The Rev. David Larsen had asked his congregation for
announcements Sunday when a man stood and declared he was "the Prophet
Peter."
As had happened in other churches in the area recently, this stranger to the
Voluntown Baptist Church began by saying the Day of Judgment was upon the land.
"I'm off the pulpit in a minute," Larsen said. "I got in his
face. `You leave or you will be arrested.' I think my body language indicated
that there might be a third option, and then he left."
The self-proclaimed prophet and others who have interrupted church services and
confronted clergy over the past several weeks are followers of the late
"Brother" Julius Schacknow, whom they call "the Lord Julius
Christ."
Schacknow, who was described by former followers as a manipulative sexual
predator, has been dead for 6½ years. His followers, however, have been
reviving his name recently in mostly mainline churches, which they say have
failed to awaken their flocks to a world steeped in sin. They say they have an
obligation straight from the Scriptures to warn people about the doom hurrying
down to sinners from the hand of an angry God.
"The Lord Julius taught us to be prophets' voices," a middle-aged man
who identified himself as Brother Andrew said Thursday. "Most Christian
leaders are false shepherds."
The confrontations have come in the middle of services and during appointments
between clergy and Schacknow's followers. In almost all cases, the meetings
ended with Schacknow's disciples becoming increasingly agitated and hurling
biblical curses, clergy members said. The confrontations have been focused
recently in southeastern Connecticut, but word has spread among churches and
ministers have been told to be prepared.
Clergy members who have met them over the past several weeks say Schacknow's
followers twist Scripture to meet their beliefs.
"They decide what they are and then they read the Bible to prove what they
are," the Rev. Ken Carpenter of Union Baptist Church in Mystic said.
Andrew and another follower, who identified himself as Brother Peter, talked
about their faith and their mission in an hourlong interview Thursday. They
believe that Christ, in the form of Schacknow, returned because people had not
taken advantage, through Jesus, of a chance to stop sinning. Schacknow came to
evaluate 20th-century Christians and to pass sentence, Andrew said. The
sentence, he and Brother Peter said, is a scorching of the earth.
"The Christian world is an utter failure," Andrew said. "America
has turned into an immoral sewer."
In an interview with The Courant in 1987, Schacknow said, "I'm your
creator and I've come to punish the world for their sins, for their
ungodliness, their crookedness, breaking my commandments. ... You are
interviewing Jesus, who has returned like a thief in the night."
Andrew said he met Schacknow in the early 1970s, when the man with the piercing
eyes who was born a Jew in Brooklyn, N.Y., was attracting a following of
several hundred people in central Connecticut. Describing himself as a sinner
who was smoking marijuana and "whoring around," Andrew said he knew
instantly that Schacknow was more than a mere man and soon came to an unswerving
faith in his divinity.
Schacknow called himself "the sinful messiah," saying he had to sin
to know what it was like. Disillusioned former followers said Schacknow's sin
of choice was sex. They said he manipulated teenage girls and women into his
bed, suggesting that it was God's will. Men were expected to allow their wives
to sleep with Schacknow. One of his stepdaughters accused Schacknow in a civil
suit of sexually assaulting her for seven years, beginning when she was 11. The
suit was settled out of court, and Schacknow was never charged with a criminal
offense.
Schacknow parlayed his charisma into successful businesses operated by his most
loyal disciples. At his urging, dutiful followers worked long and hard for
little money and built multimillion-dollar real estate and construction
operations in the state's center.
All of that crumbled in the late 1980s, and since his death in 1996, Schacknow
and his followers have gone unnoticed by the media and cult awareness
organizations.
Andrew said he started his mission of warning Christian leaders about their
failures in May 2001, but word about the confrontations only started to spread
recently. Asked if either of them had interrupted church services, Peter said
he had, but he would not go into detail.
The Rev. Amy Johnson remembered being in the middle of a sermon on the Sunday
before Thanksgiving when a man stood up and said she was leading the United
Church of Stonington astray and that all of the people in the pews were going
to hell.
Stunned silence followed.
"At first, people thought it might be part of my sermon, because
occasionally we do creative things," Johnson said. But the man had a
"kind of violent" demeanor, Johnson said.
"He was a negative force," she said. "I said, `I'm going to have
to ask you to leave.'"
He left when Johnson called on the church deacons to come forward.
The Rev. Gregory Hamby of Quaker Hill Baptist Church in Waterford met with two
men about a month ago after one of them asked for five minutes of his time. The
men told him the world had rejected God's grace through Jesus "and the age
of wrath has begun," Hamby said. "God is going to kick rear end and
take names."
When one of the men asked to come back later for an hourlong visit, Hamby said
he told him that would not benefit either of them.
"He stood up and his face just became instantaneously furious," Hamby
said. "He said, `You will be cursed. God will strike you with a major
deformation and you will lean to the right.' I think they wanted me to be
scared, but I didn't feel scared."
Christian leaders say churches have different plans to deal with interruptions
of services, such as singing a hymn or calling on the deacons.
Carpenter, minister at Union Baptist in Mystic, said he had heard from
colleagues about confrontations with Schacknow's followers. So when he met with
two Wednesday, Carpenter said he was prepared. He had the two men sit on a low
couch, Carpenter said, while he and his associate minister were on higher
chairs.
As in other meetings between clergy members and Schacknow's followers,
Carpenter rejected their presentation and they became increasingly animated and
angry.
"I told them at the end - they were starting to curse us - if you guys are
going to curse us, you ought to know about this ancient ritual," Carpenter
said. He then made up a story about an ancient curse used by Celtic monks in
which a candle is broken, thrown at the feet of the non-believer and the words
"Candelae extinctorus!" are repeated three times.
"This is completely made up, right out of the atmosphere," Carpenter
said. "I was trying to say I don't believe in cursing. I don't believe God
works that way and he certainly doesn't give people that kind of power."