The Heat Is On: Spin Doctoring Within The Xenos/Dwell Bunker
By Rev. Rafael Martinez, Spiritwatch Ministries
A pattern of Xenos/Dwell spokesmanship has emerged as time goes by that reveals Dennis McCallum’s pedantic influence. It requires them to address their controversies in the drearily academic fashion that he’s personally accustomed to, as if reliving the volitional powers of his glory days in seminary.
We saw this as Conrad and Kate first spoke to me and Megan in December 2021. The two addressed our observation of abuse with a personal commentary that was muted, dispassionate and almost robotic. They wore the same vague and sleepy expressions during the half hour of encounter which was a classic manifestation of a cultic stoicism, a discipline of disconnection from intrusive passion that might violate their scholarly rationale and distract from their defense of Xenos/Dwell. Their manner was drily pleasant, the level of which automatons might be expected to deliver preset recordings. Once we beheld that, we knew that this was simply the cult’s leadership rising to the example of their fearless supreme, which is precisely what Dennis wanted.
For more detail, we were directed to a collection of position papers on their website that addressed each point of concern we or anyone might have with their movement. This substantial corpus of Xenosian thought is one of the primary sources that their disciples are pointed toward when the subject is broached among them. Their years of pedantic content creation aimed at proving how on-target they are weren’t wasted, and in these uploaded rejoinders, you find almost clinical dissertations replete with thesis statements, arguments of refutation and supporting footnotes to buttress their suppositions and conclusions.
It’s an intellectual deepfake that cleanly diverts hard questions and suspends rational inquiry among Xenos/Dwell members and has been their consummate utilitarian cultural glue keeping their movement on the same page. This stems from the fact that McCallum and the Xenos/Dwell leadership team takes great pains to impress upon their disciples the need to resort to a robust argumentation they are indoctrinated in as the standard way to defend their cultic way of life.
Using the rigorous tools and principles of scholastic debate they repeatedly require them to adopt as part of their mindset, they then incorporate a twisting of Biblical absolutes that assert divine and unquestionable authority to their arguments. Therefore, the cult takes to itself an infallibility impossible to resist or ignore and Xenos/Dwell quite literally becomes the only source of truth to a dark world. It is spoken of as “God’s Church” and an undeniable spiritual elitism is quite evident as it speaks of it’s exalted authority and supremacy over Christendom in its off the record teachings and direction. It is under this vast cloud of imposing erudition that Xenos/Dwell leaders manage to dazzle their disciples and critics using elaborate rationale, scholarly defense and Evangelical piety to further a hidden agenda or group curricula.
While this obfuscation is not unique to Xenos/Dwell, as all cults seek to self-commend so readily, their resorting to it as group teaching moments is perhaps their most well known characteristic. Among their disciples, Xenos/Dwell leaders resort to this intellectual smokescreen so quickly, thoroughly and effectively that it reinforces their purely cultic thought reform within the Xenos/Dwell culture itself. Already so profoundly indoctrinated in how to react to times of tension, the membership of Xenos/Dwell finds that the thinking has been done for them and they readily submit to its dictums.
So with a church organization so well conditioned to resort to its own resources in its tensions with those outside of it demanding answers, it’s not hard to understand why no one person seems set to speak exclusively for Xenos/Dwell. Everyone’s been primed to speak up and defend what they believe there. It’s a curriculum hatched out of the greatest cunning of a cult leader’s wiles. Disciples trained to defer to leadership only when questions get too challenging are indeed the greatest assurance of their submission to organizational conformity. And this is what is at the heart of a truly cultic system of mind control - an absolute programming of their thought, heart and soul that translates to preconditioned behavior in reaction to challenge.
But even Xenos/Dwell has limits to the length of the chains it attaches to its disciples on their Christianized dog runs. There are the times when the leash of the master gets plainly seen and a prime example of this is Dennis McCallum’s first published reaction to our first article on Xenos we published in that spring of 2022 just as the NBC News programming was coming out. It's long form defensive deconstruction of my first article was written for mass consumption on the Xenos/Dwell street. Called “Dwell’s response to Spiritwatch”, Dennis' circling of their wagons actually raised more questions than answers about his movement than he probably ever intended.
In just the first moments of reading this document, Dennis’ self-contradictory false humility tries hard to have his cake and eat it too. His banal and rambling critique of my article basically posted portions of it in a rebuttal that McCallum peevishly informed us was his “personal opinion” he was giving “rather than on behalf of the church.” The confusion starts from the get go. Either Dennis represents the church, or he doesn’t. The article is entitled as “Dwell’s response” and simultaneously it’s his own “personal opinion.”
