Content note: This story contains references to sexual assault and abuse.
Tim McDermott was brushing his teeth in the bathroom of his home in Woodland Park, Colorado, when his life began to crumble. Hands shaking, he looked at himself in the mirror and saw a stranger: tall and thin, a beard working to cover the exhaustion etched into his face. For years he had rationalized the mistreatment, underpayment, and manipulation he experienced at work as the cost of striving for the Kingdom, a sacrifice he was making for the Lord. He internalized the lesson that any complaint on his part was a symptom of his own lacking faith. That morning in 2021, though, toothbrush in hand, his rationalizations – and the life he’d built atop them – fell to pieces.
“I just felt this rage of a sort I had never experienced before,” he told me. It was the first thing he had felt in months. “I had been confused, I was numb emotionally, I was all over the place.” Then came the rage, sweeping through seven years of rationalizations like a fire through the underbrush, bringing clarity with it.
After giving nearly a decade of his life to Charis Bible College, Tim knew he needed to leave. Four thousand six hundred miles from his home in the English Midlands, living in the United States on a work visa sponsored by the school, he did not have a plan, he did not know where he would go next, but he knew he needed out.
“I felt like I was killing my future a little bit,” Tim told me of the decision he made that morning.
Now, more than three years after he took a leap of faith away from the community he had called home, Tim looks back on the rage that scorched him that morning as a blessing.
“I’m so grateful for it,” he said when we spoke for the first of many times earlier this year. That rage, he feels, woke him from the deep, restless sleep he had been lulled into at Charis, and set him on a path to find the version of himself that he had lost there: the one hungry for knowledge and love and a relationship with the God of his Christian faith; the one which had been snuffed out by what sources say is Charis’ culture of silence, abuse, and manipulation.
“It can only have come from the deepest, most me part of me.”
Last year, while I was reporting a seven-part series on the controversial Woodland Park school board, Charis (Kayr-iss) Bible College thrust itself onto my radar. The college and its parent organization, Andrew Wommack Ministries (AWMI), played a prominent role in the drama surrounding the school board, which I came to learn was the opening salvo in Andrew Wommack’s declared plans to “take over Woodland Park.” Over the past year, I have reported on Wommack’s rapidly expanding political involvement not just in Woodland Park but around the state.
In the course of covering Wommack’s political involvement, I had the fortune to meet people from the Charis-AWMI community, and I learned that there was a deeper story to tell – a story not about politics, but about people. Roughly 2,000 people commute to Wommack’s compound every day, perched on a hilltop just outside of downtown Woodland Park. I wanted to understand what drew them to it, and what kept them in it. I wanted to know what life was like inside.
Over the past six months, I have learned the answers to those questions. This three-part series is the product of interviews with nearly two-dozen sources, people like Tim, who were students or staff members at Charis and AWMI. Ten of those sources, like Tim, spoke to me on the record. Another dozen sources spoke either off-record or on the condition of anonymity, out of concerns for retaliation from the school or social fallout with friends, family members, and loved ones who maintain ties to Charis. Two sources requested to be named only under pseudonyms, in order to discuss sensitive matters involving abuse. In the course of reporting this series, I interviewed sources in five countries spread across three continents. Mr. Wommack did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did representatives of Charis and AWMI.
“There were so many great, markedly positive things that happened for me at Charis,” Lucy – a pseudonym – told me. Lucy attended Charis as a student and worked for Andrew Wommack Ministries for ten years before leaving in early 2023. “The community aspect was so, so strong.”
Like Tim, each of these sources shared with me a story of being drawn to the school by pure intentions, hoping to pursue and strengthen their Christian faith. When they arrived, they found what they had hoped for: a community of earnest, loving believers on a pristine campus, nestled into the palm of Pike’s Peak’s hand. A flame of evangelism kindled on the mountainside.
In recent years, though, most sources say that things at Charis and AWMI have taken a dark turn. In a drive for expansion, leaders have adopted a mindset that the ends justify the means, and that any criticism can only be an “attack of the enemy,” they say. Since undertaking a corporate reorganization in the late twenty-teens, the school and ministry have developed an internal culture which one source described as “cruel and harsh at its core.”
