalism, Remnant clearly was going to stay the course of eagerly wolfing down whatever tired iteration of propaganda Gwen would authorize for them to communally feast upon.
2018: The Bridge Into Troubled Waters
2018 truly became the year of watershed for Gwen and Remnant when her new forays into politics and romance set her on the path to a destiny of disaster. For the next three years, her direction and the impact it wrought upon her cultic movement was inestimable. Profound just doesn't quite describe the chaos her life and legacy would unleash upon her disciples.
In that same year, we were approached by the production team behind the "Way Down" documentary and asked to help them create it. They really did not know where to begin or who to speak with and after they convinced us they were legitimate and even sincere, we began to ask for help from the ex-Remnant community we were in touch with. Dropbox and Google Drive bent a lot of bandwidth with the documents, video and audio we sent. Much of it would be later seen in the episodes. Several people stepped forward for interviews, myself included, and all of this ongoing while Gwen's descent into daffy delusion pitched nose down.
That year she unabashedly sought to become a kingmaker once more. While Gwen has sought to gain cultural and political allies in the Brentwood area as an ongoing task, her interests have always been centered about advancing her Remnant vision and agenda and she’s not exhibited any coherent strategy for engaging those outside Remnant in social and political settings for networking or connections in the world outside it. Without a clear vision of service to the external community or an established sense, any sense of social justice has always been founded on what Gwen and the Remnant would gain for taking interest in one political avenue or another. Her initiative becomes visible when Remnant members seek to influence local politicians for a rezoning decision by encouraging input from local Remnant members directly to them or wanted to do damage control of any negative publicity by having Remnant members bake cookies or do yard work for their neighbors in a short term effort. Gwen’s politics are highly pragmatic and in reaction to challenges they perceive to their own consolidation of social stature and influence.
She plunged into a full scale mobilization of her group to enthusiastically back the ambitions of Tennessee Republican congresswoman Marsha Blackburn to become the senator for Tennessee in the United States Senate. Tedd Anger's daughter interned for her during her campaign and Blackburn readily rubbed shoulders with the Angers in photo ops. The fact that he was a cult leader who'd helped decimate the lives of so many people didn't faze her one bit. Gwen even had one of Blackburn's campaign signs posted on her lawn outside her home for the sake of the cause. Blackburn won the election, no doubt to not a few Remnant voters rallied on by Shamblin's "suggestion" that they consider her a candidate of integrity, in time for her installation as another Republican loyalist for then President Donald Trump's extremism and for her to alternatively support and then hypocritically condemn the Capital insurrection on January 6th, 2021. The kind of larger than life persona espousing scorched earth polarization in public discourse that Trump championed, a relentless demonization of everything and anyone who didn't fit in his "conservative" worldview, was familiar to Gwen and likely just as irresistible.
Another pot came to full boil in 2018 in her life which would then spill over into the fabric of Remnant itself with even more ichorous mess.
A couple years before, Gwen was having work done at her mansion when she found herself magnetically pulled again by the winds of change to the dark eyed handyman who was introduced to her by Exodus Industry connections. In the game of love, one thing always leads to another and she began ardently responding to the amorous attentions of the handyman, one Joe Lara, a former B movie actor and country music star wannabe. He joined the church in 2017 and regularly attended, and immediately gained a social circle of Remnant peers to hang with. Her hardened matronly prophetess visage softened into that of a smitten lovestruck teenager and she quickly forgot David’s existence as she lifted up Joe before her thunderstruck congregation as her new man. It became well known that he and Gwen had regular getaways to her Destin, Florida beach house - even while still married to David.
