Aggressive Christianity
Mike Smith
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About nineteen miles south of Las Cruces, near the southern edge of our state, lies the mostly flat, wide-sky, desert town of Berino, New Mexico. There, cotton fields sprawl into the distance from the edges of dirt and gravel roads, the cars of Interstate 10 and the waters of the Rio Grande border the horizons to the east and west, and an old red-brick school building with a bizarre history slumps beside some railroad tracks.
In 1993, that little schoolhouse became the compound of a semi-obscure fundamentalist sect known as the Aggressive Christianity Missionary Training Corps. Wearing military-style uniforms, and awarding rank to members of the group based on their dedication, the group considered themselves a spiritual army, preparing the world for an apocalyptic war against the evils of society—against rock and roll, homosexuality, television, psychoanalysis, medication, karate, and more.
“In 1979 James and Deborah Green entered the prayer closet and God was there,” wrote the group in a brief introduction to its history. “Speaking to them prophetically, He made it clear that He was raising up an army—His Spirit army. True, there had been other armies claiming the Lord's name, but this was something new. ...Yes, God is raising up His army, an army of fearless, obedient disciples—The Army That Sheds No Blood! This is how the Aggressive Vision came to be.”
By 1983, the group’s founders, husband and wife Jim and Lila Green, two former 1960s-era hippies, had established a communal compound of four barracks-style buildings in Sacramento, California, named it Fort Freedom, and named themselves Free Love Ministries. Starting out as an extreme but orthodox Christian ministry, by 1984 the group had amassed approximately fifty followers, a body of increasingly unconventional doctrine, and a great deal of unwanted attention. Parents noted major personality changes in their adult children who had joined the group; Christian watchdog organizations documented the group’s cult-like encouragement for members to sever all connections with family and friends; and a local radio station, KFIA, dropped the group’s daily radio show due to the Greens’ almost rabid preoccupation with demons.
“Basically, what [Jim] Green was saying was that any particular problem was controlled by a demon,” KFIA station manager Tom Wallace said in a September 25, 1984 Sacramento Bee article. “Colds were caused by a cold demon. And if you needed deliverance, you just had to attend a Jim Green service.”
Early on, the group obtained much of its funding from the profits of three Sacramento-area print-and-frame shops, owned by one of its members—stores in which employees were instructed to censor all images of frogs, owls, and unicorns, due to these creatures’ supposedly satanic traits. Rock and roll music was decried, wrote Donna Kossy in Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief, because the group believed that covens of witches were placing spells intended to demonically possess everyone who listened to many popular songs. Lila Green declared herself to be God’s number one prophet, and she and her husband began publishing her alleged revelations in a globally distributed output of ‘zine-style pamphlets and newsletters. In the July 1984 issue of one such newsletter, the Battle Cry, she even wrote out a recipe that she claimed God had given her for “travel bars.”
“Although the devil tormented me, I obeyed the Lord and the results were delicious, nutritious, and kept very well under conditions of extreme heat and humidity,” Green wrote. “The Lord told me these travel bars were an excellent item to carry when traveling.”
As the group’s beliefs and behaviors grew more radical, darker and more alarming stories came to light as well. In 1985, neighbors of the group reported to the sheriff that the sect’s members had been engaging in militaristic war games in the northern California desert, using real weapons, though these charges were never proven. Over the years, the group sent missionary “soldiers” out all around the world, and in 1987 they found themselves in legal trouble when one missionary died of malaria in Malawi, Africa and the group made it difficult for his family to recover his body. And then in 1988, Sacramento woman Maura Shmierer filed suit against the group, claiming that Free Love Ministries had kept her virtually imprisoned in a backyard shed for six months, for the crime of “spiritual adultery”—for loving her family more than God. During that time she claimed the group—then consisting of about twenty-five members—forced her to wear a black scarf and a sackcloth dress, changed her name to Forsaken, and forbade her from making eye contact with her children. Schmierer said they even pressured her into divorcing her husband and signing over custody of her kids, and she claimed that the group accused her occasionally misbehaving five-year-old son of being possessed and changed his name to Demon.
In July of 1987, Jim Green ordered Schmierer out of the compound, but without her four children, and it was not until three months later that a court order returned the two youngest to her. When the group refused to show up to trial, the court awarded Shmierer $1.2 million, and as a result of their failure to pay, the Government seized the group’s art stores and property. Most of the sect fled to the town of Cool, in northern California, and then to Klamath Falls, Oregon, before ending up, in 1993, where so much of this world’s strangeness sometimes does—New Mexico.
In the former Berino schoolhouse, renamed and repackaged as the Aggressive Christianity Missionary Training Corps, the group generally tried to keep a low profile. By that time, Lila Green had changed her name to Deborah, and both she and her husband had taken the title of “Brigadier General.” The group’s remaining ten or twelve members kept mostly to themselves, according to a June 26, 1995 El Paso Times piece, spending much of their time in frenzied meetings in which members spoke in tongues and rolled around on the ground. Members were also sometimes spotted in their all-black uniforms and berets, selling homemade bread in the nearby cities of Juaréz, Mexico; El Paso, Texas; and Las Cruces.