“Something is wrong in the culture,” a source told me. “There is a big cultural problem, and it’s gotten worse over the last few years.” That culture is the subject of this first installment in the series.
In the quest to raise money at all costs, to fuel the organization’s planned expansion, sources say that the school and ministry have turned a blind eye to suffering in the student body, and have exacerbated that suffering with teachings which encourage students to blunt their own emotions or else be accused of lacking faith. The increasing thirst for cash, sources say, has also driven exaggerations and outright fabrications from Wommack’s faith healing ministry.
“The thing I could not reconcile was that in seven years I never saw a healing,” a former top-level executive told me of the ministry’s claims to heal the sick and, in some cases, even raise the dead. Health and wealth – the ministry’s financial and healing claims – are covered in the second part of this series.
Doggedly avoidant of scandals, in recent years the school and ministry have responded to instances of abuse, rape, suicide, and murder in ways which sources feel prioritized the organization’s reputation over the wellbeing of victims. In some cases, sources allege that the school did not just fail to respond adequately to instances of abuse, suicide, and murder, but that they contributed to them – allegations covered in the third part of this series.
“I definitely hold some responsibility towards the school for her death,” one source said, referring to his sister, whose story is told in part three. “I think they need to be held accountable.”
In the center of the equation is Andrew Wommack, the septuagenarian Texan whose vision is being pursued and enacted by a senior leadership team which sources have described to me as “manipulators,” “flatterers,” and “pathological narcissists.” Though the 22 sources I spoke with for this series were unified in their criticisms of the school and ministry – what they say are its financial improprieties, its cruel and abusive culture, its ends-justify-the-means approach – they were divided on Wommack himself. Some feel that the aging evangelist is broadly unaware of the dangerous culture which has spread through his organizations. Others believe that Wommack has personally been corrupted in his pursuit of power and influence.
Whoever is responsible for the change, sources were clear: the spark which brought Charis to life, which made it the community sources say it used to be, has turned into a consuming flame, a danger to the students and staffers who have huddled around it for warmth.
“Going to Charis really did a lot of positive things for me,” Lucy said. “On the flip side, it kind of ruined my life for ten years too.”
A seamless cross between an old-time tent revival preacher and a modern televangelist, Andrew Wommack has spent more of his life in the pulpit than out of it. Like any storyteller, he has arrived at a standardized version of his own narrative.
Shortly after having an ecstatic religious experience in 1968, at the age of 19, Wommack was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam. His newly inflamed faith faced something of a crisis in the jungles of southeast Asia. “Temptations abounded,” he wrote of his time in Vietnam in his book, Spirit, Soul and Body. “Everyone else gave themselves to the drugs, alcohol, and prostitutes that were so readily available,” Though the “constant pressure to sin seemed unbearable at times,” he wrote, “I refused to give in.” Instead, he says, he channeled his “gnawing inner frustration” into “praying and studying the Bible as much as sixteen hours a day.”
After the war, Wommack started growing both his family and his ministry. He and his wife, Jamie, fathered two sons, Joshua and Jonathan Peter. Wommack became a pastor and, by 1976, a small-time broadcaster hosting the Gospel Truth radio show in Childress, Texas. During his early ministry career, Wommack also served as an usher for famed faith healer, Kathryn Kuhlman, and has frequently cited Kuhlman as an influence in his work.
In 1980, Wommack moved his family and ministry to Colorado Springs, where they flourished. By the end of the decade, the Gospel Truth show was syndicated, and the small ministry he had transplanted from Texas had grown into Andrew Wommack Ministries International. In 1994, Wommack founded Charis Bible College, an unaccredited school which graduated its first class in 1996. By 2000, Gospel Truth had jumped from radio to television. Today, the show is aired on Trinity Broadcasting Network, the largest religious television network in the world, alongside shows by famous mega-preachers like Joyce Meyer, Creflo Dollar, and Joel Osteen.