Does everyone in Dwell Community Church find his pontification as representative of what they think about it all? This kind of rhetorical shell game well illustrates the deceptive and fallacious reasoning McCallum readily resorts to which underlies the work. He simply cuts and pastes what portions he wants to focus on and lets fly his turbid rhetoric. And it's squarely upon the shoulders of Xenos/Dwells’ collective existence that Dennis’ supposedly personal thoughts are saddled. You wonder behind the stony faces of congregational agreement McCallum sees how many of them truly struggle with this diarrhea of his rationale.
McCallum’s reaction incorporates some truly laughable jibes clearly meant to play in the Peoria he’s built there at Xenos/Dwell. These one liners, barked out as supposed refutation are scattered throughout his shrill screed: “A more relevant question: Who is “Spiritwatch”?” “Somewhat exaggerated but basically true. What’s the problem?” “Cults have hidden doctrines. We have none.” As we said, that level of snark is an example of McCallum’s rationale that the Xenos/Dwell faithful know all so well. It’s meant to trigger well qualified trains of thought that reinforce the mind controlling conditioning they’ve been under since their middle school days in the Xenos ghetto. There’s nothing surprising there and also, no real interaction with the truth claims at hand either.
Dennis can impugn what I say in the most colorful means he chooses to resort to but it hardly repudiates anything I’m on record for, and much less, addressing the testimonials that shed light upon his dark world within the Xenosian four walls. His verbiage in the document is rife with many of the thought-stopping cliches meant to herd the conditioned Xenos/Dwell populace down along a pre-set chute of directed thought toward the conclusions he wants them to program their minds with. All of his outrage over the attacked dignity of his religious empire is stoked with an additional kick at the heads of those abused by it. That was clearly what he seeks to do in undercutting their testimony and exalting his cult’s place in the cosmos. We get that clearly. Yet Dennis at times delivered his apologia more like a nine year old kid’s rejoinders - “Oh yeah? That’s what you say” - than any real response.
On that point, McCallum’s defensive and self-righteous indignation over anyone having a voice about his cult’s abusive nature is quite noteworthy. It’s a pathetic display of his utter failure to engage with what’s been shared by ex-members in any meaningful way. “Those feeling abused are the only voices being heard. The rest of our 5000 members are thrust into silence, and their stories discounted as brainwash.” You can hear this echoed by Mark Lowery’s 2022 sermon. For Dennis, and any other cult leader, the horrible carnage of their own home grown spiritual abuse is a spectacle they make short shrift of. They make room for some acknowledgement of what to them sounds like “their horrible experience” while contemptuously dismissing the vast majority of ex-member testimonials as delusional emotionalism by weak apostates barely tolerable to be around. They are written off as collateral damage whose existence is explained away as a miniscule percentile of malcontents, defined by their own abject moral failings and rebellion.
McCallum’s “pastoral response” is just another display of his own depravity and not coming from the heart and mind of a shepherd but that of a hireling. His complaint that these are “the only voices being heard” would be laughable if it didn’t actually show how wickedly insensitive McCallum is to people around him who bear struggles, questions and issues that apparently disqualify them from congregational compassion. The grief and terror of these victims of Dennis’ web of relational deceit as executed by disciplinary and counseling excess is at once dismissed. And he goes on to spill crocodile tears over the silenced body politic of Xenos/Dwell whose muzzles he actually holds in his own hands.
Dennis complains bitterly that his supposedly five thousand member abusive megachurch are a bunch of mute captives cut off from their ability to speak out - and in so doing, he really betrays a very bitter reality here. It shows how much control over his church he personally wields. He depicts their so-called “silence” as the fruit of our oppressive opinion when it actually stems from his own jealously guarded position as the cult’s gatekeeper of thought and practice. This of course stems from the plain fact that the thinking in Xenos/Dwell, as it is in all cults, is being done only by its leaders who prompt their masses when to speak and be silent. Those “five thousand” people in Xenos/Dwell actually are in a silence imposed upon them by the group’s indoctrination among them to offer dialogue to opposing viewpoints only using approved channels using approved subjects and refutation talking points they want heard. In essence, his own Freudian slip showing, Dennis admits to the existence within his cultic church of their own toxic omerta, a code of silence all are to follow over discussion of anything that would expose the serpents in their suburban Eden.
As we’ve said before, with a formal letter we sent to Kate Mizelle and Conrad Hilario earlier this year (2024), any leader and any member is welcome to dialogue about this who is from Xenos/Dwell and Dennis is welcome to the microphone also. We’ve made that pretty clear during our involvement here, yet no enmasse groundswell of their membership has arisen to demand equal time of us over the past two years, which begs the question as to why such a muted indignation exists. If the people of this errant church are as free to speak as they are, they clearly haven’t found their own voices. We haven’t muzzled them. So McCallum really says more here than he really will ever admit about how free his followers actually are. And while we’ve gotten a couple of indignant emails taking religious objections to our mean dumping on “God’s Church” that’s been about it.