It’s hard if not impossible to believe that David was innocent of his wife’s trysts but since he was a fringe figure in Remnant to begin with, it was easy to keep any protest isolated. The inevitable finally came and in November 2017, Gwen decided to divorce her husband David after 40 years of marriage. But in typical fashion, she seemed to have forgotten that inconvenient legal detail when in January, 2018, she still posted an Instagram entry celebrating her 40th wedding anniversary with David:
The consequences of this abrupt and shocking lifestyle choice Gwen made cannot be overstated. It’s vital to realize that divorce was absolutely forbidden in Remnant, a hold over from her puritanical lifestyle standards she mandated all in Remnant to follow. So great was her obsession for this that Gwen created an inner support group of women called “Beulahs” who were accorded a status within Remnant as heroic martyrs she personally counseled to stand true for her no- divorce directives. Dozens if not hundreds of women faced degradation, spousal abuse and unrelenting pressure by Gwen to live in unhealthy and even dangerous marriages to men who would rather fight with them than submit to their wives’ entreaties to submit to Remnant authority over their lives. It was a subject completely ignored by her, never raised among her Beulahs or in the Remnant media and for good reason.
A zero tolerance of divorce and innumerable claims of healed marriages were a central thrust of her WD and RF marketing campaigns. One of Gwen’s scathing criticisms of the Christian church is that divorce is a rampant social ill within it, while for years, her curricula websites, videos and testimonies were lavish media productions filled with assertions that her religion was proven true because of so many marriages that her product and religion restored. So she delayed any official announcement of her nuptials with Joe while planning a lavish wedding in almost complete secrecy that summer, in stark contrast to the high visibility Remnant lavishes on their church wedding planning industry which are a huge revenue stream for them. That was an extraordinary act in itself and absolutely no mention of Shamblin and Lara’s plans was made in Remnant media. It was only through an official statement at an all church meeting in late July 2018 that she informed her followers that she was now divorced and would remarry shortly. Barely 8 months later after celebrating her 40th wedding anniversary with David, the printer ink barely dry on her June 2018 divorce decree, Gwen married Joe in August that year, in an over the top and gaudy two hour ceremony where numbers of people fainted in the hot Remnant sanctuary. All media discussion of this in RF circles was tightly controlled for sometime afterwards. It was only brought up when Gwen brought Joe on stage during Remnant festivals and activities from the fall of 2018 onward.
The spinning Gwen engaged in about this shocking turn of events would make a Maytag washer blush. Despite her rigid refusal to allow those in her Remnant church flock any permission to divorce their non Remnant mates so she could claim they were trying to “heal” marriages, Gwen suddenly had a change of perspective just before she remarried to Joe. She posted a new directive on marriage on the Remnant website that was a shocking reversal of what’s known as “Remnant law”, that is to say, Remnant’s unique traditions and directives. It became permissible to divorce to be “allowed in circumstances, but it must be for the pure Church and not for merely selfish reasons.” A lengthy statement on divorce and remarriage setting forth the propriety of divorce in some instances as set forth on the official Remnant website ends with a statement that it had existed since 2003. Checks of archived versions of Remnant’s websites in 2003 do not show this document there and it obviously was uploaded in 2018 as a spectacularly clumsy effort to cover Gwen’s previously hardline position forbidding divorce among Remnant members.
To this day, there is no mention of Gwen and Lara’s marriage even on the church’s wedding planning website. The existence of David Shamblin was virtually erased from Remnant history and Lara and Gwen rushed ahead to present their marital espousal as the only actual reality, an act of denial that is common in Remnant circles when intolerable contradictions in their inner narrative confront them. This statement’s claim to have been authored in 2003 was a bald faced lie. The claim was a hamhanded ploy and it was made just before Gwen’s remarriage to Joe in 2018, publicized internally and finally posted on the Remnant Fellowship website, just in time for her to unveil her own plans to divorce David .. and to remarry Joe.