Wommack’s exposure has also grown with his ministry’s online reach in the past several years, bootstrapped by the Truth & Liberty political organization he co-founded with fellow evangelists like Lance Wallnau and David Barton. The organization is heavily influenced by the Seven Mountains Mandate, a belief popular in Christian nationalist and New Apostolic Reformation circles which asserts that Christians must conquer the seven “mountains of society” or “spheres of influence,” which adherents say are business, arts & entertainment, media, government, education, family, and religion. His political activity and comments he has made about his positions have repeatedly drawn a spotlight to Wommack in recent years. The day after a mass shooting at an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs in 2022, Wommack lamented that the media “went overboard” with sympathy for the queer community. In February of this year, he said that a civil war would be “worth it” if it brought Donald Trump back into power. The following month, he boasted on a livestream that Charis has “more weapons than the local police department,” saying that his followers are “armed to the hilt.”
Syndication on TBN, combined with the ministry’s rapidly expanding online platform, has greatly expanded the reach of Wommack’s message. It has also provided robust pipelines for recruiting students to Charis, the project many former insiders say Wommack hopes will be his legacy.
The quest to build that legacy is well underway. In 2014, Charis and AWMI relocated to a 157-acre property in Woodland Park where they have since built a 150,000 square foot campus and auditorium to house classes for Charis’ roughly 1,200 in-person students. In 2017, the ministry acquired an adjacent 336-acre property, where the headquarters for AWMI and Truth & Liberty now stands. Over the next decade, Wommack hopes to complete a planned billion-dollar expansion to add student housing, an events center, and athletic facilities to the gated and guarded campus compound, with the intention of doubling student capacity to 2,500. The first of the new student housing buildings is currently under construction, projected to finish this year.
In addition to the main campus in Woodland Park, Charis Bible College also has U.S. extension campuses in Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington, D.C. The school also has a robust international presence, with 31 international campuses, including locations in Canada, Mexico, the UK, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Russia, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.
Despite Charis’ international presence, many foreign students attend the main campus in Woodland Park. Charis also attracts students from a wide age range, with as many retirees as recent high school graduates among the ranks.
“There are so many really, really decent, good people who are looking for God there,” Tim said of the student body.
Charis attracts students from a wide range of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, including many who have recently determined to rededicate their lives to God. “You have people who are searching, who are desperate, who are in some really difficult places,” Tim told me. “And sometimes they get help. Sometimes stuff goes well. They attend Charis and then find a good career, or they go to Charis and kick their drug addiction. They find their future spouse and go on to live lovely lives.”
Sometimes, he emphasized, wrestling with a dichotomy which has troubled a number of my sources: that a place of healing and refuge for some is a place of torment and abuse for others.
It’s a truth I encountered every time I spoke to a former insider for this series: that all of the malfeasance, all of the improprieties they alleged, were enabled by the culture which has taken root on the Woodland Park compound in the last several years; that none of it can be understood without understanding that culture.
“That’s what has hurt my heart so much,” Tim told me, “and what has made me all the more angry at the powers that be, is that seeming contradiction. What is a really uplifting, beautiful experience for one is like a living hell for another.”
“I experienced both.”
Seven years before his epiphany of rage at the bathroom sink, 18-year-old Tim McDermott landed in Colorado with his life packed in a suitcase. It was September 2014, and he had just moved across the Atlantic Ocean and two-thirds of the way across the subsequent continent to attend bible college in the mountains of Colorado.
“It was the classic teenage thing of, like, what do I do with my life?” Tim told me. “I thought, I have no purpose, I might as well see what God has to say.”
That September day was not Tim’s first experience with Charis, though. Raised in a family of charismatic Christians in the UK, much of Tim’s life to that point had been shaped by what charismatics call the gifts of the spirit: speaking in tongues, healing, and other miraculous works. And for good reason: both Tim and his younger brother, according to their own belief and that of their parents, experienced miraculous healing during their upbringings, when what had been diagnosed as symptoms of a developmental disorder in both boys disappeared in early adolescence after their mother, Deborah, sought prayer and healing from a number of charismatic evangelists, including Andrew Wommack. Today, neither of the McDermott brothers shows any sign of the affliction which shaped their early years. As the second part of this series will examine at length, though, the family has come to resent the way Charis and AWMI twisted their story for marketing purposes.
