At a cult compound in rural Iowa, death prayers and doomsday prep gave way to ‘natural’ health grifts and costly tests of faith
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On Dec. 12, 1972, cult leader John Robert Stevens made a big announcement: he was a time traveler.
“I had a real meeting with the Lord,” Stevens told his followers in the Living Word Fellowship (LWF), also called the Walk. “During this meeting, I was projected seven years ahead of the present time. It was such a total thing that it almost blew my mind.”
“We are heading for some fantastic days,” he continued. “We really are. And the limitations that we’ve had in this Walk, we’re not going to have in the future, especially the financial limitations.”
The Nevada mine into which he’d invested their tithes would soon pour forth gold and silver. The congregations he’d amassed in southern California, eastern Iowa, Brazil and Hawaii would manifest God’s perfect kingdom on Earth — just in time for the apocalypse in 1979.
“Freeways will be bombed out. They’ll be destroyed,” Stevens said. “You’re going to have to know how to survive. I’d like to have 1,000 homes stocked with the necessary equipment for survival.”
If anyone in the crowd of LWF’s South Gate, California church had doubts about this prophecy, they didn’t voice them that night. Instead, “there was an immediate flurry of confirmation from the brothers [Stevens’ top acolytes], prophesying and coming up and agreeing with him,” said Scott Barker, who was raised in the Walk. “They just heard probably the most wild claim by John Robert Stevens to date, and they are immediately up there to back him up, just eating it up.”
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