Suddenly, divorce American style was a new option to Remnant which many chose to take. Divorce lawyers started to get a lot more business in 2018 to this day thanks to Gwen’s sudden epiphany filled with tap dances through the Bible. This sudden lancing of a long festering sore within Remnant socially rocked it in ways beyond our telling. The voice of God heard through the Memphis accent of Gwen had changed the tune. But it fooled none of the Remnant slaves who knew better. 15 years of being told to endure bad marriages was not a mandate that her flowery new rhetoric could dismiss. This sent serious shock waves throughout Remnant that have not stopped to this day. And the sacrificial consequences of this change and several other major shifts of leadership, practice and direction within Remnant caused major turmoil at a level within it that Gwen, with the disconnect of romantic fantasy clearly preoccupying her, made herself blissfully unaware of. Her and Joe's political planets aligned and they became full on Republican supporters.
A year later, in 2019 the Laras got the idea that a reality TV series about their perfect life would be a project to mutually benefit their egos and their pocketbooks. Her publicists got to work, no doubt ensuring simultaneously that they kept inoculating Gwen on her sets and in her office with Diet Coke. By this time a serious undercurrent of discontent and confusion apparently developed among Remnant members over Gwen’s flip flopped position on divorce. This resulted in several divorces one after the other in the church where Remnant members, citing Gwen’s document, found a way out of unhappy marriages they’d been in for years. To be consistent to her position, they were allowed to take place. In the middle of all of this absolutely cosmic shaking of the Remnant body politic, the Laras pitched a reality TV series called "Weigh Down South" to various production companies, and pressed ahead with planning to film the show in personal, private and church related settings. That footage would involve all of Remnant itself, which would now provide for them astage for which the life of Gwen and Joe would be featured. It would be entitled, well, “Life with Gwen and Joe”: they were actually convinced that a TV project where they would be thrust into intimate settings to ramble on about their hobbies and accept Remnant member accolades was going to actually attract an audience for a regular nationwide television series as well as a positive cash flow. If T.I. and Tiny could get a family hustle going, why not they?
Gwen called a meeting of her Beulah ladies in the winter of 2019 to advise them that her new marriage and a now impending TV show focusing on their doings was a sign of God’s approval. She took great pains in this meeting to emphasize that her great sacrifices for the sake of Remnant were being rewarded and that she was now going to have to ensure that the producers got only the best source material from it. Women, therefore, who had marital or weight problems were not to be interviewed by the show producers and possibly provide any troubling imagery or reports to them. And that was a non negotiable issue all women were to be to submit to. This requirement for throwing certain faithful Beulah women under the bus as potentially troublesome losers took place with universal agreement by the women themselves, who all swore to keep this as another secret for the sake of Gwen and Zion.
It turned out that no production entity ever picked up the show. Not to be undone in her quest to be a full blown TV star, Remnant’s media wing ended up filming a trailer in the fall of 2019 and episodes of her "Life With Gwen and Joe" began to be streamed via Remnant's media outlet on YouTube. Subtitled playfully as a show featuring " the Preacher and the Pilot", the Laras had their moment in the sun and made the best of it. They continued to produce an ongoing show while the pandemic of 2020 shut the nation down, with the spectacle of Gwen and Joe and her chosen Remnant supporting cast cavorting unmasked and unsocially distanced even as thousands died in America from COVID-19. This paroxysm of self-indulgent conceit finally was reigned in by the fall of that year, ironically with an episode about “honoring the Christian martyrs” that began with a shot of Gwen and Joe twirling each other with a disinterested band of Remnant members around them. Nothing could be more telling about the surreal and grotesque focus of the Laras on themselves.. at the cost of the trust of her Beulahs and by default her entire Remnant flock who became bit players in their self-centered religious romcom.
Her teaching and manner all the more self-infatuated, her production of teaching materials having long ground to a halt, Gwen began to direct repeated readings of her "History" books as led by Remnant elders by YouTube videos. Instead of Gwen the prophetess speaking of the mysteries of God, the lesser lights of RF leadership were pressed into following her direction during Saturday and midweek services, even as it was phoned in from out of state in a conference call. Her already rambling and disconnected talks became even more disjointed and almost incomprehensible and Gwen relied more upon her cadre of sycophantic leaders to lead church webcasts even as she wallowed on the beach with Joe. She became increasingly more uninvolved with Remnant church services and her desire to live more self indulgently became a disorienting reality her flocks had to face square on.
