Despite a change of name and location, a growing East Coast—based church group and its controversial leader have found their past—and their critics—difficult to leave behind. Several cult-watching groups continue to raise concerns about Greater Grace World Outreach (GGWO) in suburban Baltimore, formerly known as The Bible Speaks and based in Maine and Massachusetts.
The group gained notoriety in 1987 when department store heiress Elizabeth Dayton Dovydenas, who said the group had brainwashed her, sued to recover $6.6 million donated to The Bible Speaks. After the group lost the suit, it relocated and changed its name.
Today, GGWO leaders say the group is thriving, with about 25,000 members in some 25 countries. It airs an international radio show, “The Grace Hour,” and operates a Bible school and seminary at its main church in Baltimore, which has an estimated 1,500 members.
At the center of the past and present controversy is founder and leader Carl Stevens. Former members and cult watchers claim the 62-year-old Stevens presides over a system that wrongly emphasizes pastoral authority.
“God’S Man”
A former bakery truck driver who has now been in the ministry 38 years, Stevens has claimed to be “God’s man,” saying adherence to his words equals adherence to God’s will. According to The Bible Speaks Book of Miracles, in the early 1960s “God called [Stevens] one day to the back of the woods near a lake. There the Lord Jesus baptized him with what Pastor describes as liquid waves of love. Along with this experience, God promised him several things. First and foremost, God promised an anointing upon every message he would preach from then on.”
Stevens has also taught that anyone who speaks against GGWO’s leadership, especially Stevens’s, would be subject to God’s harsh judgment, say observers.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, consultants for the Christian Research Institute (CRI), including CRI founder Walter Martin (see p. 21), worked with the group to smooth out problems with its aberrant teaching on authority, says CRI researcher Elliot Miller. But despite initial signs of reform, Miller says, Stevens ultimately returned to his initial teachings of “delegated” authority.
“The basic problems with the group have not been alleviated,” Miller told CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
A 1983 CRI critique, which Miller still stands by, says The Bible Speaks—now GGWO—“maintained an orthodox, biblical position on those doctrines most essential to the Christian faith,” but adds that Stevens has had an “exaggerated view of his own importance.”
However, Daniel Lewis, Stevens’s assistant pastor and international field director, says he sees “a very humble man. A man with tremendous vision for the lost.”
Lewis says GGOW has published a paper answering CRI’s claims. “That was a very unfair evaluation of us.… Those that have sought to discredit have not really looked into the true picture,” Lewis told CT.
Lewis says CRI and others have relied on the claims of disgruntled, former members, some of whom have since recanted comments they made to CRI. He and other GGWO officials say they have been the victim of unfair scrutiny, often at the hands of non-Christian cult-watching groups and press.
Fitting In
Stevens’s recently released book, entitled Forgive Me, I’m Human, is being marketed nationally to evangelicals. And members often point to visits to their church by influential evangelical ministers as evidence they fit the mold of an evangelical “affiliation” of churches.
Despite early negative reactions to their relocating in Baltimore brought on by the press and local members of Cult Awareness Network, GGOW claims the community has received the group positively. “We are reaching the inner city here with over 29 different Bible clubs for young people,” says Lewis, who cites letters of commendation from President Bush and the mayor of Baltimore. “We work with 48 churches in an antipornography movement in this city.… Pastor Stevens personally supports Beverly LaHaye’s CWA [Concerned Women for America] and World Vision. We have a kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade Christian day school with 275 children.… We have 70 different outreaches in which we help with alcoholics [and] drug addicts.”
By Joe Maxwell.
