Former Grace Cathedral member says of Ernest Angley: ‘He divides and conquers families’
By Bob Dyer
Beacon Journal staff writer
Beacon Journal staff writer
Televangelist Ernest Angley has torn apart families by advising his parishioners to turn their backs on those who have departed, according to a number of former members.
Becky Roadman, who quit the Cuyahoga Falls church last year after 13 years as a member, said Angley routinely blasts people who have soured on his church.
“When they leave there, they shun you and say you’re devil-possessed,” Roadman says. “[Members] have shunned even their own wives, husbands and children.
“What kind of pastor does that?”
Angelia Oborne, who left not long ago after 20 years, said of Angley, “He divides and conquers families.”
Mimi Camp of Munroe Falls said her desire to leave the church, pitted against her husband’s desire to stay, led directly to their divorce.
Kenny Montgomery, who said he divorced his first wife because he wanted to leave the church and she didn’t, said his parents wanted nothing to do with his second marriage.
“I invited my mom and dad to the wedding and they refused to come because it wasn’t ‘of God’ and it wasn’t ordained by Ernest, and they couldn’t be a part of it,” he said.
“I got mad and severed communication with them for seven years.”
Pam Cable also blames Angley for her divorce.
Cable attended the church for nearly three decades before she ran out of patience with Angley’s psychological dominance and told her husband she wanted to quit the church. He didn’t. End of marriage.
“[Angley] ruled my life, day in and day out,” said the 60-year-old Akron resident. “He took my husband from me. He took my youth from me. To have any kind of a pastor rule over you like that is wrong. It’s just wrong.
“God is the creator of the family, not the destroyer of the family. I’ve seen too many families destroyed sitting in that man’s ministry.”
Wed as a teen to another young member of the congregation, Cable said Angley’s lust for complete control led directly to her divorce after 17 years of marriage.
She said the light bulb went on during a mission trip she took with her husband to Hawaii. The trip coincided with their 10th wedding anniversary. But she said, she was not allowed to stay in the same hotel as her husband.
“I began to question why and was told I was demon-possessed and I shouldn’t be asking questions, that I should do as I’m told.
“It took me six years after that to finally just say, ‘I’ve had enough. I just can’t do this anymore.’
“Basically, I had ahold of one arm of my husband and Ernest had ahold of the other, and Ernest won.
“It’s one thing to fight against alcoholism or drug addiction or even another woman. But I was fighting against the concept of God. And there’s no winning in that situation.”
Public scorn
Cable is among those who say Angley actively tries to put distance between his flock and those who depart. “What he does to people when they leave his church, it’s horrendous. [He] stands up there and slings this mud about people, and names them from the platform.”
She said that after she left he told the entire congregation she was “a dark angel.”
During an interview in his office last month, Angley was asked why he is so adamant that people who stay behind not have any dealings with the people who left.
“Well,” he replied, “they don’t need to hear all that stuff [negativity about the church]. I’ve got to protect them. I’m their little shepherd under the Lord.”
Among the members whose departures caused deep family divisions is Kim McCabe, who now lives in Florida with her husband, Shane, whom she met and married at Grace Cathedral.
When she was inappropriately touched and propositioned by a member of the church, she told her mother, who then told Angley. After the meeting, “he pulled my whole family into his office and told them I was telling lies about the church and they should refrain from talking to me any longer. Each family member was pulled into a group meeting and then into an individual meeting.”
McCabe said Angley convinced her family that “I was dangerous. My sister hasn’t spoken to me in, like, five years. My mom still does, but it’s very strained.”
One of the primary reasons the McCabes left was because they were appalled by some of the things their young, adopted children were being told at Sunday school.
Horror stories
One day, Kim McCabe recalled, “the teacher said, ‘If you’re 7 or older, raise your hand!’ My son had just turned 7 that weekend and was waving his hand. So I stuck around to listen, and she went on to tell them that she did not see them going down to the altar and praying, and, ‘If you don’t do that, you’re going to miss the Rapture. You’re going to be left, and what if you wake up one day and your parents are gone and you’re still here?
“ ‘How will you take care of yourself? How are you going to feed yourself? You are going to starve to death — blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ At 7 years old!”
