Broken Faith - Inside the Word of Faith Fellowship, One of America's Most Dangerous Cults - Mitch Weiss Page 0,135
and Word of Faith associate Bryson Smith sent an email to Sheriff Chris Francis containing a guest list for a fund-raiser for US Congressman Mark Meadows, R-North Carolina.
Sam and Jane Whaley were among the numerous Word of Faith Fellowship members on the list. So was their daughter, along with others, like Todd and Karel Reynolds and several members of the Caulder family.
Whaley and her followers supported Donald J. Trump in his 2016 presidential campaign, and some attended his inauguration. When the president held a rally in Charlotte in October 2018, numerous members of the church sat in the front row wearing volunteer passes, including Robin Webster and Leigh Valentine. In fact, Valentine has been one of Trump’s biggest supporters. Her Facebook page is filled with her at 2016 Trump campaign events. And right there, on her page, she has several photos of her with Trump, just the two of them. After his election, Valentine claimed she was a member of a little-known presidential group promoting religious outreach. It’s unclear whether she is. But in May 2019, for a black-tie event, she touted her close relationship with the president. Valentine was of the featured speakers at a Washington “gala” for Constitutional Millennials, a group that says it’s “working to restore our country back to its biblical foundations.” In her bio, she says she “currently serves as a leader under President Trump for faith leadership outreach.”
Now in her late seventies, Jane Whaley is still in charge, and shows no signs of slowing down. Over the years, the investigative team had tried to interview Whaley and other church leaders, including the Covingtons. They couldn’t visit the church because it’s on private property. But before the AP stories ran, the team either knocked on the front doors of key Word of Faith Fellowship leaders or visited them at their businesses. The reporters were told by church members to talk to Whaley, or had doors slammed in their faces. So the investigative team sent questions via emails to Josh Farmer, who acted as the church spokesman, or to Whaley’s Charlotte-based attorney, Noell Tin. Farmer and Tin denied any allegations put to them. As for Whaley, she tried to spin the AP series, saying no abuse has ever taken place inside the church.
“I would never hurt anyone—especially children,” she said.
But Whaley’s own words and deeds have exposed her dark side. It’s hard to say you don’t abuse congregants when you can hear Whaley screaming at members during blasting sessions that sound like outtakes from a horror movie. Audio tapes of her sermons from the mid-1990s reveal her philosophy of devils and deliverance.
The Word of Faith Fellowship might not be as big as the Church of Scientology. And Jane Whaley might not have the following of televangelists like Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, or other prosperity gospel preachers. But Jane Whaley—the woman who was once shunned by televangelists’ wives—has amassed millions.
And while some of her contemporaries, like Robert Tilton, have faded, Whaley keeps going.
What makes Jane Whaley tick? What makes her unique among her kind?
One aspect is her undying focus on the “unclean,” a code word for anything sexual. Outer appearances say Jane Whaley came from a normal background and lived an ordinary life. She went to college, competed on the swim team, taught high school math, married, and had a daughter. But something happened in her life that made her believe that sex is evil and demonic, and should be avoided whenever possible.
At some point in her life, she started believing that men were mostly to blame for the uncleanness in her world.
Her confidantes were women. They were the first “true believers.” When the hammer came down on the “unclean” and the Lower Building filled up, all the inmates were men and boys. Yes, women were accused of “giving in to the unclean,” but their punishment was not nearly so severe. Men were blasted and isolated. Women are, for the most part, humiliated and shamed. Their blastings appear much more mild.
Only Whaley knows what shapes her strict doctrine. Other practices are easier to see: Jane Whaley is materialistic. Those who knew her well say she bragged about her secret shopping sprees. Randy Fields, a former security team member, said once the offerings were counted up in her office after services, Jane “took the cash and headed out the door.” No one in the congregation ever saw the books. They were too afraid to ask.
In August 2014, Whaley and her daughter sued the US government, claiming members of the Transportation Security Administration lost or stole a leather satchel they were carrying on a flight from Charlotte to Israel. Whaley said the bag contained $74,000 worth of jewelry.
In a sworn deposition in a child custody case in April 2017, Whaley spoke of “love offerings”—gifts and cash people give to her out of the goodness of their hearts.
She said she has a steady stream of “love offerings” coming in from congregants in the United States as well as Brazil and Ghana.
But that wasn’t enough. Jane Whaley evidently hoped to build a spectacular new sanctuary, and pay for it with a boulder-sized emerald-encrusted stone that might or might not have been stolen. It’s a caper worthy of an international crime thriller.
It began in 2014, when a member of the Brazilian church, a gem dealer, asked his minister to watch the rock for him while he was in the hospital—it was worth millions, he said. When the man was released, his rock was gone. The preacher wouldn’t say where it was.
The gem dealer’s daughter, Rebeca Melo, was a teacher in the Word of Faith Fellowship school in Spindale. Her dad told her his stone was missing. She confronted Jane Whaley.
Jane told her she and all the Brazilian pastors knew where the rock was, but that it wasn’t worth much. The security team escorted Melo off church grounds.
What they didn’t know was that Melo had recorded the conversation. The investigative team drilled down and found more details and documents regarding the rock.
The rock was in the custody of FreightWorks, a trucking company owned by Josh Farmer and his father, Ray, as recently as December 2015. It was stored in a North Carolina warehouse.
Two companies that specialize in precious stones analyzed the rock or parts of it. One of them, EGL USA, noted that it was the largest emerald-encrusted stone of its kind the group had ever seen.
It’s unclear how the rock got to the United States. Once there, Mark Morris and other church leaders went to a gem show in Arizona to meet Dwayne Hall, a reality TV character known as the gem hunter on the show Prospectors.
Hall said Josh Farmer asked him to clean the gem and prepare it. Farmer said he was a preacher who wanted to use the proceeds to build a church and school in a poor village in Brazil. Farmer, Morris, and other church leaders prayed with Hall, and he decided to do the job.
In early 2016, Hall said that Farmer had come for the rock and told him it was worthless. The gem hunter was never paid. He said he worked more than a year on the rock because he thought it was for a charitable cause—he had no idea that Farmer was not a preacher. And after it left his house, that’s where the trail goes cold. No one—except the church—knows what happened to the emerald-studded stone.
The reporters discovered that the US Department of Homeland Security is looking into the alleged theft on behalf of the Brazilian government. Brazil is one of the most resource-rich nations in the world, and a gem like this is considered national patrimony.
Meanwhile, Josh Farmer continues to promote his trucking company. In February 2017, he announced the “exciting news” in a press release that FreightWorks had been certified under the International Cyanide Management Code to transport sodium cyanide, a deadly poisonous chemical used in the mining industry.
Some former members find that troubling. If authorities take action to shut down the church, will they arrest more members? And if they do, will it be peaceful? No one wants another Jonestown—where over nine hundred cult members drank a cyanide-laced drink when faced with an end to their church.
One thing is clear: Jane Whaley cannot hide any longer. She has used the right of religious freedom, a cornerstone of American democracy, to shroud her activities long enough.
John David Cooper started this story with his telephone call. He knows he made the right decision. “The end is near for Jane Whaley,” he said.
Like the others, he doesn’t know how it will end. It has gone on for so long that many have lost hope. But John Cooper is keeping the faith, believing that good people will do the right thing, and justice will come to Rutherford County, North Carolina.