NEW YORK
New York Times
By BENJAMIN MUELLER
OCT. 16, 2015
The founder and longtime pastor at Word of Life Christian Church shamed congregants from the pulpit, dredging up old sins and recounting them at Sunday services in humiliating detail, a former member said.
He demanded they redo the floors and fix the plumbing in his living quarters, day after day for hours, until they felt numb from sleep deprivation. Members who raised questions were put on church discipline and forbidden to speak to others.
And the founder, Jerry Irwin, taught hate, using racial slurs during sermons, according to the former member, Chadwick Handville.
In the aftermath of the brutal beating at Word of Life Christian Church in central New York that left one teenage congregant dead and his younger brother seriously injured this week, investigators have been trying to understand how that violent episode may have grown out of what some described as a church culture of secrecy and isolation.
Mr. Handville, who defected from the church in 2000 after a decade of praying and working there and who now lives in Phoenix, offered the first detailed public account since the teenager’s death of what happened behind the church’s locked gates and thick row of hedges.
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