In a separate interview, her husband remembered the same scene — “My kid is freaking out. He can’t even tie his shoes.” — and said the scare tactics started even earlier with a younger child.
“My 3-year-old was coming home asking me, ‘Why is God going to destroy the world?’ ”
Although the McCabes left, Kim’s mother has remained an adamant believer in Angley, which has caused a major rift, Kim says.
Afraid to leave
Tale after tale has emerged of families torn apart by disagreements over Angley. The stories are so commonplace, said Pam Cable, that they prevent some unhappy members from leaving.
“I think there are a lot of people within that church [who] would like to leave but can’t because their families are tied into it and, if they leave that church, he will separate them from their families.
“And that’s been proven over and over and over again. You are definitely shunned if you leave that church.”
A member of one large family said differing opinions about the circumstances of the departure of an associate pastor have “destroyed our family.”
“I still have family members there, and they refuse to have anything to do with us.”
A woman who doesn’t want to be identified because she teaches in a local public school said her father was in Angley’s inner circle for 17 years, and she frequently witnessed the impact Angley’s shunning can have on a teenager.
When someone leaves, she said, those who are left behind “are told, ‘You don’t even look at them.’ And all your friends — you have closer relationships with them than you do your family — and all of a sudden they do not talk to you. They see you in a parking lot and they turn the other way.
“They’re told not to even look at you because if they look at you, the demons that are in you, because you left, can jump onto them. And they believe it!”
Demons abound
A woman who now lives in Iowa (she does not want to be identified because she fears for her safety) said that when she went to Angley to tell him her stepdad was severely beating her mother, she was told her mother was at fault.
“He said there was a huge demon hovering over my mom and penetrated its claws into her brain,” said the 29-year-old. “So I grew up in fear of my mom for a long time.
“I was told that if I went near my mom, the demon would jump off her and attach to me.”
Camp, the woman who said Angley caused her divorce, reported that she, too, was warned about demons, as well as leeches.
“He told you if you had any thoughts about questioning his teachings, there were leeches in your mind and spirits that were changing your thought pattern.
“He told us not to watch TV because people on the news are devil-possessed and that the demons in them would come through the TV and possess our soul.”
Some say those who stay behind do so mainly because they have been brainwashed into believing Angley is on par with God.
A woman who was raised in the church but left just before her 22nd birthday said, “Father, Son, Holy Spirit and Ernest Angley. They don’t worship a trinity. It’s a quartet. And nobody questions anything.”
NEXT: A man who regrets giving $80,000 to Ernest Angley is among many who wonder why the preacher needs to own a Boeing 747 that costs more than $2 million a year to operate.
Allegations of sexual abuse are kept internal at Ernest Angley’s Grace Cathedral
By Bob Dyer
Beacon Journal staff writer
Beacon Journal staff writer
Former members of Grace Cathedral say televangelist Ernest Angley has turned a blind eye to sexual abuse they reported to him.
Shane McCabe is among those who told the Beacon Journal they were molested in the Cuyahoga Falls church.
“I was sexually abused there,” said McCabe, who has since moved to Florida with his wife for a new start.
McCabe said the abuse began at age 15 at the hands of a close Angley associate who was frequently in and out of town. It happened several times over the course of a year, he said.
When he finally worked up the courage to talk to Angley about it a few years later, McCabe said, “he basically blew me off.”
“He asked if I had told anybody. I said no. He said, ‘Let’s keep it a secret. This is the way we need to handle it because God’s mercy is great.’ ”
McCabe told Angley he feared the man was prowling for more victims because he had shown up at McCabe’s birthday party. But Angley still wouldn’t pursue it, McCabe said.
When asked during an interview in his office to comment on McCabe’s allegations, Angley responded with one sentence: “I don’t think there was anything to that.”
At about the same time, McCabe’s future wife, Kim, says she also was being abused by a different church member. When she finally told her mother she had been the victim of illicit touching and graphic propositions, she said, her mom immediately called Angley, who told her not to tell anyone else — including her husband.
The mother, a devout follower, told no one.
Shane and Kim dated for years before they even told each other. “We didn’t tell anybody,” she said.
After they finally spoke up, a close, older girlfriend of Kim’s confided that she, too, had been abused.
