REVEAL: Links to Other Cult Information

Research Examine Verify Educate Assist Liberate
International Churches of Christ (ICC) Boston Movement Crossroads Movement

AFF: The American Family Foundation: The AFF is one of the largest anti-cult research organizations in the world, and it has done considerable work on the ICC and published a book about it. This is a well designed and professional looking site, although heavy on graphics. Modem users may want to turn off graphics loading for improved performance.

CARM: Cult Awareness Research Ministry: CARM is an Australian Evangelical Protestant counter-cult ministry with basic information about various cults and heretical Christian groups. (CARM's focus is on both, and its definition of cult includes both.) The most interesting thing on the site for former ICC members is that CARM hosts a support group in the Melbourne area for former members of the Melbourne Church of Christ.

The Cult Awareness & Information Centre: A site written and maintained by Jan Groenvald, a former member of the Jehovah's Witnesses. This site has a large section on the ICC, including some information I haven't seen anywhere else on the Internet. It is located in Australia, so users there and in most of Southeast Asia should find connections to it relatively fast compared to U.S. or Europe based sites.

Ex-Cult Archive: A large, slightly dusty old bookstore of a site with all sorts of unexpected things lurking in the back rows. Contains a considerable amount of information on the ICC, almost as much as the TOLC home page, and with considerable overlap. There is a lot of out-of-date stuff here, and this is the opposite of a sophisticated, slick presentation. But there are things here you will find nowhere else.

KultInfo: Das elektronische Sektenarchiv: A German version of the Ex-Cult Archive, somewhat newer and better maintained, with the best collection of information on the ICC and many other cults I've found in German on the WWW. Unfortunately most of the information is in Windows Help file format rather than HTML. REVEAL is working to "translate" it to HTML and post it on the WWW directly.

reFOCUS: The Recovering Former Cultists Support Network: Contains a list of contacts, both on the Internet and phone numbers and by mail, for recovering former cult members, including former ICC members. The site recently moved to its own domain, and has been updated thoroughly. There is a lot of solid cult recovery information here.

Resource Center for Freedom of Mind (FOM): This organization is the brainchild, and baby, of Steve Hassan. Hassan wrote the book that more or less started the modern anti-cult movement, and which provided the first systematic look at a non-coercive means of discussing their affiliation with cult members and, in many cases, persuading them to leave. The page contains a lot of excellent information on various aspects of fighting cults.

OASIS -- A Support Service for Recovering Former Cult Members: In the words of the Oasis site, Oasis is "A support service for the growing network of people recovering from their involvement in highly demanding/highly controlling or abusive churches and cult-like religious movements." Based in Australia, the Oasis site appears to be the work of a few former cult members (a number of them formerly in the ICC) working in their spare time, much like the REVEAL site. There is a page about the ICC, but it doesn't contain much information yet and the links from it are mostly broken.

Spiritual Abuse: The Survivors: A page which documents spiritual abuse, "as it relates to 'mainstream' religions and others." The most interesting part of the site to me was the webmaster's own story of the spiritual abuse he underwent at the hands of a minister/psychotherapist who used a combination of religious and psychological techniques to establish control over his patients. I found a lot of parallels between what he underwent and much of what I experienced and have seen in the movement. If nothing else, reading this will dispel any illusion a former ICC member may have that the ICC is unique.

Trancenet: A slick, well-written page, but in a table format which is almost unreadable using Lynx or other older browsers which don't do tables. Trancenet was founded by former members of Transcendental Meditation (TM), but has expanded into doing work on a number of cults, most of them stemming from the Orient or based on Oriental religions or philosophies. Reading about TM and other such groups whose beliefs are quite different from the ICC can be illuminating, because many of the practices of these groups are so similar.

University of East London Chaplaincy Cults Warning Page: An excellent set of information on how cults operate on university and college campuses in the 1990s. Includes a revealing assessment of the London Church of Christ, the main ICC affiliate in Great Britian, but unfortunately the link to this article from the Cults Warning Page is broken. You may access the article here.

The Watchman Expositor: Boston Church of Christ: A review and position paper written by the Watchman Fellowship, Inc., a Protestant Christian anti-cult organization. The emphasis is primarily historical, although it is clear throughout that the Watchman Fellowship approves of neither the ICC nor the mainline Churches of Christ from which it came. This piece does contain one of the more complete short reviews of the history of the Restoration Movement and mainline Churches of Christ, though, so if you can ignore the grinding axes, you may find it helpful for that reason.

Wellspring Retreat & Resource Center: The homepage of the only residential recovery program I know of which specializes in working with former cult members. Wellspring is a non-profit organization begun and run by former cult members from a wide range of cults. It has extensive experience working with former ICC members, and every one of them has given it extremely high marks for the quality of the program and help it offered. Both this WWW page and the organization are highly recommended.

| |

____________________________________________________________