Tag Archives: Master’s Commission International

Former MC from TX Tells Her Story

Written by a Former MC from TX

It was said that Pastor Nathan was accountable to the pastor of the church, but I quickly learned, Pastor Nathan was the end of the line.

There would be an hour of morning prayer, daily devotionals, cleaning, working, Bible reading, and a strict ban on dating. There was even a ban on “emotional dating” that I eventually understood to mean “don’t be good friends with members of the opposite sex.”

(Pastor Nathan even gave a sermon on how girls who had mostly/only male friends were emotionally damaged. Oddly, the reverse was not stressed.)

What more could a seventeen year old girl want?

Unfortunately, the idea of being really holy appealed to me at the time. Also, like most crazy religious organizations, this program showed the world one side while promoting an entirely different world once you were involved in the program.

See, the only preview I got of this program was when I saw them lead a youth service. They seemed (as the Evangelicals like to say) “on fire” for God. They did music videos (acting out Christian rock songs), they quoted scripture with trembling passion, and they lit the auditorium with an emotional blaze that got everyone pumped. I wanted to be inspiring like that.

What did I learn about those shows? (I call them “shows” now instead of “services”.) We practiced our asses off for those shows. We practiced the tears, we practiced the emotive quoting of scripture, and if it was not reaching the emotional highs Pastor Nathan needed we were lectured and ordered to practice more.

The really insidious part of it all? He did not call it practice.

I remember a girl named R. She was called an intern because she was in her second ten-month stint in the program. She quoted the same scripture at every show. She was, like most of the other kids in the program, a genuine believer. She joined the program to be closer to God, to learn to inspire others to come to God.

She would stand on the stage half-weeping/half-yelling her memorized scripture, trembling and making the crowds wish they could feel something as deeply as R.

They did not see how Pastor Nathan told her she was “doing things for her own glory” during one practice. He told her to go pray and come back when she was doing things for the right reasons. R, like the rest of us, was so eager to please God, all Pastor Nathan had to do was claim she was doing something displeasing to Him and she would break.

She went to a corner and prayed earnestly and then came back and delivered the more emotionally reactive quotation that Pastor Nathan had really wanted. Pastor Nathan said she had done better, but to “watch herself.”

Apparently, Satan was itching to infiltrate our group and one weak leak would bring us all down.

In fact, we were increasingly encouraged to cease looking at ourselves as individuals. We were a unit. The sin of one was the sin of all.

When the boys made the error of renting “Meet Joe Black” it created an uproar. Now, we girls, being kept well away from the boys’ quarters, had no idea that the boys had rented this movie. We never would have known.

We found out. Pastor Nathan marched it into devotion time. It was the only time during the day we saw Pastor Nathan unless he made special time to reprimand us or suddenly change our schedules. It was generally the time when we found out what we were doing to annoy him.

This devotion time was special. There was a TV in the room. It was paused on some part of a movie with Brad Pitt kissing some chick.

The boys had rented a movie with a sex scene in it. Did they watch the sex scene? No, they either fast-forwarded through it or stopped watching completely. Did that matter? Not a bit.

Since those boys had so defiled our group, we girls were unknowingly defiled too. So, Pastor Nathan said we would all have to watch the sex scene together. He hit play and stared at all of us like we were about to drop into Hell.

No one moved. No one looked at the screen. The fear of Nathan was a powerful thing because he had made himself God’s emissary. He was our own, personal Jesus Christ.

Then, from the back of the room, a boy named jumped up and ran to the TV. He turned it off while shaking and crying. Then he turned to us, addressing the girls with, “Don’t you know some of us are tormented by lust?!”

Looking back, I laugh quite heartily at that. It was an odd thing for an eighteen year-old boy to be screaming in an extremely tense situation. Furthermore, I wasn’t sure why he thought it was our job to prevent his lust.

Pastor Nathan was pleased. Well, sort of.

“It’s about time someone did that. I’m ashamed none of you did it sooner!” He said. Then he made the male staff members (you had to be a three or more year member of the program to be staff) apologize to the group. We all had to spend extra time in prayer that day.

Then there was the time another female student informed me should would be politely confronted Nathan about our scheduling—or lack thereof. As students, we never knew what was happening days or only hours down the road. Our schedule could change in an instant and we would not know until the last minute. This bothered many of us, not just T.

A couple of days after T informed me she would be speaking to Nathan about this, we had a particularly stern message from him in the morning devotional. It centered on the selfishness of worrying about temporal things like time management. Nathan said we needed to trust the leadership with our time. It sounded eerily pointed.

I scribbled a quick note to T during Nathan’s message, “Did you talk to him yesterday about our schedule?”

She looked at me and mouthed, “How did you know?” To this day I’m not sure if she was joking or not.

Many of Nathan’s messages seemed to be pointed at anyone who disagreed. I believe I might have inspired a couple on rebelliousness with my concerns. In the later one he went through a list of types of rebellion. He informed us no true Christian makes claims on “rights.” We give-up “rights” when we surrender to God. He also reiterated, as he did often, the need for complete trust in the leadership (though they were known to share all secrets with Nathan). He even said that because he and the leadership were appointed by God, we would not need to worry if the leadership “inadvertently” asked us to do something wrong. We would only be following Nathan’s instructions, so God would only hold Nathan accountable. Free-will was never mentioned.

That message was probably the closest Nathan ever came to being honest about his motives.

Former MC from Texas attended Master’s Commission of Austin under Nathan Davies. She loves the Longhorns and Tex-Mex.