“We knew that the three of us had had the same thing happen by three different men at the same exact time,” Kim said. “And the same thing was done: It was kept quiet.”
When Angley was asked why he counseled people to stay silent about such matters, he said: “They shouldn’t talk about it, but they can do something about it. But they ought not to spread it abroad, you know, because that hurts others.”
But shouldn’t others be warned?
“Well, yeah, if they’re dangerous,” Angley responded. “If it’s somebody that, you know, makes a habit of that. We get ’em out. We get them out. We just let them know they have to go.”
When asked why he didn’t report such issues to authorities, he said, “That isn’t my place.”
The McCabes wed at Grace Cathedral in 2004 (incurring the church’s wrath, they said, because they declined to use the Cathedral Buffet for their reception). By 2010, they had had enough.
During separate interviews, both related what they considered an incredibly odd conversation during their last visit to Angley’s office.
They say he expressed absolutely no interest in her complaints but wanted Shane to recount his in minute detail — marking the fourth time, Shane said, that Angley had him tell the entire story.
The second time Angley asked for details, Shane figured Angley was checking to make sure the stories matched, to determine whether he was telling the truth. But after the third and fourth retellings, Shane was certain that wasn’t the motive, he said.
At their joint meeting, Kim said, Angley “went into very graphic detail with my husband about, ‘What happened to you? Why didn’t you [orgasm]? I’m sure it felt good. That would have been natural.’
“It was ridiculous and not something any professional person would ever ask.”
Still grieving
Another former member of the church, now 29 and living in Iowa, says she was abused throughout her youth by a different church member and was appalled by Angley’s lack of concern when she told him about it.
(Her name and town are being withheld because she says the person who repeatedly sexually penetrated her is still active in the church and is violent, and she fears he will use his connections to have someone harm her.)
When Angley hosted a meeting with the woman and the man she accused, the preacher “gave [the man] a slap on the hand,” she said over the phone, sobbing. “He basically ‘saved’ him again, and had him say another prayer — and started saying it was partly my fault because of my actions. ...
“For a long time, I believed it.”
Years later, she began to have horrible flashbacks, remembering “his hot breath, and him being big, and coming into the room. It was one flashback after another and I couldn’t get it to stop.”
Today she has an entirely new set of friends, none of whom know anything about her days at Grace Cathedral.
“I thought about going back just to make a scene, to yell at him. I was so pissed off at Ernest Angley, and I still am.
“What he did — he took my whole childhood from me. He took all that away from me. You only have one childhood.”
Arranged marriage
One former member says Angley paved the way for her to marry a man he knew was a convicted sex offender.
C Jay Coker says Angley told her the man, a friend of hers, had been falsely imprisoned because of unspecified, trumped-up charges initiated by an angry ex-wife.
Coker and the man had been exchanging letters and, upon his release, they started dating, with Angley’s blessing — although Angley told her to keep the relationship a secret, she said.
“Once we secretly dated for almost a year, Ernest told me to marry him,” she said.
Only after their wedding did she discover that he had been convicted of molesting a 5-year-old girl multiple times. She was so upset that she literally vomited.
After sitting through court-ordered counseling and group-therapy sessions in which she “was forced to hear the disgusting thoughts he had about young girls,” she started to plan her exit.
Coker, once a member of the choir, looks back in horror on Angley’s inordinate influence on her most important decisions. “I’m ashamed of how I let one man ruin my life.”
Ernest Angley’s Grace Cathedral rocked by accusations involving abortions and vasectomies
By Bob Dyer
Beacon Journal staff writer
Beacon Journal staff writer
Former members of Grace Cathedral say televangelist Ernest Angley has turned a blind eye to sexual abuse they reported to him.
Shane McCabe is among those who told the Beacon Journal they were molested in the Cuyahoga Falls church.
“I was sexually abused there,” said McCabe, who has since moved to Florida with his wife for a new start.
McCabe said the abuse began at age 15 at the hands of a close Angley associate who was frequently in and out of town. It happened several times over the course of a year, he said.
When he finally worked up the courage to talk to Angley about it a few years later, McCabe said, “he basically blew me off.”
