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There are several private mailing lists for former members. These generally welcome new people by invitation/recommendation only, and new lists keep appearing. Many of these lists are so private that their existence is not announced publicly. The lists we know about which are public are:
ICOC_concerned is owned by Matt Cramer, an ICC recruit who spent months in "First Principles" studies, but sensed something wrong and decided not to join before he was baptized. This list is for former members, family, friends, and others concerned about the ICC who want to talk with people who know something about it, and is a fairly new list. Matt has a web page at Geocities for this list which gives more information.
ICOC_exmembers is currently owned by Pam Northam, a former ICC member in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. Sarah Marin, a former member of the Triangle Church, founded this list, but "retired" in April 2000 to devote more time to other areas of her life.
This list is restricted to former members only. The rare exceptions to this rule tend to be for "almost members" who spent months being recruited by the ICC but didn't actually join. This is an established and quite busy list focused on recovery issues, and can be very helpful for people who have recently left the ICC or who left some time ago, but are only now dealing with the issues associated with ICC membership.
Ex-cult-support is owned by Jan Groenvald, a former Jehovah's Witness from Australia who is active in anti-cult work. It welcomes former members of all sorts of cults -- you will find former members of groups ranging from Scientology to various "Bible-believing" Christian groups to esoteric psychotherapy groups and various eastern religious groups as well. People looking to understand what makes cults tick, and who want contact with people who were in different groups, will find this list valuable.
To subscribe to any of these mailing lists, follow the link to the subscriptions page and follow the instructions there. You will need to sign up for Onelist itself before you can subscribe. All three lists require that the list owners approve your subscription, so there may be a delay of a few hours to a day or two before your subscription request is acted upon.
After looking over the material on this and other WWW sites, you will probably have questions. The Internet's public bulletin board system, called the Usenet, is a good place to ask these questions. It has many thousands of "newsgroups", or discussion areas for specific topics. Two of these are alt.religion.christian.boston-church, which is specifically for discussing the ICC, and alt.support.ex-cult, which is for discussing cult issues in general.
If you already read the Usenet and your internet service provider (ISP) carries these newsgroups, you can just subscribe using your normal software. If your ISP doesn't carry these newsgroups, they usually will be willing to do so if you ask politely.
If you don't yet read the Usenet, you will probably be able to access these two newsgroups by clicking the links below:
If that doesn't work, you will need to talk with your ISP to find out how to set up your computer to read the Usenet.
The REVEAL Library contains a collection of posts from alt.religion.christian.boston-church. This might be a good place to look for unusual or interesting posts, or to get a feel for some of what is in the newsgroup without having to dig through thousands of posts.
If you want to look through old posts for information on certain topics, you can search DejaNews, the largest Usenet archive on the Internet. You can also participate in the Usenet and post public messages through DejaNews, although you will have to sign up for their free My DejaNews service first. To sign up to use this service, follow the instructions on their home page.
You can use the search form below to search the DejaNews archives for Usenet posts that meet your search criteria, or you can go to DejaNews's Power Search page for more options. If you would like some pointers on how to search Dejanews effectively, take a look at our Tips on Searching Deja News.
You have two types of searches you can perform directly from this page. Use the top group of fields below to search by author name, subject, and message dates only. Use the bottom field to search message text and to construct more complex searches.
Please note that you will be taken to the Deja News site when you do a search from the form below. Use your browser's "Back" button to return to REVEAL.
Deja News hides a powerful Boolean search engine underneath its friendly WWW face. A Boolean search engine lets you combine search terms with operators like AND, OR, and NEAR, to make your searches more focused and retrieve what you really want to see instead of a bunch of other stuff. Here are some suggestions on how to make the most of this feature.
If you just want to search DejaNews for articles on a particular topic, you type in a list of keywords -- words that are likely to be found in the posts you are looking for -- in their search form or ours above. For example, if you want to read posts about the San Francisco Church of Christ, you could type "San Francisco Church of Christ" in the Subject: field.
Unfortunately, Dejanews won't allow you to put quote marks around search terms in any of the top fields, although they are allowed in the bottom field. (It won't let you search for a multiple-word string, such as "Kip McKean", in those fields.) It also treats a phrase as a separate group of keywords rather than a unit. For example, if you search for the subject, "Former Members", it looks for any post with either "Former" or "Members" in it, which will give you a list of several thousand posts, most of which do not have anything remotely similar to "Former Members" in the Subject: field.
So, if you are using the upper search fields, you may want to put the word "AND" between your search terms. (Search for "Former AND Members" rather than "Former Members".) That won't force DejaNews to treat your search as a phrase, but will at least cause it to find only posts with all the words present, which usually works when you are looking for a particular author or subject.
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