The COVID pandemic travel restrictions changed nothing and she came and went as she pleased, even arriving late in some services and having little to do with them until the very end where she wrapped things up with her rambling summary. Formal dinner parties and alcohol fueled socializing with Joe and Gwen's insider entourage became her devotional time and Gwen’s reliance upon the rigid attention Remnant members paid to her direction enabled her to readily focus elsewhere. The conditioning of her flock to offer nothing less than total obedience to her whims was so firmly entrenched in their culture that nothing broke her bliss.
2021 : When The Cup Of Judgment Overflowed
Gwen was living large and living under the dream she was in God's totally perfect will doing as she pleased. That is until Memorial Day 2021 when the Laras and two other couples were killed in a wreck of Joe’s jet plane that crashed into a lake in Tennessee . Shortly after takeoff into overcast skies as they attempted to fly to Florida to attend a Make America Great Rally for which she had given a significant contribution (it's possible she may even have been slated to speak), the craft didn't make it out of the Smyrna, Tennessee air space and impacted Percy Priest Lake. That day, reality penetrated the hot house of Remnant's insular social womb. Killed in the wreck with the Laras were David and Jennifer Martin, Jessica and Jonathan Walters and Brandon Hannah, the husband of Gwen's daughter Elizabeth. The plane plunged roughly 3000 feet in just under six seconds and was traveling almost nose first at over 340 miles an hour according to an eyewitness until the impact into six feet of water. Survival was virtually impossible and blunt force trauma was listed as their causes of death.
In an instant, seven people plunged into the murky shallows of a Tennessee lake and, according to Scripture, found themselves not at a political rally to schmooz with political demagogues and junkies but instead standing before the blazing throne of God's judgment seat. This isn't "karma", but a divine justice that God has long warned of in the Bible and which Gwen certainly thought she was secure from. While the Lord's deliberation to reveal someone's standing before Him is His alone, what we can know of how He arrives at His judgment by that terrible swift sword of discernment is made crystal clear within Bible verses she endlessly quoted but thought didn't apply to her:
“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’
While Gwen made much about "doing the will of the Father", we have long recognized that the "will" she really was concerned with was a total obsession with obedience to her commands at any cost, even if they were in defiance of the Biblical mandates of love, truth and real faith. Her feigned concern over the moral principles from Scripture were a smokescreen. The "will" Gwen demanded her slaves to burden themselves with culminated in the abuse of children, blindness to her immorality, the division and destruction of families and the physical and mental damage inflicted on thousands by her contradictory and unbiblical compulsions.
Such things certainly were never God's will and it's plain to see that as she died, she has a lot to answer for. Gwen has enough blood on her hands and wickedness she's nurtured to answer for, so much that when He speaks to her, it will make me want to hide in the deepest closet of my mansion in heaven with my hands clapped over my ears so I can't hear the dreadful things He will say to her.