“He asked if I had told anybody. I said no. He said, ‘Let’s keep it a secret. This is the way we need to handle it because God’s mercy is great.’ ”
McCabe told Angley he feared the man was prowling for more victims because he had shown up at McCabe’s birthday party. But Angley still wouldn’t pursue it, McCabe said.
When asked during an interview in his office to comment on McCabe’s allegations, Angley responded with one sentence: “I don’t think there was anything to that.”
At about the same time, McCabe’s future wife, Kim, says she also was being abused by a different church member. When she finally told her mother she had been the victim of illicit touching and graphic propositions, she said, her mom immediately called Angley, who told her not to tell anyone else — including her husband.
The mother, a devout follower, told no one.
Shane and Kim dated for years before they even told each other. “We didn’t tell anybody,” she said.
After they finally spoke up, a close, older girlfriend of Kim’s confided that she, too, had been abused.
“We knew that the three of us had had the same thing happen by three different men at the same exact time,” Kim said. “And the same thing was done: It was kept quiet.”
When Angley was asked why he counseled people to stay silent about such matters, he said: “They shouldn’t talk about it, but they can do something about it. But they ought not to spread it abroad, you know, because that hurts others.”
But shouldn’t others be warned?
“Well, yeah, if they’re dangerous,” Angley responded. “If it’s somebody that, you know, makes a habit of that. We get ’em out. We get them out. We just let them know they have to go.”
When asked why he didn’t report such issues to authorities, he said, “That isn’t my place.”
The McCabes wed at Grace Cathedral in 2004 (incurring the church’s wrath, they said, because they declined to use the Cathedral Buffet for their reception). By 2010, they had had enough.
During separate interviews, both related what they considered an incredibly odd conversation during their last visit to Angley’s office.
They say he expressed absolutely no interest in her complaints but wanted Shane to recount his in minute detail — marking the fourth time, Shane said, that Angley had him tell the entire story.
The second time Angley asked for details, Shane figured Angley was checking to make sure the stories matched, to determine whether he was telling the truth. But after the third and fourth retellings, Shane was certain that wasn’t the motive, he said.
At their joint meeting, Kim said, Angley “went into very graphic detail with my husband about, ‘What happened to you? Why didn’t you [orgasm]? I’m sure it felt good. That would have been natural.’
“It was ridiculous and not something any professional person would ever ask.”
Still grieving
Another former member of the church, now 29 and living in Iowa, says she was abused throughout her youth by a different church member and was appalled by Angley’s lack of concern when she told him about it.
(Her name and town are being withheld because she says the person who repeatedly sexually penetrated her is still active in the church and is violent, and she fears he will use his connections to have someone harm her.)
When Angley hosted a meeting with the woman and the man she accused, the preacher “gave [the man] a slap on the hand,” she said over the phone, sobbing. “He basically ‘saved’ him again, and had him say another prayer — and started saying it was partly my fault because of my actions. ...
“For a long time, I believed it.”
Years later, she began to have horrible flashbacks, remembering “his hot breath, and him being big, and coming into the room. It was one flashback after another and I couldn’t get it to stop.”
Today she has an entirely new set of friends, none of whom know anything about her days at Grace Cathedral.
“I thought about going back just to make a scene, to yell at him. I was so pissed off at Ernest Angley, and I still am.
“What he did — he took my whole childhood from me. He took all that away from me. You only have one childhood.”
Arranged marriage
One former member says Angley paved the way for her to marry a man he knew was a convicted sex offender.
C Jay Coker says Angley told her the man, a friend of hers, had been falsely imprisoned because of unspecified, trumped-up charges initiated by an angry ex-wife.
Coker and the man had been exchanging letters and, upon his release, they started dating, with Angley’s blessing — although Angley told her to keep the relationship a secret, she said.
“Once we secretly dated for almost a year, Ernest told me to marry him,” she said.
Only after their wedding did she discover that he had been convicted of molesting a 5-year-old girl multiple times. She was so upset that she literally vomited.
After sitting through court-ordered counseling and group-therapy sessions in which she “was forced to hear the disgusting thoughts he had about young girls,” she started to plan her exit.
Coker, once a member of the choir, looks back in horror on Angley’s inordinate influence on her most important decisions. “I’m ashamed of how I let one man ruin my life.”
Next: A departed pastor is blasted from the pulpit during an unusual Sunday service.