By the time Tim stepped off the plane in 2014, he had already completed two years of study at the Charis campus in Walsall, England. Charis is structured as a two-year course, with optional third-year courses offering specializations in fields like business, politics, film & production, and ministry. Tim had arrived in Colorado to complete a third-year course in what was then the media school. After arriving, though, he came to feel that he had not gotten the most out of his experience at the Walsall campus and opted to start again as a first-year student in Woodland Park.
Far from home, Tim found a community among his fellow students, united by their pursuit of a deeper knowledge of their faith. He also found a passion which carried him through much of the next seven years: theater. As part of its effort to train Christians in the performing arts, Charis stages several original productions each year, providing students and staff the opportunity for onstage roles. By his second year, in late 2015, Tim had fallen in with the theater crowd. With no prior experience, he auditioned for that year’s Christmas show and won a speaking role.
“I’m tall and English,” he said, explaining that initial casting. “Kind of awkward and gangly, but they could work that out of me.” The show came and went, and Tim knew he was in love with the stage. “I had never done anything like it before in my life, but I loved it,” he told me. “I still do.”
Embraced by the community and invigorated by his newfound love of performing, Tim had found what he came to Colorado to find: a purpose for his life. When he graduated, he knew he wanted to come back as a member of staff.
“I thought, ‘this is where I’m going to be for the rest of my life. I’m going to work here. I’m going to make my career here. This is it. I’m sorted.’”
When he made that dream come true, though, and returned as a staffer, he saw facets of the school he had never seen before: a rivalrous, backstabbing internal culture where emotional manipulation and spiritual abuse are routine, and in which the ministry’s full-throttle quest for expansion was slowly turning students into little more than cash cows.
“You go to Charis and everyone talks about love, everyone talks the God language. But in the back rooms,” the tall Englishman told me, “it’s bloody feudal.”
Hannah’s origin story stuck out among her diverse and eclectic peers at Charis. Unlike so many other students, she was not raised on the teachings of Andrew Wommack. She had wrestled with her faith at a number of nondenominational churches since losing her brother as a child. And she had not traveled to the school from Ukraine or Zimbabwe. She was from Woodland Park, one of the rare students to attend from the town the ministry calls home.
Hannah is not her real name. The Colorado Times Recorder agreed to identify Hannah only by a pseudonym in order to preserve her privacy and let her openly discuss the sexual violence she experienced at Charis.
She was 11 years-old when her brother, 17 at the time, died. Curious by nature but spurred to grander inquiries by the freak tragedy, Hannah had questions. She wanted to know who God was, and why he took her brother. Seeking answers, she turned to the pastors of the local church her large family attended, but came away empty handed.
“I was getting all of these vague, shrug-off kinds of responses,” she told me. “It was obvious that they were uncomfortable that I was asking.”
Instead of answers to her questions about the nature of God and fate, Hannah was instead taught the same things many young women were taught in evangelical churches on either side of the turn of the century. “Here’s how to remain pure, here’s how to not incite unseemly urges in men, here’s how to be a good wife, here’s how to be a godly mom,” she said when we spoke in a crowded bar in April. “All this bullshit. And I’m thinking, what if I don’t want to be a mom? What if I want to have a career? What if I actually want to study and become an academic?”
An experience which would have turned many people away from faith thrust Hannah deeper into it. Instead of looking to local pastors for answers, she started seeking them out herself, reading and studying the Bible in earnest. Graduating high school, she was hungry for more knowledge but knew she could not afford to leave town for college. That’s when she started looking at Charis. After sitting-in on a few classes, she applied to attend as a student the following year.
“I decided, well, I’ve got the money for this, it’s literally right here in Woodland Park. I might as well give it a shot.”
Unlike Tim, Hannah did not have to wait to become staff before seeing the dark side of Charis. She got into a serious relationship with a fellow student, a young man whose family had “known Andrew for decades,” Hannah told me. The family had relocated to Woodland Park, she says, to be closer to the ministry, and for their son to attend Charis. Over the course of two years, he repeatedly raped Hannah. He weaponized “purity culture” against her, blaming her for “enticing” him to assault her, and convincing her that no one else would want her.
