Inside the House of Prayer

On a humid April night at the House of Prayer church, about 90 members raise the roof in praise of their pastor, from whom so many blessings flow.
(...)

The testimonials offer familiar comfort to a congregation that, along with its pastor, is under siege. It is from the House of Prayer that the state took 41 children into protective custody last month after allegations of systematic whippings overseen by the pastor. The children included two boys who showed up at school with welts and bruises; the other 39, officials say, were at risk of similar abuse.

Police filed criminal charges against Allen, 68, and 10 church members. A week later in court, the parents of the 41 children refused to renounce their pastor's teachings on discipline. They left their children in foster care rather than accept a deal that would have reunited their families. The children, ages 2 to 17, could remain in state custody a year or more.

The case has sparked debate across the nation over when corporal punishment becomes child abuse, over the rights of parents to discipline their children, over the role of a church in a family's life.

To Allen, there is no debate: God has a purpose in allowing the House of Prayer's children to linger in foster care --- and he is at its center. To church members from this poor neighborhood, the episode is one more persecution they will endure with God's --- and Allen's --- help.

Their unquestioning devotion to their pastor is all that is certain about the House of Prayer. Everything else is shades of gray --- an array of ambiguities and contradictions that obscure the meaning of what has happened at the little church that, until a month ago, was anonymous except for a tiny roadside sign.
(...)

Allen encourages church members to live free of sin. But former members claim he frequently intersperses his sermons with inappropriate sexual comments, and the pastor confesses to an affair years ago with an 18-year-old woman from the church. He also acknowledges an early marriage that he had kept quiet, a marriage that produced two children whom he long ago left behind.

Church members say their pastor has given them homes, cars, money --- material goods that complement his spiritual sustenance.

But what they have given Allen in exchange is control.

"You can't do anything in that church I don't agree with," Allen says, "because I'm the pastor."

As the pastor, Allen authorizes courtships between church members and approves marriages for girls from the congregation as young as 14. Georgia law forbids marriages at ages younger than 16, so Allen takes young brides-to-be to Alabama, where they can legally wed.

The pastor collects weekly dues of $25 from every church family, many of whom rent houses or apartments that he owns.

He promotes isolationism among church members, encouraging them to live within walking distance of one another and discouraging them from voting.

He advises congregants to avoid contact with family members outside the church who are "trying to poison their minds against the church."

And he makes it clear that the parents whose children were seized would be in conflict with the church if they reunited their families by promising a judge they would not follow the church's disciplinary practices.

"They'd be compromising their faith," Allen says. "Either you love the Lord thy God with all your heart and soul . . . or you don't. God doesn't accept serving two masters."

Such talk prompted Judge Sanford Jones of Fulton County Juvenile Court to label the church a "cult."

Some former members agree.

"They look to this man just like he's God," says Ernest Madden, a church member for 29 years who left after a dispute with Allen. "Everything they do, they have to wait to see what he's going to say about it. It's amazing he can keep that many people's minds in unity with him. But you can see it: What mother would leave their own baby?"

The accusation infuriates Allen.

"If we are a cult, why is that door open to everyone, both black and white?" Allen shouts from the House of Prayer's makeshift pulpit.

"If we are a cult, where are our guns?"

He thrusts his worn black Bible heavenward and waves it fiercely.

"This," he says, "is the only weapon I need!"
(...)

Allen, who himself often sports a fedora, has been preaching at the House of Prayer since the days when men routinely wore hats to church --- the mid-1960s, when Allen and a few founding church members wandered through northwest Atlanta housing projects recruiting members.

Then, as now, the theology was simple: Allen's self-taught interpretation of the King James Version of the Bible. He preaches against abortion and homosexuality, against birth control and out-of-wedlock sex. He thinks the end of the world is near --- but not too near.
(...)

The House of Prayer literally began in the homes of church members.
(...)

In the early days of the church, says former member Madden, the message was the reward of hard work.

"He would preach that you need to get out of the projects," says Madden, a retired mailman who describes himself as Allen's second-in-command during those years. "He would say, 'Young man, you need to go to work, be self-sufficient.' . . . I liked it because he preached prosperity --- bringing those up who are on a lower level."

But over time, Madden says, the focus changed. Allen wanted more control, he says, and got it by keeping church members financially dependent on his generosity. Many of them stayed in low-paying jobs, or didn't work at all, and became increasingly loyal to Allen as he helped pay their bills, Madden says.

"They would have to come to the church treasury to get his approval," Madden says. "If they were on his left side, it was a thumbs down. If they were on his right side, his good side, it was thumbs up."
(...)

What Allen wants, Madden says, is for the congregation to live in an enclave near the church, away from outside influences.