Ernest Angley’s Grace Cathedral rocked by accusations involving abortions and vasectomies
By Bob Dyer
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published: October 13, 2014 - 06:29 AM
| Updated: October 15, 2014 - 06:55 AM
Depending whom you ask, one of two things is happening at the big
Cuyahoga Falls church run by legendary television evangelist Ernest
Angley:
• The devil himself has infiltrated the church, and Angley, who is a prophet of God, has been working tirelessly to fight him off.
• Angley’s church is a dangerous cult where pregnant women are encouraged to have abortions, childless men are encouraged to have vasectomies and Angley — who preaches vehemently against the “sin” of homosexuality — is himself a gay man who personally examines the genitals of the male parishioners before and after their surgeries. They also say he turns a blind eye to sexual abuse by other members of his church.
During the past few months, a tear has ripped through the 3,000-seat auditorium known as Grace Cathedral. One longtime associate pastor resigned, telling friends and family he felt he had been inappropriately touched by Angley for seven years.
The dispute exploded on July 13, when Angley and two others in his camp addressed the situation in a 2½-hour open service. The service was recorded by one of the attendees and shared with the Beacon Journal.
In response to swirling accusations that he is a homosexual who has abused both his associates and members of the congregation, Angley, 93, had this to say to a large Sunday gathering.
“I’m not a homosexual. God wouldn’t use a homosexual like he uses me. He calls me his prophet, and indeed I am. ...
“They called Jesus a homosexual, did you know that? And still do. Because he was with men. Oh, Mary Magdalene and a few women. But you can’t stop the people’s lies.”
Then he addressed his history of urging the males in his congregation to submit to vasectomies.
“I’ve helped so many of the boys down through the years,” he said in his slow, singsong cadence. “They had their misgivings. Sure, I’d have them uncover themselves, but I did not handle them at all.
“And I would tell them how that would work. And they’d have to watch it. I’d have some of them come back to me that I felt needed to. And I would tell them, I would look at them, their privates — I, so I could tell how they were swelling.
“One young man, he decided to put in a garden [doctors advise against physical exertion after a vasectomy]. And he’d like to died. If he’d just told me — ask me. ...
“Another one was constipated. It was awful. And he was just dying deaths.
“And another one, one of his testicles fell out, absolutely fell out. ‘It’s dangerous, you should have a nurse.’ But I knew they wouldn’t get one.
“And men’s — I was a farm boy. We thought nothing about undressing. We didn’t know about homosexuals. We talked about women.
“And some of these turned against me.”
They certainly did. In droves.
Many speak out
The Beacon Journal spoke individually with 21 former members of the church who insist that Angley has been running a cult, not a church, and say he consistently threatens and intimidates his flock into following his instructions, bullying them into life-changing decisions that often split up families.
These folks say Angley controls virtually every aspect of their lives, from deciding what they read and watch on TV to whom they will marry and when. The sheer amount of time they are urged to spend at the church — three- to five-hour services, multiple times per week, plus a host of other activities — enables him to limit outside interference, they say.
Angley and other top church officials say the wave of members who left the church this summer was part of a conspiracy to take control of the ministry, and that the former members are “lying” about virtually everything.
But a parade of ex-members — some who departed 25 years ago, some who departed only a few months ago — scoff at those assertions.
“This man is a monster,” said Pam Cable of Akron, who left the church in 1988. “He’s a monster. And I can’t understand why all these years have gone by and nobody’s ever really been able to do anything about him.
“The people in Akron, Ohio, have a Jim Jones sitting in their backyard. ... These people in his congregation would drink the Kool-Aid if he told them to. They would.”
Kenny Montgomery, a former usher, also invokes the name of Jones, the religious leader who in 1978 persuaded 909 of his followers to commit suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.
“That place is a textbook cult,” said Montgomery, whose mother introduced him to the church at age 9. “I’m really scared for my friends and family that still go there.”
Preventing children
He and others say Angley holds so much sway over his members’ lives that he has persuaded them to get abortions and vasectomies even when they didn’t want to.
“None of us have kids because he makes all the men get fixed,” said Becky Roadman, 32, who quit the church last year and now lives in Georgia. “You’re not allowed to have babies there.”
