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Throughout the dispute, JPUSA and Covenant officials have criticized Enroth's methodology as flawed because he:

• Quotes anonymous sources as criticizing specific JPUSA leaders, including REZ band lead singer Glenn Kaiser and Cornerstone editor-in-chief Dawn Herrin Mottimer. JPUSA leaders say Enroth and his respondents should instead observe the confrontation principles of Matthew 18;
• Has not visited JPUSA'S facilities;
• Has said that he plans only to tell the former members' stories, not JPUSA'S perspective. Trott calls this methodology "the therapeutic view of reality," in which authors presume the truthfulness of victims' stories.

Trott believes the conflict between verifiable, historic truth and personal, subjective reality will be "the issue of the nineties."

Enroth says he is obliged by professional ethics to honor his promise of anonymity to former members of JPUSA.

"The people at JPUSA and the Covenant headquarters are not behavioral scientists and apparently do not comprehend that promises of research confidentiality are standard practice in psychology, sociology, and anthropology," Enroth writes in a nine-page response to the Cornerstone issue.

"This is the same research and methodology that I've used for 20 years, but now that it's applied to JPUSA, somehow it's considered different," Enroth told CT. Enroth had accepted JPUSA's standing invitation to visit the facilities, but changed his mind twice. Once, Enroth objected to JPUSA's terms for the meeting, which he described as "a congressional hearing-like scene."

Eventually, Enroth and his publisher, Zondervan vice president and editor-in-chief Stan Gundry, met with JPUSA and Evangelical Covenant leaders at the denomination's offices in Chicago. Enroth considered a visit to JPUSA after that January meeting, but backed out, saying Trott violated the confidentiality of remarks in the meeting. Trott and Covenant president Paul Larsen maintain that the meeting was clearly identified as being on the record.

Covenant officials stand behind JPUSA. ''I believe there is abusive behavior in churches and cults, but if this is [Enroth's] usual methodology, he does a great injustice, even to those [cults] we would find abhorrent," Larson told CT. "He has evidence we have shown him that his sources are unreliable. Most of his material is 15 to 20 years old."

"What disturbed me most about that meeting was that they spent the better part of an hour attempting to discredit three of my respondents," Enroth says. "I felt they were engaging in inappropriate character assassination of my respondents. Every single group I have studied would disparage ex-members as unreliable." Enroth's best-known respondent is Jim Denton, former bass player in REZ, who is now a Covenant pastor in Virginia.

As the Covenant has stood behind JPUSA, Zondervan stands behind Enroth. "The testimony of forty-plus people is not hearsay. It is the evidence," Gundry told CT. "Neither JPUSA nor the Covenant gives much credence to that." Trott says an invitation to visit JPUSA unannounced and tour the facilities unrestricted stands.

This article originally appeared in the July 18, 1994, issue of Christianity Today. Douglas LeBlanc is now associate editor for the magazine.

Copyright © 2001 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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April (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45