One of eight defining marks of toxic cultism, as defined by Dr. Robert J Lifton’s model of thought reform, is how readily a group will deny the actual relevance or even reality of anyone or anything that differs with their perspective. It’s called the “dispensing of existence,” an Orwellian concept used by cultic movements to reject any truth claim that refutes their own deceptive narrative as a fantasy not even worth acknowledging. Dennis McCallum’s rebuffing of any eyewitness accounts of his brusque and controlling manner is a perfect example of his usage of the cultic mind control dynamic in Xenos/Dwell. This account came from Dr. James Bjornstad of Cedarville University and what he saw at a Xenos meeting while accompanied by the late Dr. Paul Martin, former director of the Wellspring Rehabilitation Center in New Albany, Ohio. The memories of the late 1990’s meeting were recounted by Bjornstad, in a personal phone call to me on February 25, 2022.
Dennis of course, couldn’t precisely recollect that moment:
Dennis: One of these sources is dead, and the other is retired and unavailable. These are the only sources, other than angry ex-members, in this paper. And we only have Rafael’s word for what they said.
The almost childish petulance displayed here is noteworthy in its' evasion. We don’t have just “Rafael’s word” for what was said. Both Dr. Martin and Bjornstad were eyewitnesses whose proximity to his jaundiced manner Dennis quite intentionally brackets by refusing to acknowledge their identity and consigning them to the dust of an allegedly unverifiable history
I don’t believe this report, because scholars like these would have contacted XD leadership and we would have known they were visiting. No such visit is on record. .. we have nothing but Rafael’s word for this — the same voice that has demonstrated such hostility toward our group in this paper. I have read Martin, and admire him, but I have never met him, And I’m sure I would remember if I had. Also, he has never observed my interactions with others. I don’t believe this story ever happened. Martin is now dead, so this claim cannot be fact-checked.
In all too familiar cult leader cant, It comes down to whether or not he can remember if they ever got on his Rolodex or contacted his secretary and of course, he couldn’t. So Dennis quite literally dispenses with their own existence by dismissing their relevance and availability, and therefore the trustworthiness of what they beheld. If he doesn’t “remember” their presence, then it never happened. So if it didn’t happen, no one could have seen anything wrong with his dictatorial attitude and so it’s fallacious to believe it happened .. especially since a witness is dead and the other is “unavailable.”
This dispensing of existence of the findings of critics who had first hand observation of their movement’s questionable doings is classic cult leader reaction. Yet a couple of inconvenient facts remain which McCallum’s hasty bluster here and his attempt to spin the discussion can't cover.
While Dr. Paul Martin sadly passed away on August 12, 2009, Dr. James Bjornstad is still very much alive and to this day stands by what he said. He cited Dr. Martin’s input as we spoke. Both men brought a silent yet consummate perspective of discernment to their visit to Xenos while they providentially lived in Ohio not far from Columbus. They were able to see together for themselves Dennis McCallum in his own unfiltered colors as he treated others there: and Bjornstad’s account of how he first heard of Xenos and his visit with Martin were singularly revealing:
This was back in the late 90s and early 2000s when I had contact with them. I would rule them as strictly authoritarian. I mean they were tight, but the people I talked to were nice and everything, but they were well controlled by the leaders. (The authoritarianism was seen at) the very beginning of (Xenos) and that's where I saw it basically. It was in the church before and I saw it to begin with just as it started out. They were really getting a lot of kids from Ohio to come, college kids that were coming and they were having Bible studies. The Bible studies were good but the leadership was really tight on the kids .. they were a very authoritarian group and it reminded me a lot of Maranatha Campus Ministries.
We were doing research and so we went to them to get some information on some things, and that's when we went over there, we began to see things we didn't like. They treated us very well and we were respected - they never pushed us - but the way they treated some of the others, we were pretty questionable about that, even Paul Martin would say "I think they're kind of tight."
They run something like a church and it's not as blatant as, for instance, Maranatha because Maranatha was right out straight, telling the kids, you know, straight out. This was more done on the side when they were doing their control. They could look at somebody and somebody would just stop. It was not the same as the more blatant varieties that I've seen. This one stood pretty much within the Ohio area right around Columbus and it was picking kids off from Ohio State and Ohio University so that's a little different than the others that were moving more broadly in the United States.
Bjornstad’s penetrating observation here carries a significance that cannot be overemphasized. It wasn't cold in my office where I took his call, but I began to feel chilled to the bone as he spoke when I understood the association he was drawing here.