That assertion is seconded by Akron resident Angelia Oborne, who worked in the church’s restaurant, the Cathedral Buffet, for 20 years before quitting the church a year and a half ago.
“My husband and I can’t have children because my husband had a vasectomy,” she said. “We were looking at getting it reversed, but I’m 35 years old and ... may not be able to have children anymore.
“And that breaks my heart, because that choice was made for me, because of the brainwashing, the mind control. We weren’t allowed to have children. If you turned up pregnant, it’s almost as if you had sinned.”
Oborne says Angley once advised a friend to think of her growing fetus as “a tumor.”
“She was four months pregnant and she sat in the [abortion clinic] waiting room and told her baby that she was so sorry that she was doing this,” Oborne said.
“I know another girl — she won’t come forward — but she was forced into having four abortions.”
Reluctant follower
Among those who have been pressured into abortions is Mimi Camp of Munroe Falls.
Camp was 25 and the mother of two boys when she and her husband moved from Florida to Akron and joined the church. When she became pregnant again and revealed what she figured would be the joyous news, her husband was upset, quoting Angley as saying, “It’s against God’s will for anyone to have a child.”
When they went to talk with Angley, Camp said, their pastor declared that abortion was her only option — “and then he went into some sort of vision and said, ‘Thus sayeth the Lord, if you have this child it could take your life or be retarded and you won’t be the mother to your other two children.’ ”
Camp grudgingly, haltingly acceded.
“I actually waited until I was 15 or 16 weeks along,” she said. “I was taking my prenatal vitamins and everything because I just didn’t want to do it.
“I kept getting pressured. The church recommended the abortion clinic. The first one I went to, I got up and walked out. I couldn’t go through with it.
“Then some higher-ups from the church were saying, ‘You know, you’d be doing the right thing. You really need to go through with it.’ And I went ahead and did it.”
She deeply regrets the decision. She experienced early menopause and never had another chance to have the girl she always wanted.
“I thought perhaps it was a girl,” she said. “It was terrible. It was absolutely gut-wrenching.”
Bad time for kids
During a 90-minute interview in his office, Angley said he doesn’t remember Camp’s circumstances, doesn’t push for abortions and only suggests vasectomies.
“I can’t regulate their lives,” he said. “But I can advise them about things if they ask me.”
Why would the head of a church want to limit the size of his future congregation? Usher Mike Kish, who sat in on the interview, said, “I would hate to even bring a child into the world at this point, being a parent, just having common sense. ... If you look at the condition of this world ... it just seems to be going downhill.”
When Angley was asked whether he agrees that this is a bad time to have children, he responded: “It really is. It really is. I wouldn’t want to be brought into this world now.”
Even if you had strong faith?
“No, because the people of strong faith go down. And their children are in danger ... . It wasn’t like that when I was a kid. We could walk up and down the streets, we could play at night and we were not molested at all.”
Angley volunteered a story about a male church employee who, Angley believes, wanted a child too much.
“This girl, she wanted a baby, she’s a second wife,” Angley said. “Those vasectomies can be undone, and he had it undone for her sake.
“I knew he shouldn’t have. We almost lost her, and they had twins and one of them died [at birth]. The little boy [who survived], he is something else. He really loves me. ... The daddy, he’s proud of him. But he knows he did the wrong thing.”
Angley and his late wife, Esther (he called her “Angel”), who died in 1970, never had children. When asked why, Angley said: “We didn’t want children. We wanted to give our lives to the work of God. ... My wife really loved children, but she didn’t feel like that we should have them.”
Ulterior motive
Some former members believe Angley has an ulterior motive in trying to prevent his parishioners from having children. Among them is Greg Mulkey of Barberton.
Mulkey was a prominent figure at Grace Cathedral, a singer in the Hallelujahs, a group featured on Angley’s TV broadcasts, and a key member of the church choir.
“He doesn’t want people to have kids because it would take their time and money away from [the church],” he said.
“He really forced people into abortions through scare tactics, as if he were a medical doctor. It turns my stomach.”
Mulkey says vasectomies were force-fed as well.
“When you tell another man to have a vasectomy, and you’re not a doctor, and you have influence over that person, you’re taking away their humanity.