If the Bible means what it says, then Gwen's eternal destiny certainly involves a lot of heat, the gnashing of her teeth, the gnawing of worms in no light and unrelenting agony. It will involve a realization of the truth she rejected and the bowing of her knees to and confession of the Lordship, the Deity, of Jesus Christ, the only hope she would have had. Before blunt force trauma snuffed her life out in the mud of that lake and that of those with her, that was their only hope and with a life devoted to her delusion, it's highly doubtful in six seconds of terror and disorientation that she could have reembraced that. This is an ugly yet Biblically validated reality for which the Gospel of Jesus she rejected would have prepared her. Like all too many in our all too frail and casual world, her presumption and pride blinded her from doing the right thing. Ultimately, God is the judge but His Word is not mute.This horrific end of her life and that of others was nothing anyone had expected. Many of her victims to this day are still stunned and not a few rejoiced at her demise. This traumatically sudden and totally unexpected death tore a gaping chasm of inexplicable reality into the soul of Remnant that hasn’t yet been addressed by the leadership of the cult. The understandable paroxysms of grief, horror and loss have swept the church -- and we are aware that a fair number of people left Remnant in the days following the crash and that it continues to this day.With steeled faces, Gwen's children Elizabeth and MIchael initially seemed willing to buckle down for what would would be a herculean struggle ahead in trying to "lead" what was so obviously a movement in nose-diving crisis. But apart from bravely recorded monologues about moving ahead during a June 2021 memorial service, neither of them have provided any visible functional guidance whatsoever. Those words appear now more and more to be a hollow whistling of someone walking through a graveyard, especially when Michael Shamblin fought for his inheritance share from his mother's will, then divorced his wife Erin and vanished out of Remnant life altogether in the fall of 2021.
These days, if you stop by a Remnant church service, you’ll see videos of Gwen being played and disinterested true believers half filling the sanctuary. Increasingly, more and more members opt to view the webcasts by logging in and presumably sitting and watching a rerun of Lara’s curricular past and a chosen member or two of leadership to give the inevitable charge for everyone to stay true to Gwen’s Remnant vision. Remnant members are being told to remain in the hold of the good ship Zion's boiler room, shoveling coal into furnaces like sons of guns never checking to see that there’s actually nobody in the bridge, steering, even as it takes water from hit after hit it receives from reality. They've pulled down the old Remnant signage to put a slick new face on, repurposed their website with slicker navigation and cleaner graphics still thinking that "if they build, they will come." They are enduring a rude surprise weekly when the numbers get thinner and thinner, as current and ex-members report.
The good will Remnant that has been extended to Elizabeth for months awaiting her assuming of visionary leadership is a resource that Remnant leadership is rapidly burning through. Even a cult as slavenly devoted to the memory of Gwen has its limits of endurance of clueless leadership and someone is going to have to step up and take the dilemma's horns to offer a clue. She calls in to church service webcasts with little more than pep talks and at one point, called in her chat while at home in bed. Such exhortation is the equivalent of a slap in the back and nothing more. Through an understandable amount of personal trial and tragedy, Elizabeth has clearly decided to sit in the shadows and let others run the cult her mother created. Yet the shuffle board of governance that Remnant leaders like Rob Day, Eldon Gormsen, Marc Dunn and others are skipping through can only go so far. Our thought is that all of the talking points leadership offers just isn't going to cut it and we’ve already seen an Exodus out of Zion taking place with many people leaving Remnant who’ve stopped to smell the pizza and finally vote their confidence in it by their feet moving out of range.
In the unexpected and abrupt loss of the leader of personality-centered movement, a critical priority is for direction and reaffirmation of that vision. In Remnant, however, no one is stepping up to provide that vision, much less offer any directive Weight Down curricula which Remnant would be conditioned to follow in light of any other guidance. I suspect that Gwen’s personal assistants Patrick and Amy Stites and others were the ghostwriters for Gwen for years since the coherency of her books and curricula had a lot of help. The curricula of the Weigh Down Workshop has all the stamp of product development by focus group process, meaning that the source work coming from Gwen's writing likely was polished heavily. Yet these team based editorial skills however are worthless when the trusted leader provides no content and chillingly abandons ship when navigation that makes the difference between survival and shipwreck is direly needed. This is why Remnant is still crashing out and bleeding itself dry of vitality.