“As a 19 year-old girl who’s been assaulted, I’m thinking, ‘I’m not pure anymore, so who is going to want me? That means I have to make this work, because what other option do I have?’”
At school, her abuser’s words were amplified by a curriculum which encouraged women to submit to men. “It was all these teachings of how a man should be the leader of the household, the wife should be submissive, meek, and gentle,” she told me. “I’m sure you can tell that I’m none of those things,” she laughed.
Eventually, things were bad enough that people in leadership noticed something was wrong. When a teacher asked Hannah about it, she told them. “I explained that he never asked me if it was okay, and when I said stop, he wouldn’t.” Nothing was done.
When she confided in others that she had been repeatedly raped by a fellow student – one who, like many students, was also an employee of the ministry – nothing was done. “I communicated to a few people at Charis what had happened,” she told me. “They didn’t do a doggone thing.”
Given that Hannah was an adult at the time, Charis was under no legal obligation to take further action regarding her allegations. Still, she expected better than a shrug.
When Tim McDermott returned as staff, the reality behind the scenes was a world apart from the happy, organized exterior he had been shown as a student. What he found instead was poorly managed chaos, an organization in which each department was quasi-sovereign territory, each with its own autocrat.
“They are their own little kingdoms with their own little kings under the overlordship of Andrew Wommack,” Tim described it. “None of them communicate with each other, and they all kind of dislike each other.”
As an employee in the film & production school, Tim found himself living in Elizabeth Muren’s fiefdom. Muren, a writer and performer from Norway, has been with Charis since 2014, writing and running original productions for the school. As the lead of the film & production third-year program, she was the dominant figure in Tim’s life as a staffer, precipitating both his descent deeper into Charis and his ultimate departure from it.
Muren did not respond to requests to comment on this story.
As Tim describes it, his relationship with Muren was shaped by her wilful use of emotional and spiritual manipulation – the way she gave or withheld approval, the way she presented her own desires as God’s desires, the way she muddled and merged the concepts of serving God and serving her. At the time, though, he was intoxicated by it.
“I can’t tell you what it does to your personality, what it does to your sense of identity,” he told me. “Because you get caught up in it, and then part of who you are becomes what you do for God, for the ministry, and for Elizabeth.”
Even during his early days enamored with Muren’s mission to serve God through the performing arts, though, Tim already felt the hooks of control slowly sinking into him.
“It created, for me, an environment where you are looking for that validation. You need that validation,” he said. “So when you displease Elizabeth, when you go against something Elizabeth says, it’s not just that you spoke out of turn, it’s that you are going against God’s vision.”
According to the former members of Charis staff I spoke with during the reporting of this series, Tim’s experience with Muren was far from unique. Many former staffers I interviewed described leaders in the school and ministry habitually conflating their own desires with God’s desires. The problem is amplified by Wommack’s theology, which sets the tone throughout his organizations. Part of what’s called the Word of Faith movement, Wommack preaches that faithful Christians can receive ongoing divine revelations – messages directly from God. But there is a hierarchy to the revelations.
“Not all revelation is equal at Charis,” CJ, a Charis graduate who received a ministry license from the school, told me. CJ, who asked that we not use his last name, said that revelations from students carry the least weight, but revelations from Wommack himself are unquestionable. “Nobody could refute a revelation Andrew [Wommack] had received from God. If Andrew said it, it was basically Gospel.”
Wommack is also a proponent of what is often called the “prosperity gospel,” the belief that Christians can achieve health, wealth, and success by having enough faith. Many of the internal problems at Charis and AWMI can be traced back to these beliefs: leaders who believe that their leadership is a sign of God’s approval, managing employees via competing messages from the Holy Spirit.
“There’s a lot of ‘being spoken to,’” Deborah McDermott, Tim’s mother and a former Charis student herself, told me of the internal culture driven by fetishized success and constant “revelations” from God. “They’re all getting personal revelations,” she said. “‘God told me, God told me, I hear the voice of the spirit.’ And they’ll say ‘No, you can’t do that because the Holy Spirit told me that I get to do that.’”