“[It’s] his way of controlling everyone. It’s very scary stuff.”
Given Angley’s level of control, ex-members say, parishioners are vulnerable to his advances and those of his associates. That subject will be examined in Part Two.
• The devil himself has infiltrated the church, and Angley, who is a prophet of God, has been working tirelessly to fight him off.
• Angley’s church is a dangerous cult where pregnant women are encouraged to have abortions, childless men are encouraged to have vasectomies and Angley — who preaches vehemently against the “sin” of homosexuality — is himself a gay man who personally examines the genitals of the male parishioners before and after their surgeries. They also say he turns a blind eye to sexual abuse by other members of his church.
During the past few months, a tear has ripped through the 3,000-seat auditorium known as Grace Cathedral. One longtime associate pastor resigned, telling friends and family he felt he had been inappropriately touched by Angley for seven years.
The dispute exploded on July 13, when Angley and two others in his camp addressed the situation in a 2½-hour open service. The service was recorded by one of the attendees and shared with the Beacon Journal.
In response to swirling accusations that he is a homosexual who has abused both his associates and members of the congregation, Angley, 93, had this to say to a large Sunday gathering.
“I’m not a homosexual. God wouldn’t use a homosexual like he uses me. He calls me his prophet, and indeed I am. ...
“They called Jesus a homosexual, did you know that? And still do. Because he was with men. Oh, Mary Magdalene and a few women. But you can’t stop the people’s lies.”
Then he addressed his history of urging the males in his congregation to submit to vasectomies.
“I’ve helped so many of the boys down through the years,” he said in his slow, singsong cadence. “They had their misgivings. Sure, I’d have them uncover themselves, but I did not handle them at all.
“And I would tell them how that would work. And they’d have to watch it. I’d have some of them come back to me that I felt needed to. And I would tell them, I would look at them, their privates — I, so I could tell how they were swelling.
“One young man, he decided to put in a garden [doctors advise against physical exertion after a vasectomy]. And he’d like to died. If he’d just told me — ask me. ...
“Another one was constipated. It was awful. And he was just dying deaths.
“And another one, one of his testicles fell out, absolutely fell out. ‘It’s dangerous, you should have a nurse.’ But I knew they wouldn’t get one.
“And men’s — I was a farm boy. We thought nothing about undressing. We didn’t know about homosexuals. We talked about women.
“And some of these turned against me.”
They certainly did. In droves.
Many speak out
The Beacon Journal spoke individually with 21 former members of the church who insist that Angley has been running a cult, not a church, and say he consistently threatens and intimidates his flock into following his instructions, bullying them into life-changing decisions that often split up families.
These folks say Angley controls virtually every aspect of their lives, from deciding what they read and watch on TV to whom they will marry and when. The sheer amount of time they are urged to spend at the church — three- to five-hour services, multiple times per week, plus a host of other activities — enables him to limit outside interference, they say.
Angley and other top church officials say the wave of members who left the church this summer was part of a conspiracy to take control of the ministry, and that the former members are “lying” about virtually everything.
But a parade of ex-members — some who departed 25 years ago, some who departed only a few months ago — scoff at those assertions.
“This man is a monster,” said Pam Cable of Akron, who left the church in 1988. “He’s a monster. And I can’t understand why all these years have gone by and nobody’s ever really been able to do anything about him.
“The people in Akron, Ohio, have a Jim Jones sitting in their backyard. ... These people in his congregation would drink the Kool-Aid if he told them to. They would.”
Kenny Montgomery, a former usher, also invokes the name of Jones, the religious leader who in 1978 persuaded 909 of his followers to commit suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.
“That place is a textbook cult,” said Montgomery, whose mother introduced him to the church at age 9. “I’m really scared for my friends and family that still go there.”
Preventing children
He and others say Angley holds so much sway over his members’ lives that he has persuaded them to get abortions and vasectomies even when they didn’t want to.
“None of us have kids because he makes all the men get fixed,” said Becky Roadman, 32, who quit the church last year and now lives in Georgia. “You’re not allowed to have babies there.”
That assertion is seconded by Akron resident Angelia Oborne, who worked in the church’s restaurant, the Cathedral Buffet, for 20 years before quitting the church a year and a half ago.