Madden finally left the House of Prayer about a year and a half ago. The last straw, he says, came when Allen meddled in the marriage of Madden's daughter. The pastor gave her a gift of $20 and told her not to tell her husband, Madden says. She told him anyway. When the husband challenged the pastor over it, Madden says, Allen ruled him "out of order" and instructed several church members to eject him.

"I got up out of my seat and went to the back door," Madden recalls. "I told my children, 'Come on, let's go.' I told Pastor Allen I was getting my children out."

"He said, 'I'm the pastor here.'

"I said, 'Yes, sir, but you're not Jesus.' "

He says he approached Allen, offering to shake hands in farewell.

"Pastor Allen said, 'Throw him out.' "

"I haven't been back since," Madden says, "and I don't intend to go back."

Allen disputes some of Madden's account, saying he banished Madden because he disrupted services.

He acknowledges, though, that he wants to limit outside influences on members of his congregation --- even from members of their own families who might cause them to stray.

"If I'm out trying to plant corn," he says, "I can't have a bunch of crows eating up the corn while I'm trying to plant it."

He also discourages church members from exercising their right to vote. Until the 1960s, when civil rights legislation guaranteed voting rights for black citizens, "who wanted your vote?" says Allen, who has never registered to vote. "Could you vote? To me, hasn't anything changed.
(...)

About one-third of the congregation's 22 families live in property that Allen owns or controls. He says their rent is low --- about $400 a month --- and they don't have to pay when they don't have the money.
(...)

Carla Wilson drapes a shawl over her head as she kneels at the House of Prayer's folding chair altar. Her four children, ages 2 to 7, are among the 41 taken into protective custody.
(...)

But the Wilsons say they haven't considered parting ways with the House of Prayer to regain custody of their children.

''I'm not going to distance myself from where the Lord done blessed me at,'' says David, who has been charged with cruelty to children, a felony, for whipping his nephew.
''Right,'' Carla says.
''If I distance myself from the church,'' David says, ''I'm distancing myself from the Lord.''
(...)

Tammy Clark doesn't see Allen as an instrument of God, but as a man obsessed with sex.

"He always talks down to women," she says. "He always wants to call somebody a whore."

Clark left the House of Prayer when she was in her mid teens, and, almost 20 years later, she still resents the pastor. Clark, 35, a grocery cashier, made a special trip to Fulton County Juvenile Court in late March, eager to testify about Allen during a hearing to determine whether children from the church were at risk of abuse. The hearing ended before she had a chance to speak.

"Most of the time he preached, it was all about sex," Clark says at her Atlanta apartment. "He would start out reading verses out of the Bible, and before you know it you're into like a sex class, he's talking about sex."

And the pastor's vocabulary was "filthy," Clark says.

Allen routinely urged women to denigrate themselves in front of the congregation by graphically recounting sexual acts they had engaged in before coming into Allen's fold, Clark says. "It was just crazy."

Another former member, Tanyaneeka Barnett --- who is Carla Wilson's sister --- recalls similarly degrading scenes.

"He would make us call ourselves 'whores,' 'sluts,' all kinds of names: 'dumb,' 'stupid,' " she says. "That's his way, I guess, of keeping us in there, having us thinking that there's no way out, we had no one else to depend on, we had no one else to run to."

Barnett, 25, is an administrative assistant at a real estate company and the most vilified former member of the House of Prayer. Her own parents, church members Jimmy and Jacqulyn Barnett, label their eldest daughter a troublemaker, a liar and sexually promiscuous.

She has incurred this wrath because in March she gave crucial testimony before a judge decided to keep the 41 children in state custody. The children include 10 of her siblings.

She said, under oath, that Allen forced her to marry at age 14. That when girls were whipped, congregation members would "pull up their skirts or take off their skirts or dresses." That Allen ordered her to lift her skirt in front of the church and to show her buttocks. That Allen touched her thigh during a service and remarked on her breasts. That Allen regularly spoke about genitalia during church services "in front of the children."

Lies, Allen and House of Prayer members retort. All lies.
(...)

Three weeks after nine parents from the House of Prayer walked out of a courtroom without their children, unwilling to compromise to reunite their families, Allen ponders a question.

If, as he has been telling his congregation, God had a reason to allow their children to be taken, what is it?

Simple, he says.

It's him.

"God will suffer the lesser in order to try to help the masses," Allen says. "I never would have gotten on national television if it wasn't for the publicity of our children."

This entire episode, the heart-wrenching scenes of police and social workers dragging children from their homes, the emotional courtroom standoff that left the children in foster care, the prayers and the protests --- all of it, he says, happened to give him a national audience for criticizing abortion.

"I got a chance to speak out against what they call abortion," he tells his congregation. "I call it murder. I got a chance to speak out against two men marrying each other and them legalizing it. I got a chance to speak out against taking prayer out of the schools. News coverage and television coverage offer opportunities this little church never would have gotten."
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Despite losing custody of 41 children, the members of a small Atlanta church reamin devoted to the man who binds them together.