What he and Martin saw in Xenos/Dwell in the late 1990’s reminded him of an earlier cultic movement called the Maranatha Campus Ministries (MCM). Dr. Bjornstad had been part of an ad hoc committee of Evangelical scholars and researchers who had led a probing 1982-1983 investigation into MCM which had been founded by former Assemblies of God pastor Bob Weiner. And Dr. Martin himself was a survivor of another similar cult (the Great Commission movement started by Jim McCotter) that also focused on ensnaring young believers in college using deceptive recruitment and authoritarian manipulation over new recruits. Both questionable movements had arisen out of the same countercultural Jesus movement background of the late 1960s and early 1970's that McCallum and Delashmutt had exploited to found its Fish House days. And both MCM and Great Commission had followed the same organizational arc by targeting the same demographic of college students with a mandate of control-oriented "discipleship" from their inception. All three movements, tragically, operated in the same strikingly similar manner as the vast and influential "Shepherding" movement prevalent in Evangelical church circles back then. Xenos and MCM emerged at the same time in the early 1970’s, while Great Commission had started in the mid-1960's. Yet Xenos' low key activity somehow largely escaped the radar of critical scrutiny and thrived even as the other two organizations took the spotlight of bad press in the 1980's and 1990's.
What is important to keep in mind is that Bjornstad and the committee responded when Weiner and MCM had requested an investigation of their doings in the hope to clear them of the charges that it was a cultic movement. To Weiner’s dismay, the committee concluded there was a vast amount of testimonial evidence as to their controlling and manipulative social circles within the movement and they could not in good conscience recommend it.
Shaken to its core, MCM would finally disband a few years later but many of the ministers involved with, including Weiner, still carry on their “ministry” without any mention of their checkered past (many of them in the equally controversial Every Nation movement). For Bjornstad to be reminded of MCM while visiting Xenos is a grave indictment as to just how cultic it really is. For an ex-cultist like Martin to behold the controlling treatment of people by Xenos leaders there while just being a visitor to the church reinforces the conclusion by Bjornstad that Xenos really was and is a authoritarian cultic movement known and read by them in years past.
There’s a lot of things that Dennis can deny but his already established willingness to play hard and fast with the facts shows that his memory can be equally fluid when so inconvenienced. It’s impossible to believe that his claims to ignorance of any “record” in which Bjornstad and Martin attended are connected to reality whatsoever. It's almost impossible that an observant culture watcher like McCallum could have been unaware of the MCM and GC controversies in the 1970's and 1980's. If he has to dispense with the existence of that kind of memory readily, it says more about what that reality was - one which has been attested to again and again by ex-members and ex-leaders of his cultic church.
Dennis: We are baffled about what this hostile author is referring to. After admitting our doctrine is orthodox and biblical, he launches into hateful name-calling, like “malevolent and punitive abuse.” We deny that abuse is typical of our church.
Of course Dennis denies Xenos is abusive! Of course he feigns bewilderment! Do you think with knowing who he is and what’s at stake he’d admit to anything else? And certainly, all of his hierarchy of sycophants he personally groomed for leadership there are going to do likewise. They're not going to lose their grasp of their religious meal tickets. There was no surprise of their denial of the malevolence behind their warped exercises of “spiritual formation.” In light of our findings of a well-covered hidden curricula that advocates manipulation, cultic mind control and 
religiously-inspired trauma disguised as “Biblical truth”, this is nothing but yet another disingenuous dodge of Dennis the cultic “elder”. He can deny abuse is going on all he wants to and dismiss that abuse is a characteristic of his sick movement but it proves nothing.
McCallum believes he stands on a high moral ground of theological affirmation and - in typical myopia - utterly refuses to cede that any group orthodoxy (right doctrine) never guarantees the extension of any group orthopraxy (right practice). For a seminary graduate turned cult leader, it’s inconceivable that a “Christian elder” would lower themselves to that kind of inner personal spiritual compartmentalization in which he exults over grasping Christian truth while ignoring his ruthless exercise of anti-Christian abuse of power. But this is why, using a Christian perspective, our world is considered a depraved place of sin. It’s a Shadowland, as C.S. Lewis once called it, where the fallen and sinful nature of people persist in their boldly lived-out sinfulness that is a practical denial of all that is reckoned good and holy. Dennis can say all he wants, but the track record has been established over fifty years of existence that abuse is quite typical in its environs.