The care for the future of Remnant is clearly not a priority to it's leadership because Remnant's self-identity was always snarled with commerce and materialism, with enough of the orgiastic playtime to dissipate lower passions. Let's never ever forget that when she was alive Gwen Shamblin Lara did not look on the Weigh Down Workshop or her Fellowship as just a church. Ever. It was and is a business. She was a CEO and a tireless promoter of her goods and services. Gwen viewed her authority as absolute when controlling the day to day operation and her phony humility was for the cameras and the ad print and the starry eyes of her church work force to behold. Her God talk always included references to Christians as "employees" of God .. and that He was also a CEO. Her "church" services were essentially a combination of sales pep rally and praise of her and her sacred science which would save the world. Acknowledgement of her copyrighted perspectives on God beginning with the social engineering of full immersion into Remnant's society is necessary to ensure her product was properly applied. She wrote and preached and advocated this position passionately throughout her so called “ministry.” That's because her God as executive manger concept was to be best understood as marketed through a controlled system of indoctrination through product line training.
In the deposition Gwen gave when she brought a second lawsuit against our ministry, back in 2010 in my lawyer's office in Nashville, it was very clear that when it came right down to it, that's exactly how she felt. There was no such thing as the sacred and the profane to her when it came to mixing religion with business. She spoke of it bluntly as an operation of commerce .. not a Christian organism of the Spirit. It was what David Shamblin always objected to but that never kept him from enjoying the benefits of his wife’s business that brought him ill begotten gains he enjoys to this day.
Never forget either that the participants of the Weigh Down Workshop and the members of Remnant were mobilized into becoming equally tireless brand ambassadors for "The Message" and the chief consumers of the curricula that needed to be purchased. Her sales force organization was called an "outreach" and always was aware of the bottom dollar. People who joined Remnant via the Weigh Down Workshop thought they were becoming disciples of Christ serving the world when all along they were nothing more than salespersons whose lives were to be spent polishing an image. That is the reality that even the fanatical among Remnant can’t ignore any longer, from the Beulahs to the kindergartners. The business and now the brand has taken a grievous hit and the product line has to be defended and affirmed. The testimonials will take a fever pitch when the mechanical pleasantries of the rank and file can be finally aroused.. And no further research and development has any revolution on the shelf to take to market.
So without any new dynamic and polished content delivered by Lara that manipulatively plumbs the human condition of her flock, there’s been nothing but her old Weigh Down content to sell. And guess what .. it isn’t moving. The warehouses of the cult are filled with books, old coursework and all of the gimmicks of the cult that aren’t selling. And the never ending weight of financing this narcissistic enterprise is fast becoming intolerable. The product line of the Weigh Down Workshop was structured by Lara in the years past to be it’s primary source of revenue, while her last will and testament made sure her millions of dollars and property were to be given to her children only. With sales of her product drying up, the members of Remnant are now being expected to joyously and sacrificially pour their tithes and offerings out to make up the difference to keep the so called “church” running and shill a dusty inventory of Weigh Down inventory, keychains, hoodies, coffee mugs and DVDs no one is buying.
Elizabeth and Michael are finding that rain falls on the unjust as well as the just and that a fair amount of their present troubles centers on their own choices to be the cult leaders they were and are. Sympathies for their loss and for the terrible way their mother exploited and manipulated them can't hide that fact either. The tragedy of divorce and premature death that has dogged their family not withstanding, being pampered and exalted leadership figures, they were entitled to enriching themselves simply by being a Shamblin .. or a Lara. Elizabeth and Michael may have had a domineering mother who hounded them into becoming heirs of a family fortune based on coercion, but they are hardly innocent victims by any stretch of the imagination. Their misery including an exalted social status, deep pockets and pretty secure lifestyles even as their Remnant brethren sacrificed everything to make it happen.
Keep also in mind that Gwen's chaos theory school of leadership is still in place in Remnant, among those who have outlived her. Nothing that "makes sense" will be really pursued by Elizabeth. Gwen was known for doing things on the fly, impulsively, with no explanation or clarification, leaving her sycophants to flesh out details and budgets. Her daughter can hardly be expected to rise any higher than that. In light of her obvious mental fragility over her terrible losses and her organizational vacuity, expecting Elizabeth to hammer out a master plan that "makes sense" appears to be a waiting game. Someone else is pulling the strings and keeping the lights on enough to mimic purposeful life for public consumption. But as for her and her house, they are going to do what fancies them (feel good, warm, safe, off watch and respected) and no signal can easily be expected out of that arrangement.