Many Berino residents considered the group to be good citizens who just liked to keep to themselves, but many others were openly relieved when the sect eventually outgrew their compound and moved away.
They moved...but they didn’t exactly leave.
They moved...but they actually relocated much closer to the majority of New Mexico’s population, and it was there, at their new location, that things really started happening—that things are still happening—things we’ll explore further, next month. (Click here to read this story's second half.)
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Reader Comments (18)
they talk about standing on the front lines. While they themselves send out thier little selling slaves to make monies that Mrs. Green hides under her bed and dictates everyone else while they go with noting. Everything that has come upon them they have brought upon themselves.
Therefore her husband must ex-communicate her from the group. Mrs. Green ordered the woman to live in a club house in the back of their Sacramento Property. They told her that she must remain there and work like a slave with her head covered as a sign of her shame and they named her Forsaken. Her husband drove the woman to insanity, causing everyone to be afraid that they were next to become as forsaken. Using her as a public example they even held a trial for the woman whereby they had the congregation sit as the witnesses and they themselves as the judges. Role playing themselves as the former Judges of the bible. This is when Lila Green changed her name to Deborah Green, after Deborah one of the women judges of the Bible. What they did in torment upon this womans mind was more than just judgement. The woman was forced to act out the implications that they had made upon her just to be excepted. Shortly after this occurance the Greens bean to repeat this upon other members. I was one of them. Several years after moving to New Mexico they reanacted this same cinerio with my husband. Telling him all sorts of lies about myself, saying that I was having spiritual affairs, therefore he needed to get rid of me. In reality I had been a tool in making a lot of money for them at by selling their bake products and craft items. I was falling in sales because they withheld me from seeing my son. They would send him away to the other compound threatening to throw him out if I did not make enough money. Next thing I knew I was shipped off to the compound where my son was at, and they put my into a silver stream trailer for one month and I was not allowed to come out. I stayed in ther with no heat or no communication. They put my son in ther with me telling him that we were being punished by God for I had committed some unpardonable sin, that I must confess in order to be in right standing with the community and be forgiven. Not satisfied with my paper confessions they had me to write, mostly
things I did in my childhood before I ever new them, I had joined them when I was seventeen, they sent my son and myself away on a bus with no money or no knowing where I was going. They did not tell my husband where I was, and they kept us seperated from eachother for 10 months. I was deceived to beleive in them. I thought they had loved me and would never do anything to hurt me. Yet the whole time they had infected my brain to think that my only way to God was to be in what they call the Community of Holy People. Or the Aggressives. My son was the one who told his story. I did not know any of these things until
he was grown and he finally learned that he had a voice and could speak up for himself. I reconciled with the Greens trying once again under their manipulations. This time they wanted my sons allegiance, trying to convince his that we were no good parents. Of course I was not there for my son because I was always out making money for them as my contribution to the whole. They said this was my calling and to fail was to bring hell upon myself, and a curse upon my son. I wanted to be perfect. I wanted to be the perfect mother and accepted this into my heart. It's like a woman who will do anything for abussive
husband no matter hurt it may cause herself and her child. I'm so sorry until this day that I had not awoke sooner. Finally my husband son and myself seperated from the group. As they became more and more bitter at this community living that they call so pertinent to the Kingdom of God. There are other women in their group who are controlled the same way. If I had more time to write I could write a book about the 20 years and my life there. I thank God for having the mercy that he has had upon my family, and the Graciousness to succeed with or without them. They called us back in Novemember 2005, they wanted us to come
back. Of course they were a little low on amount of people who could make the kind of money that we made for them. I'm telling you people out there. The people who have chosen to remain there will never be trully safe until Lila Green tells the truth about her unholy covetousness toward the husband of Mrs. Shmierer. Why do you thing her husband hold so much anger inside. She doesn't really love him, but is stuck with him. In her own words. Therefore she is so much more elite than him because God speaks to her directly, making her the female Christ on earth. No one is allowed to beleive other wise. For she is
the only on direct by the Words of the Spirit. The words of her own imagination.
When I was putting these two columns together, I exchanged a couple of e-mails with Deborah Green, your former group's prophetess.
I was thinking about telling her about these comments, and inviting her feedback. Very likely she would just deny everything, but maybe something productive--or at least interesting to read--would come of it. How do you think she would react? Would you be interested in hearing her response?
Caring Aunt--
What's your niece's name? And are her husband and children in the group with her?
I drove the two miles to my apartment and went inside. Not ten minutes later, my doorbell rang. God must have been watching over me because I peeked through the blinds and was shocked to see the same young man standing outside my apartment! I quietly locked the door, fled with my baby to the back of the house and locked all doors. What was he doing there? What did he want? How did he find me? I was so scared in those 15 minutes!!!! that he rang my bell. He knew I was inside and would not give up!! I hid in my room, clutching my child tightly.
At the time, I only knew that these tam-wearing bread sellers were from Fence Lake. I didn't know their history or background. I have always been thankful that I did not open my door that day. I now believe these people are dangerous and not to be trusted.
I wanted to add my story to see if any one else has experienced the same thing.
you can contact me at cgutierrez@kdbc.com