For the record, his indictment of me as a "hostile author" only can stick if my hostility is directed toward the heresy McCallum has incubated in his Fish House Petri dish. I have no hatred or malice toward him, but his warped view of Christian "faith" as mediated by cruel intolerance his oral tradition champions is a hateful, evil thing that deserves every bit of opposition it finds. My completely unfiltered outrage over his hypocrisy, callousness and pride comes through in my writing which I'm not all that really concerned about. For it is his orally mediated "one anothering" dogma replicated in Xenos/Dwell that is an antichristian abomination he enthusiastically nurtures through his leadership cadre. The shepherds readily devour their sheep in extremist control. So nothing less than a bold spiritual contention should be waged against it and all other forms of spiritual tyranny as the apostles mandated (Jude 3 - 4). And both McCallum and Delashmutt are poster children for the "certain men" identified there who stealthily insinuate themselves into Christian circles "unawares" to draw away the unwary after their corrupt example. I can't and don't hate these who certainly are facing a horrible destiny all their own.
In his continuous attempts to model an up-front and irrepressible candor about their checkered past, McCallum even cites my quotation in an account of Xenos/Dwell’s own past drawn right from their online history of the movement
Xenos elders got feedback from the network and from area pastors before launching an internal inventory that uncovered a number of incidents involving cult-like behavior. In response, the leadership launched numerous reforms. Training was dramatically increased. The elders reasoned that leaders lacking knowledge might rely on pressure instead of persuasion. That could lead to some of the bossiness evident in some groups. The elders also went back over all their training materials to root out statements that could be misinterpreted as condoning the controlling of members. They also convened several re-evaluation meetings with existing leaders to rethink their philosophy of ministry, including the possible overuse of church discipline.
By their own introspective account, the chief failing of Xenos discovered in the 1980’s and 1990’s until their so-called “internal inventory” is that control of members by leaders through “pressure” and “bossiness” condoned by leadership did in fact exist (these were their own words). The Xenos writers who authored this statement try hard to sanitize the horrific evidence at hand. It was, they said, just a “misinterpretation” of leadership mandates by junior disciplers which “existing leaders” (McCallum among them) simply had to root out, with a lot re-training to do. The organization, Dennis would say, had the input of the Cult Awareness Network’s (CAN) advice which had resulted in this self-assessment and corrective action. And the CAN’s interactions with Xenos and their efforts in putting to rest the reports of impropriety emboldened Dennis to confidently conclude that:
CAN never claimed any “glaring outrages” happened in Xenos. Neither did they ever identify us as a cult.
Au contraire, Dennis, to quote the late Dr. Paul Martin. There’s a lot more about what CAN discovered which Dennis didn’t bring to his apologia here that we will discuss in much more detail later. For now, we will say that the evidence about CAN we’ve discovered demonstrates that CAN didn’t sign off on Xenos as just another Christian movement with uncompromising principles about church order and discipline. This digestible self-assurance is what McCallum and others go to great lengths to reiterate in their most recent “statements.” It is instead a hollow grasping of straws.
The observations we’ve consistently presented in our research on the cult are that Xenos’ principles of coercion exist not on paper but are passed down by the personal modeling of it by it’s abusive authorities. Beginning with McCallum, it thrives handily and quite apart from all of their blizzard of writings and papers. A largely oral tradition passed down through the years has conveyed their abusive advocacy. It was displayed by their personally and coldly controlling treatment in meetings, socialization and ministry house settings. It was observed by junior leaders as they beheld their elders’ excoriation of their errant there and then commended for required imitation as a token of “Christian love."
The Xenos ghostwriter claims that a purge of errant written “statements” and a staff intensive of retraining corrected their issues back then. Yet the same old oral wisdom on how to manipulate people was still being passed along by tangible leadership interaction with their disciples for decades. A leaders’ meeting delivering face to face instruction on just how to deal with people defies detection and is easily deniable - which is exactly how Xenos/Dwell have perpetuated their horrific abusiveness over five decades..
This “Christian church” as McCallum has programmed it is instead a religious dystopia. Xenos/Dwell has approximated the activity and even the ethos of a church yet betrayed its very ideals through how it actually treats its members. This was illuminated in the searing judgment of Yahweh in Ezekiel 34. In that chapter, the dysfunction of ungodly and abusive spiritual leaders resulting in the destruction of those whose subservience they command is unrelentingly exposed by His judgment upon them. Our citation of this in the first article griped Dennis enough he had to file a protests. Yet it is this Scriptural perspective that McCallum’s legacy in Xenos will be judged by. And we find Dennis none too fond of this allusion:
Applying Ezekiel to us is extreme and wrong.
I suspect that seeing your sin prophetically exposed and judged can remove the skip out of the Xenos/Dwell Shuffle up and down High Street and beyond. It may be too extreme for Dennis to behold but it is the Gospel truth of the evil there. A proverb about not being able to stand the heat of the kitchen comes to mind.
But it brings up a key point, missing from this paper. Cults have leaders who are using the flock for personal enrichment or sexual favors. Who is the cult leader in XD? Where is his fortune? The very things described in Ezekiel are missing here. Is the cult leader me? I’m not even in upper-level leadership. I lead a modest life in a simple house and used car.