To contact Former MC from TX or to drop her a line, you can email her at: FormerMCTX@gmail.com

This work by Lisa Kerr is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. © Lisa Kerr and My Cult Life, 2010. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Lisa Kerr and My Cult Life with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Master’s Commission

Here’s my story about Master’s Commission and the history of the program:

I entered Master’s Commission in 1998, after I graduated high school. From there, my story continues. Some of you aren’t familiar with Master’s Commission and want more information on the program. Some of you have attended a Master’s Commission program somewhere around the world and have had a similar experience that I’ve had. Others of you are still involved in the group, have graduated and may be Master’s Commission directors around the United States or beyond.

Essentially, Master’s Commission was fashioned after the Mormon (or Latter Day Saint–LDS) missionary program for young adults. I have a lot of LDS friends, whom I’ve known from childhood.

After high school, one of my good friends went on an LDS mission to Venezuela. I went to Master’s Commission, in an Assembly of God church. What she got out of the mission training program was high level language training, housing, food, and travel expenses covered. She also got two years paid tuition when she returned to the states to Brigham Young University. The University has a highly respected academic reputation and tuition for the 2010–2011 school year is $4,420 for LDS students ($8,840 for non-LDS students) (as quoted from the BYU website: http://saas.byu.edu/ebrochure/BYU_New_Freshmen_Guide/Financial_Aid/Worried_about_Paying_for_College_.php).

Why do I make this point? My LDS friend ended up giving up a year of her young adulthood to serve as a missionary in Venezuela. She was able to leave after her mission was finished, and she came back to the U.S. with some paid college tuition to an academically qualified school.

Master’s Commission never offered college credits, or classes while I attended. It wasn’t until this past summer (2010) that I spoke with Lloyd Zeigler and he said that students had the option of getting their Bachelor’s degree through Master’s Commissions partnership with a college.

I researched this more and found out that this college is not accredited with the U.S. Department of Education. More info is in this post here: http://www.mycultlife.com/?p=561

For most of the Master’s Commission graduates who attended from 2010 to previous years, we didn’t get any career training, college courses, or professional experience that is marketable. Most of us have worked really hard overcoming this set back. I entered college at the age of 25, which is incredibly stressful and difficult. Once you have the financial responsibilities of a 25 year old, you’re likely to need to work full-time to pay for your bills and have to struggle to maintain your grades. Something is going to suffer.

I consider Master’s Commission a set back in my life, because of that reason alone.

As the MCIN website states, Master’s Commission is a 9 month discipleship program. What is a discipleship program? From my experience in Master’s Commission Phoenix, which is now Master’s Commission USA in Dallas, TX; Master’s Commission of Austin ran by Nathan Davies and Tim Wilson; and Elevate 3D (formerly Master’s Commission Industries) ran now by Greg Thompson the discipleship program is a manipulative, controlling, destructive wanna-be school or pastor’s training program that takes away the decision making abilities of young adults who are fresh out of high school (and sometimes older). From my experience, the discipleship program is mentally, emotionally, and spiritually destructive. It is a way to take away the rights of young people, make them feel like they are elite Christians, and send them out into the world with a guilt trip, handicapped emotionally and spiritually, and many times–depressed with no sense of self-worth.

How’s that for keeping up with the main “heart” of what those two original founders wanted the program to be?

Here’s some information and history about Master’s Commission.

The story I was always told from Lloyd Zeigler, when I attended Phoenix Master’s Commission at Phoenix First Assembly of God under Pastor Tommy Barnett, was this, which can also be found on the MCIN website http://mcin.org/overview/history/:

“The idea for Master’s Commission was birthed while two men, Carmen Balsamo and Larry Kerychuck, were at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting Phoenix, Arizona. Larry was speaking a message entitled, “Who’s Your Hero?” and after that meeting they had a conversation with the brother of a Mormon missionary. This young man told Carmen and Larry that his brother was his hero because of his commitment to his beliefs. This young man had converted to the Mormon faith and forfeited a college scholarship to fulfill his 2 year Mormon mission in a rural part of America. The young man expressed how impressed he was with the commitment of the Mormon people to their religion and asked why Christians were not as committed.

As they walked away from that conversation, these two men desired to find a way for young, Christian men and women to give one-year of their life in service to God. They decided that they would first personally take that time frame and dedicate themselves to scripture memory, Biblical studies, outreach, witnessing and accountability to each other. They found, after that one-year period, their personal and Spiritual development was astounding and Carmen decided to offer an opportunity for others to be involved. Francis Graves, wife of church missions overseer Charlie Graves, was a great woman of prayer and came up with the name masters commission. The initial group was 12 members and met daily at the campus of the Phoenix First Assembly of God Church in 1984. Tragically, in the early stages of Master’s Commission, Carmen Balsamo died from a sudden heart attack. Phoenix First Senior Pastor Tommy Barnett then introduced Pastor Lloyd Zeigler as the man to develop the program; Master’s Commission has exploded throughout his tenure.

Pastor Lloyd Zeigler transformed this concept from a single 12 member meeting into the nation’s leading discipleship program with over 100 affiliated programs worldwide. He also developed the Master’s Commission International Network (MCIN) in 1995 whose purpose was to assist the development of other Master’s Commission programs nationally and internationally. Pastor Zeigler currently still oversees and directs his own Master’s Commission program, the MCIN, and is the Lead Pastor of Relevant Church in the North Dallas, Texas area.”