“My husband and I can’t have children because my husband had a vasectomy,” she said. “We were looking at getting it reversed, but I’m 35 years old and ... may not be able to have children anymore.
“And that breaks my heart, because that choice was made for me, because of the brainwashing, the mind control. We weren’t allowed to have children. If you turned up pregnant, it’s almost as if you had sinned.”
Oborne says Angley once advised a friend to think of her growing fetus as “a tumor.”
“She was four months pregnant and she sat in the [abortion clinic] waiting room and told her baby that she was so sorry that she was doing this,” Oborne said.
“I know another girl — she won’t come forward — but she was forced into having four abortions.”
Reluctant follower
Among those who have been pressured into abortions is Mimi Camp of Munroe Falls.
Camp was 25 and the mother of two boys when she and her husband moved from Florida to Akron and joined the church. When she became pregnant again and revealed what she figured would be the joyous news, her husband was upset, quoting Angley as saying, “It’s against God’s will for anyone to have a child.”
When they went to talk with Angley, Camp said, their pastor declared that abortion was her only option — “and then he went into some sort of vision and said, ‘Thus sayeth the Lord, if you have this child it could take your life or be retarded and you won’t be the mother to your other two children.’ ”
Camp grudgingly, haltingly acceded.
“I actually waited until I was 15 or 16 weeks along,” she said. “I was taking my prenatal vitamins and everything because I just didn’t want to do it.
“I kept getting pressured. The church recommended the abortion clinic. The first one I went to, I got up and walked out. I couldn’t go through with it.
“Then some higher-ups from the church were saying, ‘You know, you’d be doing the right thing. You really need to go through with it.’ And I went ahead and did it.”
She deeply regrets the decision. She experienced early menopause and never had another chance to have the girl she always wanted.
“I thought perhaps it was a girl,” she said. “It was terrible. It was absolutely gut-wrenching.”
Bad time for kids
During a 90-minute interview in his office, Angley said he doesn’t remember Camp’s circumstances, doesn’t push for abortions and only suggests vasectomies.
“I can’t regulate their lives,” he said. “But I can advise them about things if they ask me.”
Why would the head of a church want to limit the size of his future congregation? Usher Mike Kish, who sat in on the interview, said, “I would hate to even bring a child into the world at this point, being a parent, just having common sense. ... If you look at the condition of this world ... it just seems to be going downhill.”
When Angley was asked whether he agrees that this is a bad time to have children, he responded: “It really is. It really is. I wouldn’t want to be brought into this world now.”
Even if you had strong faith?
“No, because the people of strong faith go down. And their children are in danger ... . It wasn’t like that when I was a kid. We could walk up and down the streets, we could play at night and we were not molested at all.”
Angley volunteered a story about a male church employee who, Angley believes, wanted a child too much.
“This girl, she wanted a baby, she’s a second wife,” Angley said. “Those vasectomies can be undone, and he had it undone for her sake.
“I knew he shouldn’t have. We almost lost her, and they had twins and one of them died [at birth]. The little boy [who survived], he is something else. He really loves me. ... The daddy, he’s proud of him. But he knows he did the wrong thing.”
Angley and his late wife, Esther (he called her “Angel”), who died in 1970, never had children. When asked why, Angley said: “We didn’t want children. We wanted to give our lives to the work of God. ... My wife really loved children, but she didn’t feel like that we should have them.”
Ulterior motive
Some former members believe Angley has an ulterior motive in trying to prevent his parishioners from having children. Among them is Greg Mulkey of Barberton.
Mulkey was a prominent figure at Grace Cathedral, a singer in the Hallelujahs, a group featured on Angley’s TV broadcasts, and a key member of the church choir.
“He doesn’t want people to have kids because it would take their time and money away from [the church],” he said.
“He really forced people into abortions through scare tactics, as if he were a medical doctor. It turns my stomach.”
Mulkey says vasectomies were force-fed as well.
“When you tell another man to have a vasectomy, and you’re not a doctor, and you have influence over that person, you’re taking away their humanity.
“[It’s] his way of controlling everyone. It’s very scary stuff.”
Given Angley’s level of control, ex-members say, parishioners are vulnerable to his advances and those of his associates. That subject will be examined in Part Two.