It’s a culture, Deborah describes, in which the students and staff – the kind of faithful believers who have chosen to attend or work at a bible college – are at the mercy of a leadership culture which is primed to use their faith to control them. “It’s a heady mix for people who want to go in and milk it for all they’ve got,” she said.
Even after the school and ministry responded to her disclosure with a shrug, Hannah was determined to finish her studies. She had come to Charis to learn, and she wasn’t going to let that be taken from her. “I went back to make sure that I learned more,” she told me. “I wanted to understand more.”
But she soon found herself on the outs for another reason. After two years of abuse, Hannah struggled to apply the bright, cheerful facade which Charis’ culture encourages everyone to display at all times. A teacher, one of her mentors in the third-year ministry school, pulled her aside one day and gently lectured her for being quiet and often keeping to herself.
“She was like, ‘do you see this other girl?’” Hannah said, naming a fellow classmate her teacher had indicated. “‘She’s out there talking, she’s saying hi, she’s out doing blah blah blah.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, why don’t you be like her? You can make friends that way.’”
“That’s just not the way I work,” Hannah told me. “That’s exhausting for me.” Plus, she was not friendless – she just wasn’t as relentlessly smiley as was expected of a woman in the school or ministry.
What she did not realize at the time was that that gentle lecture was a warning – one she missed. “Apparently that was some homework I was supposed to do,” she told me. To be more like the other girl her teacher had pointed out. Failing to recognize that warning, and to promptly shellac a bright smile across her face at all times, Hannah was quickly branded as a problem child. Despite attending Charis in an earnest effort to seek God, she did not appear to be doing so cheerfully enough, and that was an issue.
Many former insiders I interviewed spoke about how narrow the range of allowable emotion is inside Charis, and how central that emotional constriction is to the school’s culture.
“When you say, ‘Hey, how are you?’ they can’t say anything except for ‘blessed’ or ‘awesome’ or ‘excellent,’” a source – Lucy, who worked for the ministry for ten years – told me. “If you are in any way unwell or not prosperous or not okay, it’s you not receiving. Your receiver is broken, if that makes sense,” she said, “and that’s a you problem, that’s not a God problem.”
If you were receiving the blessing of the Holy Spirit through faith, sources explained, then you wouldn’t be having a bad day – meaning, if you are having a bad day, it can only be caused by a lack of faith.
“Ever since Jesus died, we have gone from curse to blessing, so from now on, we’re blessed,” Deborah McDermott explained the internal theological rationale for the stultification to me. “So if you ever face anything that’s not blessed, well, where is your faith?”
“There’s no place for mourning. There’s no grief. There’s no place for depression. There’s no place for the normal human experience of life,” she said. “At the end of the day, no one can be honest, authentic or real. You’ve got this weird, zombie-esque culture where no one is authentic anymore, and it’s very damaging.”
“As soon as something isn’t quite right in your life, the accusations and whispers start flying,” CJ alleged. “It’s always your fault if the Word of God isn’t working the change you want to see in your life.”
Unable or unwilling to assimilate to that culture of cheerful, dishonest silence, Hannah was steadily ostracized.
“I was lectured, I was told that I was the black sheep, that I was rebellious, unteachable, and unapproachable,” she told me. But she kept attending class, focusing on her studies. With the end of her ministry school program in sight, she was eager to graduate and embark on a career serving God in one of Wommack’s foreign postings.
Even as red flags started presenting themselves to him, Tim remained committed. He enjoyed getting to spend time onstage, and he was still eager to serve the Lord by serving Charis. He also didn’t have much of a choice.
During his time on staff, Tim was living in the United States on a work visa sponsored by AWMI. He was not free to seek other employment opportunities. If he ever decided to leave the school, he would also have to leave the country. “Working under Elizabeth required being on-call any time, day or night,” he told me. On-call 24 hours a day, Tim was only paid for 8 of them.
Despite the visa restrictions, Tim was routinely required to work for Muren’s other company, Legacy Productions, writing copy. At one point, he was shipped off to Orlando to perform at the Old Testament-themed park, The Holy Land Experience, where Muren also had a contract. “I was just kind of like a mannequin being led from one state to another,” Tim told me of that period. “Keep in mind, I was making minimum wage this entire time.”