“This paper.” I just snickered when I read this and it makes me chuckle even now. Still I have often wondered just how much we’ve written actually connects with Dennis’ conscience when he looks upon it as a “paper.” His verbiage seems to allude that engaging with our content is actually little more than an annoying academic exercise to him. It rather seems like the proverbial water off the duck's back.
In any case, Dennis’ bellicose confrontation of the laser-focused indictments made of his movement’s cultic leanings involve his bringing up some contemporary criterion about a cult leader’s behavior which, he concludes, just can’t possibly apply to him. Xenos’ own studies on what they call “‘Christian’ Cults And Sects” discerns cultism by strictly theological analysis. So, since he characterizes himself as among the theologically orthodox non-evangelical, he checks out! Yet his jarring departure from this approved discernment standards is a sarcastic ruse that McCallum makes here.
Dennis querulously goes on to assert that he can’t be a cult leader because he doesn’t use the flock for personal enrichment or sexual conquest, that he isn’t in it’s upper level management and he just lives a simple life of scrupulous thrift. After this ego-centric self-absolution, he dramatically asks “Is the cult leader me?”
The most casual review of the historical record of cultism quickly reveals that not all cult leaders seek squandered money and/or the huddling of some carnal knowledge of their flock, though many actually do so. Dennis certainly knows better and so might the people in his own orbit as to just how much of each human commodity he actually might readily command despite his claim to a humbly threadbare monogamy. And God certainly knows as well.
What all cult leaders do corner, however are all the indulging of their dual lusts for legacy and power they can sate. All of them want to be known and acknowledged in the world as well as to exercise absolute control over life and lives. For all cult leaders, the pursuit of an immortality of their inner essence by the perpetuation of their worldview really underlies their identity. Their agenda was prophetically illuminated by the apostle Paul in his vividly observant warning about opportunistic usurpers in Acts 20:20 “Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them.”
Dominance exaggerating their significance is the goal of all toxically cultic leaders, and Paul had been warning the group of elders who he shared this with of that very thing. The warning stands now. What cult leaders want are opportunities to replicate their personas in others, just as a virus hijacks a normal cell’s life processes to turn it into a biofactory producing copies of itself.
And on that point, McCallum has long ago achieved a securing of his place as one of the seminal founding co-fathers of a counterculture “for Jesus" that actually preserves his own traditions. Between he and Gary Delashmutt, his authority is by far the most visible and is incarnate through his cadre of successors - such as Dwell senior pastor Ryan Lowery who married his daughter Jessie. Cult leaders certainly enrich themselves with cash and bed partners if they feel so led, but that is just the frosting for the tastier inner core: the ability to play God in the lives of a community of people. That’s how cults work and that, as Robert Blake once said, “is the name of dat tune.”
Dennis is indeed the cult leader here. Our argument ends and we rest our case.
And cult leaders jealously seek to consolidate their power. They confront any challenge to it, double down on their less than stellar moments to sanitize them. We discussed in a 2022 podcast a documented eyewitness report of one instance of Dennis McCallum’s assault upon his wife in the early 1980’s as seen by his daughter Jessie, when she was a frightened little schoolgirl who reported it to her teacher. The ugliness of this speaks for itself as does how Dennis chose to respond.
We discovered that an online reputation management service was contracted by Xenos/Dwell that year to provide professional public image sanitization when that was revealed on our podcast. Some discreet promulgation of this effort to refute it within the church's circles was circulated. And yet whatever official committee findings they convened to deal with this sordid incident in Dennis' domestic life has remained completely under wraps there to the rank and file of Xenos. When we received email from church members asking about the results of this report related to this ncident, we knew there was something going on in the Xenos/Dwell society that was singularly telling. The spin doctoring was in full swing.
It just goes to show that in the pursuit of dominance, cult leaders will do as they please because no real accountability ever extends to them. Dennis is no exception. We've observed this in the warped reigns of others our ministry has closely examined over the years like the corrupt late “Preacher Man” John McCann, the equally degenerate and departed Gwen Shamblin Lara and the yet kicking puppet mastery of Larry Miller and Zac Kijinski. The movements they all exploited were filled with people who submitted to their autocratic bearing believing they labored under a divine command to do so, and gave their lives, living and liberty to advance their abusive sectarian visions. And no one was there to question or check them, a reality well established as a societal norm in the Cultworld itself, until we started asking hard questions and aiding their victims. 
There's so much more about McCallum's 2022 reaction we could examine, but this was a fairly representative sample of his thought when under challenge. His questionable example is routinely replicated in the ongoing communiques and public responses of Xenos/Dwell leaders who are compelled to respond to the controversy.
