Jim McCotter on "Media Mandate"

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A Botkin by Any Other Name....?

After almost ten years of faithful service, my MacBook may be granted retirement.  I'm toughing things out with an iPad until a replacement arrives next week.  The Google Blogger platform and the iPad don't interface well, and I'm weary of hunt and peck single hand typing and the frustrations of autocorrect that doesn't!  They prove to be a great hindrance as I aspire to meet my objectives as stated here.

In the interim, No Longer Quivering (NLQ) and Patheos expressed interest in hosting blog posts discussing why I moved all of my dated blog content into draft.  It all started with a letter and the man at my door.  My postman, Joseph, has been really considerate to my husband and me.  This past year in particular involved crutches, walkers, and a whole new lock on our lesser used post box because we couldn’t get the thing open.

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Closed for RECONSTRUCTION (Ha, ha)

A dozen years ago when I began blogging, I hoped to bring a very specific message to a group of Christians about what must be one of the most unpopular topics on the planet.  Some call it spiritual abuse, while other disciplines describe the same dynamics as thought reform, undue influence, and the like, but it is really just describing different vantages on what the Apostle Paul called ‘the works of the flesh.’  Some people seem to suffer little, while others bear the teeth marks of the wolf, and those wounds always look the same.

As my friend Janet put it, I helped a good many people figure out what had happened to them by giving them the construct and language that they needed to describe the experience that they had in their church.  “I helped people figure out that they weren’t crazy!” 

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The Significance of McCotter’s Great Commission at the University of Oklahoma Campus, Geoffrey Botkin, Vision Forum, New Zealand and Homeschooling

 

For those who follow Vision Forum’s homeschooling ideology and teachings, the Great Commission’s problematic history of college campus evangelism proves to be of great significance because not only because the problems manifested by Vision Forum’s “vision” match the very same problems of the Great Commission group (GC) at the height of their activities, it should also be noted that Geoff Botkin of Vision Forum worked with and for this cultic and aberrant evangelical Christian group for approximately 30 years. I’m told that the group leader and founder, Jim McCotter, was quite impressed with his creative ideas for evangelism dating back to their association in Norman, OK in the 70s on the campus of the University of Oklahoma (OU). I have found no documentation or testimony noting that Geoff Botkin renounced the past abuses of the Great Commission teachings and practices, actually now using Vision Forum to perpetuation the same core ideas. This information is also significant, because it relates to Geoff Botkin’s claims of a history of Marxism in his family and/or early history. (Please refer to this previous post with links to documentation the history of McCotter and his relationship with Geoff Botkin.)

The religious system that developed from Jim McCotter’s efforts quickly became an aberrant group, getting caught up in the peripheral aspects of the Christian faith by focusing on pet doctrines, performance standards, and a demanding submission to church authorities. There were many other churches that developed in the 1960s and ‘70s that fell into this same error, and this movement in evangelical Christianity became known as the Shepherding Discipleship Movement. Bill Gothard and Sovereign Grace Ministries are groups that advocate homeschooling as a religious right, groups that also classify as part of the Shepherding Discipleship ideology. According to the model framed by David Henke, these groups exemplify spiritual abuse because they manifest these hallmark signs: they are authoritarian, perfectionistic, image-conscious, they squelch criticism of their system, they are elitist, and they are unbalanced in that they focus on peripheral doctrine rather than essential doctrines of the faith, veering off-center from orthodox Christian teachings.

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A Botkin Update: Who is Geoff Botkin and What is the New Zealand Exit Strategy? (I think it is a reading from Jim McCotter's old script.)

A few months ago, I posted a substantial portion of Geoff Botkin’s history with the cultic evangelical group, the Great Commission Ministries (GCM). Since that time, I’ve been contacted by several people who have reported information about Botkin’s past, his present activities, as well as his declared plans for the future.

THE PAST: Recruitment of the Botkins into the GCM Cult

It seems that Geoff and his brother, Gregory (now a family practice physician who now works in an Emergency Department), grew up in Tulsa, OK and were recruited into Jim McCotter’s Great Commission cult while attending Oklahoma University during the 1970s. McCotter spent time on the campus of OU during his “Blitz,” his evangelical recruitment campaign. The sources that contacted me and had knowledge of the family stated that they had absolutely no knowledge about the family professing Marxism, and neither Gregory nor Geoffrey were known to these sources to be Marxists. What is interesting to note is that there was a cult member in Norman, OK who interacted with Geoff who members report had a history of some involvement with Marxism and whose family immigrated to the US from the USSR. (This man whose name has been removed from this post reports that left the Great Commision cult decades ago.) It appears that, based upon the testimony of those who contacted me, unless the Botkin Family of Tulsa went to great lengths to keep their Marxism under wraps, Geoff Botkin may have absorbed aspects of the testimony of this man in order to embellish his own

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Examples of the Posterity of the Shepherding Movement: Geoff Botkin and Surviving Sovereign Grace Ministries

A few years ago, I read a book review of a book on the Shepherding movement that grew out of the Charismatic Renewal movement that started in the 1960s. The reviewer said that it seemed pointless to rehash a movement and a mindset that was old news and past-tense. I remember wondering what planet this person lived on? They certainly had not lived in my corner of the universe.

Shepherding is anything but past tense, and most everything that shepherding did is still alive and as active as it ever was. Though there is not a tremendous focus on the one-on-one (or one-over-one) pastoral care that some of the original groups followed, the other spiritually abusive practices persisted. Some of those include the tremendous focus on piety and an overt focus on submission to and governance by church leadership under the guise of personal concern for parishioners. These groups also spend a great deal of energy maintaining milieu control, urging others to refrain from “sowing discord among the brethren.”

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Who is Geoffrey Botkin? A Vision Forum Recruit from the Cult of the Great Commission

Revised 02Feb13

Revised Introduction, 14Feb2019

A few days ago, I received a registered, restricted access letter from the daughters of Geoffrey Botkin (GB).  They allege that I have profited somehow by hijacking their family name, and while I never dreamed that I was so powerful, they claim that I all but destroyed their family’s ability to support themselves.

Of notable mention in the letter was a reference to this “Who Is GB?” post..  If you find broken links in this and other material, please note that I’ve put my entire blog into draft to provide myself time to prayerfully consider the family’s claims about specific matters that they found painfully difficult.  I was willing to pend everything here for careful review in a spirit of cooperation and empathy, and I do because I don’t believe that these daughters have any true agency under the system that the family advocates.  I attest to the veracity of the core information.

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