During Tim’s second year on staff, a series of incidents pushed him towards a breaking point. There was the incident when Muren decided to scrap the entire curriculum for the school year on a whim, one week before classes were scheduled to start. Tim and the department’s other two staffers were tasked with rewriting a year of curriculum.
“We didn’t manage to create a curriculum in a week,” Tim said drily.
There was the senior staff’s penchant for mocking and belittling the students behind their backs, which Deborah McDermott witnessed. “They absolutely right-sized and vilified the students,” she recalled. “‘Oh, they’re a bunch of losers and so troublesome and always complaining.’ That was the attitude of the staff towards the students.”
There was the incident where students were left to fend for themselves in sub-freezing temperatures during a video shoot in the middle of a blizzard, eventually huddling around a diesel generator as their only source of warmth, coughing up black sputum for days afterwards.
Then there was the “fatal flaw” exercise.
Infatuated with Joseph Cambell’s narrative structure, the hero’s journey, Muren told the film & production students that they were going to play a game: everyone had to disclose their “fatal flaw,” part of Campbell’s heroic archetype. “We had people [in class] who had been sexually abused. We had one kid who’d had a really traumatic upbringing. We were dealing with some really sensitive people, and none of us were qualified to deal with it,” he told me. He watched, horrified, as each student was made to reveal their darkest secrets – the worst things they had ever done, or that had ever been done to them – to a room full of peers and superiors.
“They were seeking the Lord. They were seeking wisdom for guidance and healing. And now, as part of that curriculum, they’re being made to air all of their dirty laundry to people in positions of authority over them.”
Coming in quick succession, these incidents broke Muren’s hold on Tim, cutting through the twisted conviction that his concerns could only be the result of his lacking faith. Still, he had faith in the ministry and, when he finally went to senior leaders with his concerns, he did so as gently as possible.
“I made sure to let them know I wasn’t doing this to spite Elizabeth. I was doing it for the well-being of the students,” Tim told me. “I felt like it was the only option available to me.”
And that’s when Tim learned a lesson about the culture which has taken root at Charis: staff come before students. “The bigger the vision gets, the smaller the students, the people who are funding it, become, and the more exploited they are,” Deborah told me.
The senior leaders Tim reached out to took his concerns directly to Muren, telling her that Tim –as he put it – had “ratted on her.” Tim was immediately excluded from staff meetings and cold-shouldered by Muren and his fellow Film & Production staffers in the halls.
“You never get fired at Charis. You get pushed out,” a former employee who wished to remain anonymous told me. “You’re unwelcome, and the opportunities for you are taken away.”
The sudden gap in his relationships and responsibilities gave Tim room to breathe, to recenter himself. It was time he needed, he now sees, for the realizations he had held at bay to start creeping in around the edges, to start laying down roots, and eventually – as he brushed his teeth one morning in late April 2021 – to bloom into outrage.
By her last semester, Hannah knew she was being drummed-out of the school community. “People stopped talking to me. People stopped inviting me to join them. People stopped telling me what was going on. When I would engage with people, they wouldn’t even make eye contact with me.”
She faced gossip in the guise of revelations from the Holy Spirit, and judgment pretending as concern. “I encountered it so many times, ‘the spirit is telling me,’” she said. “The spirit is giving you garbage to use against people? I’m not sure that’s how it works.”
Hannah had still hoped for a job in one of the ministry’s affiliated global operations, an opportunity to apply what she had learned while getting away from the stifling culture and the people who had ostracized her on the Woodland Park campus. Soon, though, those opportunities disappeared too. A leader in the Ministry School, in charge of those ministry placements, asked her to meet at Starbucks.
“She told me ‘After this school year is over, you can do whatever you want to do,’” Hannah recounted to me. When she expressed her ongoing interest in one of the global ministry placements, she finally got the intended message. “She said, ‘I don’t think that’s going to work.’”
She was blackballed. After pouring years of time, money, and effort into pursuing God at Charis and ultimately committing herself to working for the ministry as a career, she had been tossed aside for the sin of not smiling enough; for the sin, as she believes they see it, of being traumatized by her rape.
