Welcome to the Hackberry House of Chosun. My name is Bob. I'm reading today from a book that I put together called Cries from Among Us. I put it together from a bunch of blogs, basically 94 blog posts that were back in 2019. This is actually May the 20th we're coming to now. It's called More Questions About Troubled Teen Homes. I can't go back and say what I said about what's leading up to this. I hope you'll go back and check out the other sites. You get the book itself, which is available at Amazon.com. But the task of exposing a Christian institution, it's a serious one. I am a Christian. This is not some unbeliever coming against the church. In fact, my own belief system roughly matches that of the churches that sponsor these homes. Christians agree with one another on a whole range of issues, you know. I can even find good things in the Roman system. Uh-oh, now I've really said it, though I am clearly a Protestant. I see that Rome has some ground of truth in there. But looking only for the good and ignoring the cries of hurting people will not ultimately end well. Even the Roman Church will tell you that in regard to its pedophile priests, but we can't go there right now. Through the ages, Christian people have made mistakes. They've sinned, and they've often corrected themselves. More often, they've had to be corrected in ways they wished never existed. Speaking of Rome, well, again, look at what's happening in that system today. At long last, people are speaking out, but it's the world that had to do that, that had to bring the church to the attention that it needs to have on these things. Anyway, here are more questions about the gulag that we've been talking about. For example, how are these Christian teen homes supported? There are love gifts, quote unquote. The staff will go around visiting churches in the area, or they'll travel all over the country for this. They visit the church, they give a stirring message, and they take an offering. It's not a problem. Many ministries have to operate this way. We can only hope that the monies that were collected can all be accounted for. Many ministries submit their books, to Christian organizations that were created to monitor such things. EFCA is one. It's a financial accountability place where churches will report, and it's not perfect either, but churches need to be accountable to the greater body of Christ or else, well, you know how that goes. And when a home claims to be supported only by offerings, like one that I know about, then goes and charges parents for their services on top of that. I would like to see the books at that point. So be specific. How much do you really need to take care of a student? Food is quite often donated. Clothes are uniform, very inexpensive. What do parents pay and why does that not take care of the resident's needs? And tell us of the labor money that you save at your house and staff houses because the girls are working for you and doing things that you would normally hire someone to do. Just some questions that need to be out there. Questions about the health of the students. Reputable homes require a physical exam to be sure the student is free from disease. We get that. Nurses should be on the grounds. Of course, promises to this effect will be made all the time. But as in many things, the reality can be a bit different. There are many stories, and I will share, I guess, some of them. Again, I don't know how much of this I can really share with you. I don't know how much of this you can bear. But there are many stories out there of the trauma that has been incurred when a new female student arrives at one of these homes. In this case that I know about, they were directed immediately, almost immediately after they got there, to a little room that was a closet originally, maybe a walk-in closet that had been set up for examinations of the girl's private areas. And young girls are terrorized to think that this man is going to perform a procedure on them without permission. Later, she'll call it a vaginal exam. But some feel at the time that they're being abused. They don't know. They're innocent in that way. They're not innocent girls. Nobody is innocent. but you know they're a little sheltered and they don't know about some of this, some of them don't and they're brought into this room and somebody, you know what I'm saying, it's very difficult for them. Then the ongoing care can be punctuated with exceptions based on good behavior. Some students are ignored altogether. Insurance problems arise. Evaluations are made by non-medical staff as to the importance of a particular condition. Do your teeth really need checked? Are they really aching? Are you just putting this on? Is that wound really worth worrying about? And so on. Future posts will give testimony to these very inconsistent, if not scary, policies regarding the health and the welfare of students. Do students get to say goodbye to their parents? Another valid question, truthfully, not always. sometimes I think, but not always, knowing of the pain of the parting and the possibility that a parent might change his or her mind, parents are sometimes whisked away to leave their frightened teenager to get over it. Many students cry away that first night, first week, first month, as their parents have just abandoned them, after which staff has strip-searched them, scrubbed them, and, as I say, that unknown man doing an unknown examination on them. Would you like your precious child to go through this? Well, many precious children have gone through it, my friends, and probably go through it to this day. Who are these staff members? Well, they're people from all walks of life, all of them church members. Their resumes are in order. You would hire them. So should we be questioning the policies, the work of these honored people of God? I give you the sentiments of one of the victims. Let's say that at least, perhaps, some of them should go into another form of ministry. Some of them are out of place as the staff in a home for troubled teens. They seem to have serious troubles of their own. You have some troubled adults dealing with, quote, troubled teens. What are the testimonies of past residents? Go to any website of any of these homes. Again, you've got to do your own research. I'm not going to name names. I could easily. They're out there, folks. You've got to believe me on this. The testimonies of former residents are all, well, they're all very glowing and happy on the website, on the website of the home. But I said go looking for other websites about the home. Some of these testimonies may be true. But unfortunately, all the names of the students have been taken out. They say this is because the ones who are for the house were being attacked verbally by those who suddenly had to speak out against them. They'd get their names on the site and they'd write to them and tell them, oh, please join us in the... So they removed their names, we're told, to protect them. But now we have no way of knowing who said what. Or if anyone said anything, if these are even real testimonies, we don't know now. I understand this attack mentality that the truths on this very site of my own were attacked and caused me to shut down the entire site for a little while. You'll see only fictitious names now, but actual words of actual residents coming up. It's all true, but cautiously so. By contrast, the girls who are now speaking out about their experience have left their full name elsewhere. I gave you the site. I'm not going to give it to you every day, but I gave you the site. I told you the name of the site you can go to to find out about this one house. 