133 No, My Wife Is NOT a Prostitute (and I'm NOT a Pimp)!

When googling for "the Family International," (which happens to be the faith community I'm a member of since 30 years) one comes across a great variety of pages from all sorts of sources and different corners of the market of New Religious Movements, along with opinions and statements aplenty, both from our brothers and sisters around the world presenting their window to the world via the web, as well as disgruntled ex-members, and a bunch of "experts" who will define our community for you in their own particular way, based on whatever input they have gleaned about us from their sources.
Some remain factual, while others tend to gravely exaggerate. Unfortunately, whenever the media scrape together information, they prefer the exaggerations over the factual report: After all, their job is to divert the public's attention from the fact that their economy is history, and that they'll soon have bigger problems than they ever before would have imagined, and there's nothing like a nice juicy scandal in order to make people feel better about themselves and their System, especially a scandal about the most hated and despised groups of people of all: the "SEX CULTS."
According to them, my wife is a prostitute, and I'm a pimp who sends her out to get money whenever we're broke. That's just the way we do things in the Family - according to the media. And that's pretty much as certain as the fact that we descended from the monkeys or that a bunch of carpet-knife swinging Muslim extremists perpetrated 9/11, and the list of "facts" goes on and on, that makes up the modern Western world view of our society in the 21st century.
Unless you happen to pay a closer look at the details, instead of just swallowing whatever gossip you hear, or whatever mantras you're being fed from the mainstream machinery of propaganda.
Facts, for example, like the one that it is an excommunicable offense for full-time Family members to have any sexual contact with outsiders since around 1986. The problem is, how can you practice prostitution if you're not allowed physical contact with anyone outside the narrow circle of the full-time membership of your congregation?

Granted, the beliefs of the Family are generally a little more open-minded and permissive than the average church's, some of which even deny their members the right to re-marry once they've been divorced. And there have been times we went a little wild on some of our liberties. But those days are long gone.
It's also true that we have some "weird" beliefs other churches don't share, like spirit helpers, etc., and we vehemently refuse to believe that God stopped speaking and revealing things to His people 2000 years ago when John the Disciple finished writing the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible.
But that still doesn't make us a New Age cult, just because we might believe in some similar things some New Agers do. In fact our faith is probably more fundamentally based on the Bible than that of the average members of modern congregations and churches, including the Catholic Church.

While far from perfect, in my opinion, the Family is the closest thing in existence to the Early Church, the followers of Christ during the first 3 centuries before Christianity became an established religion: a time during which Christians were labeled a sect, suffered relentless persecution, lived communally, did not worship in any temples or church buildings, and basically taught as Jesus taught them, that in order to be a disciple, one had to renounce his earthly possessions and become a messenger for the Cause of Christ - pretty much all attributes that also apply to (full-time membership of) the Family.

Jesus said in His famous and often-cited so-called "sermon" on the mount (which wasn't really a sermon, since it was only directed at His 12 disciples, having left the multitude behind), "Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for My sake" (Matth.5:11).
When was the last time you or your church experienced the "blessing" of persecution and of people saying all sorts of things about you that weren't true? When was the last time you lived a godly life in Christ Jesus the only way Paul said this was possible - by suffering persecution?
When was the last time you were in the arena along with the rest of the true believers, facing the lions, instead of up in the grandstands, along with the mob?

Let me give you a little lesson from something we usually never learn from: history.

The religious authorities who persecuted Jesus suffered a similar fate as the one they had imposed on Him 40 years after they had crucified Him at the hands of the Romans when Jerusalem was besieged and the temple destroyed.
The kind of persecution and slander you're perpetrating against us today is only a little foretaste of what you will experience yourselves in due time when the world will be so tired of the hypocrisy that Christianity today stands for, that it will practically demand of its coming leader to "wage war against the saints" during the greatest Tribulation this world has ever known (and no, the "saints" it talks about here are not the Jews, since the only way a person can become a "saint" is through the blood of Jesus Christ; and no, Jesus will not come before that Tribulation!).

Maybe we're strange, weird, and definitely a little different than you. But try to imagine how the Early Church must have looked to the by-standers on the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit first fell on them, and they all started speaking in different languages, languages they had never learned! That certainly must have had a "New Age" slant to it!
Communal living in a more radical form than any Communists ever achieved! No wonder the authorities felt like they had to stamp out that dangerous sect, and tried to do so for 300 years.
Would you have been among the persecuted, or the persecutors?

That choice is up to you, today, and depends on who you're going to believe. Just remember Jesus' advice not to judge, because by the same standard with which you will measure others, you will also be weighed.

Time will do the talking, as to whether we're the Real Thing or just another bunch of weirdoes that will sink into oblivion like so many others before.
But before you're going to believe any lies about us (and alas, there are many), get your own picture.
Don't worry. We're not going to try to seduce you or lure you or hypnotize you. We've got our own problems and challenges to deal with and don't really need any more.
But we've also found the Answer how to deal with those problems and challenges in Jesus, and that's the one Thing we can share, just as it was for the Early Church.
Jesus is just as alive and kicking as He was in the Book of Acts. He hasn't stopped talking. The Holy Spirit is not on vacation. And if you've had extra-marital sex in your life, cheer up! There's hope! That's doesn't necessarily mean you're going to hell, contrary to what many others will try to make us believe.
On the other hand, if it's the loaves and fishes you're looking for, that some claim we're offering, you might be a little disappointed. We're not the Sex Cult we're made out to be, just another bunch of radical, sold-out Jesus Freaks, much to the chagrin of the god of this world, whose time is going to be up soon.
We don't have a nice big church to offer, with comfortable pews and big entertainment, just the truth: God is alive and still doing the same miracles He did before, and greater ones to come.