Think of it this way. It's one thing to recite a litany of familiar Gwenspeak for a week or so on a webcast and look sensationally commanding, to come off as a spiritual sage. Any of the 120 shepherds of Remnant, as depicted on their website, can do that, with varying levels of competency and conviction given what Remnant views of Shepherd X or Shepherdess Y. But that ship has sailed long ago. The endless regurgitation of the Remnant party line is clearly what this disheartened people are not waiting on. ANY group of any persuasion will demand leadership in one way or another, voting with their feet if necessary and their recent disastrous Feast attendance figures is a most ominous sign.
To The Remnant From The Friend They've Never Cared For
Remnant Fellowship, you’re looking for the One - the Elizabeth, daughter of Gwen - to bear unto you a visionary and commanding direction and then sustain it energetically, with passion and clarity in terms that will rally your disheartened, drifting congregation of people whose catechism is based upon coercion. Such a leader won't just inspire in the footlights but deftly handles day to day administration that will call you to rededicate yourselves to a lifestyle immersed in group micromanagement imposed by a firm authority line of compliant underlings .. who fall in line with her vision.
But isn’t it time you squarely face up to the fact that the kind of fire and energy needed to reacquire and sustain that level of authoritarian control isn’t going to come from a woman hiding in her mother’s house? In the end, despite her pretensive piety, it really was all about Gwen Shamblin when she alone was looked to as the sole authority there. Elizabeth isn’t vaguely close to emulating that critical aspect of her public persona. The reasons are all too obvious and have been discussed here. If Gwen's position can be likened to the assassinated Joseph Smith of Mormonism, her children are not showing the assumption of any kind of Brigham Young mantle of authority. Your religious machine’s operators aren’t just asleep but they have no wheel to steer by even if they weren't!
The critical need in Remnant is for the firm grip of a trusted figure upon reins of a fresh vision of thought reform imposing new order and direction. This is a group dynamic that Gwen mastered well but which she let slip in the months before her death. Her plunge into eros undid her focus and contributed to the start of an erosion in Remnant that is turning slowly into a full scale collapse and crisis of leadership. Gwen may have technically had a line of succession beginning with Elizabeth, but to what degree of genuine leadership along the lines I just described she was permitted to exercise was actually quite limited. To take the helm of Remnant now is a job that I don't see any candidates truly arising to assume.
That should concern you. If it does not it only means you’re going to go down with the ship, in a history already too well foretold.
The Future Of Remnant: Chaos Or Out Of Zion? Your Call, Remnant Nation!
We want to add some final thoughts about the rather bleak futures we think Remnant is now facing. There’s 1 of 3 possible directions Remnant Fellowship will take and we will conclude our summary of their nose dive with our comments on what they might be.
The first possibility is that Elizabeth may yet pull out of what is certainly a crushing set of circumstances to affirm some kind of leadership. It is possible but is becoming more and more unlikely as she continues to find her comfortable place behind the scenes. Each day that goes by makes the question marks get bigger and the bite of doubts even in the most devoted RF members certainly are finding teeth getting sharper and longer by the day. It’s also possible for her to appoint new figures to assume chief responsibility for the cult’s direction. We see Joe Langsdon and Patrick Stites among others as candidates for such an anointing of leadership.
The second possibility is that Remnant Fellowship will experience internal splits. There’s been precedent for this already, when an internal schism took place back in 2009 that resulted in the departure of several leadrs. Certainly, As I have said previously, there are junior puppetmasters rising up in the internecine intrigues of the cult’s leadership. Someone is keeping the bills paid, the media ignored, the lights on, the business phones answered, etc. I personally suspect that if history of cultism is any measure, that there may be a very quiet and earnest effort by certain shepherds or figures in the congregation to explore creating new splinter groups who will break away from RF. It's something that I suspect is going to start happening if it hasn’t already.