50 stories there. 50 stories that I tell you the truth you will not be able to read at one sitting. Not because it's so long, although they are long altogether, but because you can't bear the pain just listening to it. You can't bear just to listen. And yet these girls bore it actually. These girls want to be heard. That's why they leave their names on these sites. These victims do. Whereas the site that's trying to protect them, we don't know if there's are real testimonies or not. And if they are, there's no way to follow through and ask questions of these girls. Well, again, for reasons you may now understand, I will not be linking to those excellent sites. And if you go to my website, criesfromamongus.com, you won't see any links. I had tons of links the first time around. There are no links at all now. But it was their testimony that started the wheels turning inside of me. You do a little looking around, you'll find them. Here's a question. What churches sponsor these kinds of homes? Well, there is a denomination that is the main culprit here. In kindness to them, I will not mention their name. You'll find it out soon enough as you visit enough of these bad homes. They're not all bad, but if you visit the bad ones, you will see a particular kind of church behind it. I'll talk about their teachings later. Not every congregation in that denomination would get behind the teen gulag residences. Plus, on the other hand, there are some churches outside the denomination that freely give their money to support them because they made friends with the people at that home. They heard a good speaker come to their church and tell them a sob story. And they even brought some of the girls with them. That's a thing. When you find a video, I found a video online of another home, and they're standing there before you, not a smile on anybody's face, including the adults there. The joy of the Lord just doesn't seem to be there. Well, you just have to find that yourself also. Their church's doctrinal statement is online for anyone caring to peruse it. My acceptance of it, that statement, and agreement with it, it's in the high 90% level. I've been very conservative over the years. I'll probably remain conservative, meaning I believe what the Bible says, word for word. But these churches seem to have an unwritten code that's not clearly noticeable until you've been around a while. One item on that agenda has to do with the raising of children. It was one of those churches to which the founder of that teen gulag movement belonged when he launched his original homes. We'll talk about it. And there are carbon copies of those churches and their homes dotting the American landscape today. We could hope that they would all be exposed and shut down if they do business as the ones that I am describing. Most importantly, the real defendant on trial here is ultimately not a man or a woman or a home or a church or denomination, but a philosophy somehow wrested from the scriptures adhered to by quite a number of Christian people, and governing the behavior of leaders of homes like these, not to mention private homes, families. We're not talking only of some folks who have made mistakes, as I said before, bringing up children. All parents have done that. We're pointing out that a way of life has been described by certain Christian authors, and we'll look at one later, that binds people to certain behaviors. And they feel that when they're doing this, they're following God. To some, this way of life is so connected to the Christian message that if we dare to assail that message or them, these folks feel they're being persecuted for righteousness sake. Some would be willing to do prison time rather than change. or shut down. In fact, I'm going to tell you about a person without mentioning his name, two people really, who did just that. Not just child rearing, but church leading is on the line here. Do independent pastors have the right to sever themselves from all outside authority, even Christian brothers and sisters who could correct them and should correct them? That's what makes all of this so delicately difficult to address. Some of these leaders are God's people, not all, but some. But they hide behind the wall of their denomination, believing they're clinging to the word of God. But please don't forget this. There are quite a number of God's people on the survivor's team too. Shall we ignore their cries? Do they not deserve to be heard as well as the leaders? Especially if their number is in the hundreds and growing. Thousands, I guess, if you take all the homes together. I think you know my answer to all of that. Well, that was a post from May the 20th. We're a little early today, but I won't go into a new post of May 21 until next time. when I hope that you will join. Thank you so much for being here, and there are the works of many great men of God on this site. I really hope that you will go looking around the site. If you go about two-thirds of the way, I think, down the main page that you come to first on this site, you'll find some links about sermons by series, the word series. If you click on series there, you will find Scores of series that we've been through over these 20 years here on Sermon Audio. You'll find the works of great men of God, their stories and their words. You'll find North Korea audios, as I've said before, by the hundreds. You'll see a photo section. You'll see the study of the Quran as every Christian needs to study these days to find out what's going on with that book. Why does a fourth of the world think it's the word of God when it is not? Muhammad is a study we have made, prophecy studies, through the Bible studies, commentaries. Please check out this site and may it bless you. We have some new books out there, as you know, the one that we're reading through now and a couple of, a two volume set of the study of the book of Romans. I hope that you'll look at that. Well, This is the Hackberry House of Chosun. Lord willing, we get to talk again real soon. Bye-bye.