Ryan Lowery’s video clip provided to the Columbus NBC News team is a prime example. It was created as the cult’s response to their coverage in October, 2023 about the “Let’s Talk About Sects” podcast series focusing on Xenos/Dwell that generated a critical and quite global perspective on them. One can hear in Lowery’s glib verbiage yet another echo of his father-in-law. While trying to display a self-deprecating humility over their troubles from the heathen around them, Lowery displays a Xenosian passive aggression that Dennis would be proud of.
“It grieves us that some have been unhappy with our church,” Lowery said in the video. “While I cannot agree with what they say, I believe their pain is real. Some of our critics are unhappy with our church. Others are opposed to the Bible itself. We wish them the best.”
It is vintage cultism trying to come off as compassionate Christian response only to crash and burn. It is instead a smarmy slap at the cheeks of ex-members via Dennis’ grotesque ventriloquism proceeding from Ryan. Conrad Hilario's gentler protest in a 2018 Columbus Dispatch article asserts that charges of controlling Xenos/Dwell members proceed from a outsider's ignorance of what they really are: "we're the furthest thing from that. It's due to people's misunderstandings." His evasion is on the same par as James Rochford’s lengthy blurb of apologia published by Dwell as their defense against a scathing Daily Beast article about it in May, 2022 (in, curiously, the same point/counterpoint format that Dennis took reacting to my first article about Xenos/Dwell). The below quote was from the Beast and followed by Dwell's student ministry coordinator Bryan Adams' all too familiar dissembling sanctimony:
Some members said they had been removed for sins as minor as not attending enough meetings and not having a positive attitude. Three said they were excommunicated for engaging in premarital sexual activity; two said they witnessed others get excommunciated for being gay. (Adams refused to give the church’s stance on openly gay members, saying only that “everyone is loved by [God] dearly.”)
In his paper, Rochford’s enthusiastic support for these expulsions is as filled with deception as it is demonization in pretty much the same manner as McCallum’s. The cult’s ongoing program of pogram that mandates a cull of whoever is deemed as unsavory, unworthy and unrepentant enough underlies the DNA of their small group "body life". He not only admits that it goes on but takes pains to emphasize that Dwell’s visceral loathing of their fallen membership as noxious weeds needing to be uprooted is actually an act of Christian charity:
Removing someone from fellowship is rare in our church, and we only practice it in the case of a person who refuses to change in a lifestyle that is objectively wrong, seriously harmful, ongoing, and who have refused to change after many pleas and confrontation to the contrary. It’s our conviction that a social group that doesn’t act in such a situation is ultimately unloving. To watch a person ruin his life or the lives of others around him is not loving (emphasis mine).
As in other places throughout the response, Rochford’s unsparing castigation of those who offered their testimonies to the Beast article author targets one ex-member who we interviewed in one of our own podcasts not long after it’s publication:
Megan McGowan, a 33-year-old accessibility specialist who joined the church in 2012, wound up in a two-week partial hospitalization program after she was disfellowshipped in 2016 for repeatedly engaging in “sexual sin” with her boyfriend. Adams said members who show remorse at their meetings are given the opportunity to repent and return, but McGowan said she begged to stay in the group and was told it wasn’t enough. One member of her home church, she said, told her she needed to hit “rock bottom” before her heart could change.
“Rock bottom for a suicidal person is death,” McGowan said.
Megan once again found herself under the Argus eye of Xenosian scrutiny and once again, in trying to convey a genteel discretion in discussing the particulars, Rochford and his staff resort to a viciousness impossible to ignore.
Our pastoral staff looked into this account from this woman. The people involved have a very different view of what happened. Out of respect for this woman, I don’t feel the freedom to share any personal details.
They decided to use the dirtiest twist of an unspoken “different view” on what she shared, without resorting to any particulars. Using a lurid taint of implication to discredit is viewed as “respect for this woman” is yet another form of cultic objectification of a testimonial viewpoint. Rochford’s mocking anti-compassion drips with insult and Xenos/Dwell proudly supports the posting of these feral personal attacks. Hilario's comment about Xenos/Dwell's authoritarian example was just a matter of perspective that critics need to get straightened out (a dodge I called him out over in the 30 minute 2021 meeting). But it’s business as usual for this corrupt bunch who purportedly speak for the entire “five thousand” members of the church. Xenos/Dwell’s alleged commitment to grace that governs their relationships is nothing more than a cruel cheat. And Rochford's example is an approved echo of the viciousness of his mentor McCallum, all the while confident that their "eldership" remains inviolate and divinely appointed - despite what Ezekiel's oracle of Yahweh said to the contrary:
Thus says the Lord God: “Behold, I am against the shepherds, and I will require My flock at their hand; I will cause them to cease feeding the sheep, and the shepherds shall feed themselves no more; for I will deliver My flock from their mouths, that they may no longer be food for them.”