Remember this quote from the sci fi novel Dune Messiah, written by Frank Herbert, about one of the antagonists speaking about the ruling emperor's power structure:
"He has bishoprics, islands of authority. At the center of each island is a man. Men learn how to gain and hold personal power. Men are jealous."
Remnant’s pretty picture and media shell games behind their imagery of unity is as durable as a bubble in a tornado. Within Remnant, the authority line structure of hierarchical leadership has helped create a lot of opportunity for those in leadership position to take advantage in a situation where ambition can be nurtured. Rumblings are afoot we've heard of that the splintering has already begun.
And a third possibility is that Elizabeth herself will completely step away herself from Remnant altogether. I think she certainly has the means and ability to do so, to carry on an independent life apart from Remnant’s congregation in crisis, and can comfortably come and go as she pleases as well as distance herself from the controversies her life as a cult leader have provided. That’s going to prove extremely difficult, but following the footsteps of her brother as he and his father have moved on since the stormy years of late seems to be a real possibility. Her sister in law Erin and her children have moved in with her since her brother divorced her and this kind of solution appears to be a real opportunity for them all to put the turmoil behind them. They could leave and even live in splendidly furnished isolation, but it’s likely they can’t hide from the aftermath of the implosion that would occur in Remnant as well as from any legal or social blowback they could be experiencing now.
Where Remnant goes is indeed anyone's guess. These three are my own, but the history of cultism is a guide to seeing how rigidly conditioned populaces in cultic groups conduct themselves.
When we were asked to help victims of this cult years ago, we felt a solemn and sacred devotion to providing aid and comfort to those violated by this and indeed any other cult, as well as expose their wrong doing and evil. At Spiritwatch Ministries we remain committed to helping anyone needing assistance and that includes anyone from the Remnant subculture who’ve had enough of the deception that has drowned them for years. We’ve known a lot of people and a lot of website traffic who came from Remnant Fellowship circles. For years, Gwen and Remnant have characterized us as instruments of the devil. Frankly, folks, we are the best friends you’ve never cared to have around. Real friends speak real truth about real issues and that’s what we’ve done consistently and without flinching for the past two decades on your behalf.
In closing, please allow me to speak one more time to the “Remnant Nation.” You’ve been told not to listen to our warnings and yet a lot of you are tuning in now. We see this every day. It’s our hope you’ll think about what was said .. and remind you that our doors have been, are and always will be open to you. We’ve loved you despite your hate for us. In light of the flow of "blessing" Remnant has been facing over the past twenty years, you can't afford toblindly keep believing that the Remnant movement is some great manifestation of God's truth; it's time you face up to just how accursed and graceless the Remnant Nation actually has been for turning it's back on Christ. You are still in need of a Savior. Your cellulute will not be part of the conversation you will have with your Creator.
Understand that we’ve prayed for you daily even as you’ve cursed us. So many former members look back at so many of you with fondness, tears and love for you that has never stopped. And we truly hope that your return to the Jesus of Scripture, not the false Christ of Remnant, become your concern and not your weight. You see, Jesus Christ is returning like a thief in the night and you’ve distanced yourself from him by a useless pride in your self-righteousness that your dead leader told you to trust in. How much your outer man weighs means nothing when how unholy your inner man really is what actually matters to God.
Don’t wait to find out the hard way that you are still in need of a Savior. It’s time you turn back to Him YESTERDAY. We are praying for your exit out from behind the Zion Curtain to the arms of that Savior who still loves you. We are ready to help. We have always been.
And with many other words he testified and exhorted them, saying,
“Be saved from this perverse generation.”
Acts 2:40
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