| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today Chris Pomorski writes about a Georgia pastor who's been accused by federal authorities of defrauding the Department of Veterans Affairs of nearly $24 million. Former members of the church say he used fundamentalist teachings to manipulate them. You can find the whole story online here. You can also listen to it here. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. In Iraq, other soldiers often asked Darnell Emanuel to speak to God on their behalf. He hadn't expected this. Emanuel was an Army combat engineer, not a chaplain. He was responsible for the clearing of mines, not the ascension of souls. It was 2003, and Emanuel was 23 years old. Easygoing and gregarious, he was popular with both officers and grunts. Until recently he'd been an atheist. But he'd experienced an awakening. Back on base, in the US, he was always inviting people to church; some Sundays he'd show up at service trailing a caravan of trucks. At war, his friends didn't resent his reluctance to join them when they volunteered for combat duty. "I'm not a killer," Emanuel says. "Everyone would come to me and say, 'Pray for us before we go over the berm.'" Emanuel grew up in and around Youngstown, Ohio, a bare-knuckle industrial city then in steep decline. When he was 16 his parents divorced. He spent his last two years of high school living with classmates, sleeping in basements and on back porches. Without a stable home, he found his college plans disintegrating. "I didn't have the discipline," he says. "I was barely getting by." After graduation he enlisted and was assigned to Fort Stewart, in Hinesville, Georgia, about an hour's drive from Savannah. Not long after he arrived, in June 2000, a sergeant invited him to a Bible study hosted by a group called New Testament Christian Churches of America Inc. Emanuel soon became a member.  Established in St. Louis in 1969, the church was a Pentecostal splinter group that promoted a strict doctrine, former church leaders and parishioners say. It promised salvation only to those the clergy deemed free of sin and condemned evils such as television and birthday parties. During services, men and women sat on opposite sides of the room. The women wore long dresses and no makeup, and they rarely cut their hair. The men were buttoned up, tucked in, clean-shaven. Jewelry was forbidden save for wedding rings. This wasn't a creed with obvious broad appeal. But in the armed forces, the former members say, the church identified a fertile source of converts; its founders went door to door near military bases, proselytizing to lonely young troops. Soon, New Testament Christian Churches (NTCC) had dozens of satellites across the country and abroad, full of soldiers. Newcomers were showered with support. Church members would bring over groceries to stock your kitchen or give you a lift to the doctor. If you'd had oral surgery, the pastor and his wife might materialize with Popsicles and soup. For devotees NTCC was all-consuming. In Hinesville there was at least one event every day: dinners, Bible Q&As, impassioned prayer meetings where participants spoke in tongues. Most days the congregation paired off in "soul-winning" recruiting teams and deployed to Lowe's, Walmart and other stores, their pockets rattling with the tins of Altoids they relied on to make minty first impressions. In-house, according to the former members, preachers used Scripture to head off dissent. One favored passage came from Psalms: "Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm." Another was from Hebrews: "Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls." Parishioners were discouraged from contact with friends and family outside the church and were expected to ask permission to go almost anywhere, the former members say. Those who fell into disfavor—for pride or frivolity, missing an event or wearing a bathing suit—were often shamed from the pulpit or shunned. NTCC military membership, though, was already primed to receive orders. "I needed some structure," Emanuel says.  Emanuel and his wife, Jody. Photographer: David Walter Banks for Bloomberg Businessweek When he returned from Iraq in fall 2003, that structure was falling apart. Rony Denis, a prominent NTCC pastor, had organized a revolt against church leadership. Claiming NTCC had become too worldly and insufficiently strict, he formed a new organization, House of Prayer Christian Churches of America. Like most of the Hinesville congregation, Emanuel followed him. Denis, an Army veteran, was short, with a pleasantly symmetrical face. Born in Haiti, he spoke with an accent that could make him difficult to understand. But he had a strong grasp of Scripture and powerful charisma. "He challenged you, and he was extremely forceful," Emanuel says. Denis took about a half-dozen NTCC ministries with him, including outposts in Killeen, Texas; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Tacoma, Washington, and set up headquarters in Hinesville. He'd accused NTCC of becoming more business than church. Its founder, R.W. Davis, preached humility while he and his family lived in gated mansions near church headquarters. (Davis died in 2014. NTCC is now run by his son-in-law, Michael Kekel. In a statement to Bloomberg Businessweek, Kekel largely disputed the characterizations of NTCC in this article, which are based on interviews with 11 former members, some of whom went on to join House of Prayer; according to Kekel, at NTCC, "there are no church rules.") Denis soon became focused on money too. In 2007 he asked Emanuel to sell his house and buy one from him instead. For Emanuel this would make little financial sense, but he says he thought of it as a blessing, akin to the 10% of his income that he, like all church members, was expected to tithe. He agreed to the deal. The church filled out an application for Emanuel's new mortgage. When he reviewed it, though, he saw that it had been falsified. He'd been studying to become an electrician and working part time for about $12.50 an hour. Yet the paperwork listed a higher salary from a company he'd never heard of, Emanuel says. But he said nothing; in the cosmology of House of Prayer, questioning Denis would have been akin to defying God. If it struck anyone as odd that the church was going into real estate, Denis would remind followers of the prophet Barnabas, who'd sold his land and laid the profit "at the apostles' feet." Some months later, one of Denis' deputies asked Emanuel if House of Prayer could purchase another home in his name: The church would flip it and funnel the proceeds to good works. Again, he agreed. "They asked about that one," Emanuel says. "They didn't ask about the [next] one. Or the house they put in my wife's name." The Emanuels learned about these others only later, from mail delivered to them by mistake. Still, they said nothing. "It was questionable, but I could rationalize it," Emanuel says. "It wasn't until years later that I fully understood this was a criminal organization." Keep reading: The Georgia Pastor Accused of Defrauding the VA of Nearly $24 Million |
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