As Tim, Hannah, and at least a dozen other sources I spoke with for this series attest, Charis’ culture is dominated by spiritual abuse – a widespread but little-understood form of mental control. According to Rachael Clinton Chen, a pastor and trauma expert, spiritual abuse is “a distortion and exploitation of spiritual authority to manipulate, control, use, or harm others, mostly through shame and fear.” Though long under-discussed in clinical circles, some psychologists now link the religious trauma of spiritual abuse with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or C-PTSD.
For those seeking to deepen their faith and dedicate their lives to God, spiritual abuse can create a mental prison, repeatedly convincing victims to ignore the warning bells sounding inside them.
“We gave it the benefit of the doubt over and over again,” Deborah McDermott told me. “How does a person who is a genuine believer actually dare to stand up and say, ‘in my opinion, this is bad?’ You don’t dare to do it. There is a fear of God which prohibits it, especially in Christians who are sincere and authentic in their belief. It’s very hard.”
“But as time goes by and you start seeing things, you finally cannot lie to yourself that any of this is okay or godly or in line with any biblical principles that you’re aware of,” she said. “And you have to admit to yourself that there’s something very wrong going on.”
The former students and staff I interviewed for this series have in some cases spent years wrestling with spiritual and psychological fallout from Charis’ culture of abuse. For a while, Tim lost his Christian faith entirely.
“I left, I moved back to the UK, lost my faith for a while, went on a big journey. I just spent a couple years in the world,” he told me. Today, he looks back on that period in his life as a much-needed sojourn. A reset. “It was over that time that I slowly started to process everything, to piece everything together.”
Years after they left Charis, Tim and Hannah are both thriving.
Hannah – well-spoken, working in finance, and with a clear sense of herself – looks back on her years at Charis as a transformative experience; the pain and mistreatment she experienced at the school, the dashing of her ministry hopes, finally allowed her to embrace who she really is, beneath the layers of expectations which had been piled on her, and onto so many women in strict religious settings.
“I’m actually grateful for it, because it caused an existential reevaluation for me,” Hannah told me. After the rumors, the lectures, the ostracization, she had lost touch with herself. “I was like, ‘am I a bad person? Am I really this garbage human?” No, she realized, she’s not. “I can either believe what people tell me I am, or I can believe that I’ve actually discovered about myself, what I actually know,” she told me. “And I’m going to believe that second thing first, because most of those people don’t know me, and don’t want the best for me.”
On Tim’s sojourn into the world, he met someone who brought the joy – and the faith – back into his life. Back in the United States, Tim has received permanent resident status, no longer shackled to the ministry-controlled work visa. Today, he lives with his wife in Colorado Springs, where they have been acquainting each other with the different Christian traditions they were raised in – his charismatic, her reformed – and finding a faith of their own.
Tim did not come forward with his story out of spite; he did not do it –as he knows detractors will say – because he hates God or Christianity or ministry. “I’m a Christian,” he told me. “I believe in miracles and speaking in tongues, I can speak all the shibboleths of the Word of Faith movement. I even lean center-right politically.”
He came forward, as so many others did, out of concern for those still on the scenic mountain compound where he was abused and mistreated for years. “Charis has a large, sinister underbelly that no one outside of the ministry is privy to.”
For years, he tried to convince himself that the problem was Elizabeth Muren. “She’d managed to fool upper management, she’d managed to fool Andrew.” As he processed what he had been through, though, he understood it wasn’t so simple. “I’m now of the opinion that there was something intrinsically wrong with Charis from the beginning,” he told me. “If there wasn’t a corrosive influence at the beginning, there was a space open for it. There are no safeguards in place to resist it.”
In many ways, Tim is one of the lucky ones. Despite the trauma and abuse he was subjected to, Tim was able to leave Charis with his physical health intact, and his mental health able to rebound. Aside from his low pay, Tim was able to leave Charis without his bank account being drained. He was able to leave Charis with his life.
Not everyone has been so lucky.
This is Part I of a three-part series looking at life inside Andrew Wommack’s Charis Bible College. If you or your loved ones have had experiences with the school or the ministry and are interested in sharing your story, please reach out.