Xenos/Dwell's twisted governance is a defiance of the Scriptural mandate to cover those in the Christian community who fail into sin and moral lapse with an unashamed love and tolerance for them even as necessary admonition is given:
Seeing then that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:14-16)
Those broken by their yielding to temptation and allures of the world, the flesh and the devil can seek God’s grace with hope, even boldness.They can seek by confession of their wrong and a whole hearted repentance from it before Him the forgiveness and transformation of that brokenness His grace offers. 1 John 1:9 is the most precious promise of this to all who are weary of their struggle and long for victory over sin - God through Christ awaits our confession of sin unto HIm and with that, He promises not just forgiving but cleansing from it. Every time. A wonderful dimension of Christ's inclusive character is that he identifies and feels with us even in our struggles and even yielding to the sin we fall to. His compassion and sympathy is unfraid to reach out and embrace all who will seek Him and HIs forgiving grace, again and again. That's a divine insight all who try to live right can find ultimate victory with as they seek to overcome sin's bondages which He has broken.
That’s what the heart of the Gospel is, the Good News of the power of divine love. He knows our need of HIs saving power and will meet us at the point of our need to enable us to rise and mature past our weakness. Sadly, that is anathema to the Xenos/Dwell culture's "three strike" mentality ready to cast people away who fail. This usurped power over life and death in the lives of peers is a vicious authoritarianism fully endorsed by Dennis McCallum’s lust for the love of human power. This is "another gospel" and is the pathetic lie that is held out to a sin-ravaged planet. He is choosing to lead every one there to proudly hold their heads up to pretend nothing's wrong, when they all live in a house on fire where warnings of the flames and smoke of a deathtrap are "hysterical."
But these last examples of Xenos/Dwell’s hateful dispensing of the existence of those who differ with them are proof that the senior leadership of the cult is settling in for the long run of evasive spin doctoring to continue. They are utterly fearless gluttons of their own self-righteousness who well illustrate prophetic Biblical truth by their precedent: “These are clouds without water .. spots in your love feasts, while they feast with you without fear, serving only themselves“ (Jude 12)
It seems that they are furnishing their austere bunker in Northgate with Ikea and a good hot internet connection, with takeout from Brassica. They blithefully move ahead equating their view of frenzied evangelizing as a last days mandate from God, refusing to consider that their measure has been more than made as this pastor's assessment makes abundantly clear.
It's still true today that infallible churches can't repent. That includes the Xenos/Dwell heresy.
But Xenos/Dwell still needs to hear that they do indeed need to repent for their history of religious abuse. Such declaration is actually an avenue of grace God is extending to them , a beckoning call to seek change and renewal by humility before HIs longsuffering presence (Romans 2:4). Regardless how much of a spin cycle they can perpetuate, the voices of deception flowing out of the fortified bunkers of Xenos/Dwell will continue to be rightfully met with all the rebuke those injured and violated by it can muster. We've heard how Xenos/Dwell leaders are fueling the fires of their own hysteria in dire warnings to their flocks about picketers and possible violent protest around their facilities (and got emails demanding we "stop" the imminent "violence and persecution" coming to batter the aggrieved Xenos/Dwell hothouse - a religious fantasy that never occurred). So the whole city as well as a world beyond Ohio continues to watch to see what happens next. While Dwell drapes itself in the robes of martyrdom even as it spurns it’s own people crushed by it’s own iniquity, many of them are finding their voices to sound a warning as to their hypocrisy. Who will flinch? What can happen next? Where will it all end?
Of this, one thing is certain: In the arena of public opinion on the conflict between three generations of the assailed and three generations of assailants, the struggle will go on.
For our part, the words of Christ are enough: “Whatever I tell you in the dark, speak in the light; and what you hear in the ear, preach on the housetops." (Matthew 10:27)
We are simply helping to make known what must be known about a latter day deception. It's enough for us to help an unbelieving world around it recognize that Xenos is a dead end of brightly painted corruption that perverts the beauty of the true Gospel. We will continue to provide for the oppressed the platform we can, to ensure those in the bullseye of Xenos’ condemnation have a place where their stories can be told. It's our privilege to help survivors hear of those who whisper “me too.” and offer what avenues of recovery we can. While we have no illusions about this silent conflict (over twenty years working with the vast Remnant Fellowship heresy is proof enough) we are glad our ministry has found a part to play in it. We pray daily for the darkness to lift in the light of truth flooding in from all quarters. May the goodness of God finally lead the corrupt leaders of Xenos/Dwell to repent of their evil.
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