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Their Day in Court: Part Three
February 22, 2019 // 151 Comments -
Their Day in Court: Part Two
February 22, 2019 // 0 Comments -
Their Day in Court: Part One
February 22, 2019 // 0 Comments -
Statement from Recovering Grace regarding the lawsuit a ...
March 28, 2018 // 186 Comments -
Rethinking the Nativity
December 25, 2016 // 144 Comments
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Plaintiffs Amend Lawsuit Against IBLP, Also Sue Bill Go ...
January 10, 2016 // 1311 Comments -
Charlotte's Story
February 5, 2014 // 601 Comments -
Bill’s Cabin: Uncovering Sin
May 21, 2014 // 475 Comments -
How the Teachings of Emotional Purity and Courtship Dam ...
July 22, 2011 // 431 Comments -
Sacred Grooming, Part Six: A Secretary's Account of Lif ...
January 31, 2014 // 405 Comments
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True " I had a discussion once with someone th ...
August 1, 2022 -
Yes, this applies to many popular "teachers" and m ...
July 22, 2022 -
I definitely agree. But let's be fair. Bill was an ...
July 20, 2022 -
Perhaps Bill lived his life trying to follow these ...
July 19, 2022 -
Four steps on how NOT to read the Bible: 1. fin ...
July 19, 2022 -
Ex-Students Reveal Abuse at ‘Christian Torture Com ...
July 4, 2022 -
JM, My immense apologies, I meant Pensecola FL ...
May 25, 2022 -
I don't work for Pasadena Christian College. Wrong ...
May 24, 2022 -
JM, since you work for Pasadena Christian College ...
May 23, 2022 -
JM, I had forgotten that you knew the people in th ...
May 23, 2022 -
I would absolutely love to do that. My concern is ...
May 23, 2022 -
Well, praise you for having such a great memory! Y ...
May 23, 2022 -
Brother, you once mentionied on Alfred Corduan's D ...
May 20, 2022 -
I honestly don't care what people do with their de ...
May 20, 2022 -
JM, there is a saying "be the change you want to ...
May 19, 2022 -
We fans speak in Narnia code don't we? Like some o ...
May 19, 2022 -
Haha! Reverse Narnia curse. I love it. I'm in F ...
May 19, 2022 -
No. You got off by bringing up the Duggars. It's g ...
May 19, 2022
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An ATI Education, Chapter 4: The Law of Grace
“If a woman doesn’t cry out when she’s raped, God holds her equally guilty with her attacker.” Bill Gothard states this outright in Wisdom Booklet 36; hundreds of people, most of them well-meaning Christians, read and accepted it. I was one of them. I wrote this series for Recovering Grace to give a glimpse into the long, […]
Stolen Dreams
Through IBLP and his “homeschool” program (the Advanced Training Institute), Bill Gothard stifled hundreds of dreams in the name of godly living. As the first wave of apprenticeship students reached teenager-hood beginning in the 1990s, all of us naturally needed to explore and develop our own gifts. But as we sat through Gothard’s sessions in […]
The Shame of Beauty
Before I was born my parents started following the teaching of Bill Gothard and IBLP, and when I was 5, they joined ATI (Advanced Training Institute), the homeschool program that Gothard developed for the families of his Basic and Advanced Seminars. Gothard emphasized “principles” which simply meant there were many different rules that dictated specific activities in my […]
Belonging
In groups like the Advanced Training Institute, we have an identity and a community. We might not always like it, but it gives us a level of security. We are surrounded by people who think like us. We speak a different language from other people around us, using words like “courtship,” “motivational gift,” “rhema” and […]
Ignorance Is Not Bliss
Ever since our pastor announced that Bill Gothard stepped down, I feel like I have been in a state of shock. I have always been famous for saying, “Ignorance is not bliss.” Now I know just how right I was. I have to reconcile myself to the fact that I was living in ignorance, and […]
Sorry, Mom and Dad. We DO Have Regrets
Growing up in ATI, our parents often told us, “Because of the way we’re raising you, you won’t have any regrets.” Their regrets included broken relationships, sexual sins, temptations, “wasted” years and the like. All of which we would to avoid because of our sheltered, carefully controlled upbringing. We don’t know if our parents honestly […]
The Difference Between Horizontal and Vertical: Fifty Years of Yielding Rights and Not Taking Up Offenses
Rebecca Davis of Here’s the Joy has written about the IBLP Basic Seminar’s teachings on “taking up an offense” and “yielding rights,” the way these concepts have permeated both her own experience and broader American Evangelical culture, and the teachings’ practical effects in culture. Links to and excerpts from Davis’s posts follow below. Taking Up […]
Living by Principles
If you died with the Messiah to the elemental forces of this world, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world? Why do you submit to regulations: “Don’t handle, don’t taste, don’t touch”? All these regulations refer to what is destroyed by being used up; they are commands and doctrines of […]
1984 and ATI
My parents tell me the only reason we weren’t a pilot family in the Advanced Training Institute (ATI) is the fact that I, their first-born, was only three months old when they applied that first year. Like many others who have shared their stories, my parents are wonderful people who sincerely love Jesus and wanted […]
Twelve Characteristics of Fundamentalist Societies that Shelter Sexual Abuse
How could he have fooled so many people, so thoroughly? How did the abuse go on for so many years, unacknowledged? Whenever a leader at this level is ousted or steps down, questions like these come to mind. In the wake of revelations of sexual harassment and abuse pouring in from survivors of Bill Gothard’s […]
