Growing up in South Africa in the fundamentalist Christan group KSB, the goal for young women was to be modest and “pure”. Now based in Tauranga, former member Judy Wnendt talks to Ryan Boswell about the group’s sexist doctrine and powerful control.
Judy Wnendt and her five siblings were born into a group known as KSB or KwaSizabantu Mission. Founded in 1970 by South African evangelical and revivalist preacher Erlo Stegen, the church was based on 540 hectares of rural land. It’s one of Africa’s largest missions and now has thousands of worshippers across several countries.
Stegen (who died last year) has claimed he could heal people from AIDs and cancer.
“For the start, I think it was fame and control,” says Wnendt of Stegen’s motivation. “And then later on it was the money as well” with “rich people from Europe” tithing to the church as branches started to pop up there. Some people, she says, lost everything.
In 2020 police began investigating claims of widespread misconduct within the church, as well as allegations it was operating like a cult. South Africa’s News24 alleged that church members were responsible for human rights abuses and crimes, such as rape and beatings. The leadership has repeatedly denied the allegations.
When Wnendt moved to New Zealand a year ago, she stumbled across Gloriavale in the news, which she said was “exactly” like the KSB. Gloriavale too has denied it’s a cult amid years of allegations, instead, its leaders say they live a “fundamentalist Christian life”.
Wnendt said people who live on the KSB mission are under the “absolute control” of the leadership, and would work without earning money. There were no books, no music, and no television.
Private thoughts disallowed
KSB members would attend weekly counselling sessions, where they would be expected to reveal every thought they had, says Wnendt.
All her decisions also had to be first run past her father or her counsellor. And friendships were limited to fellow members. “I wasn’t allowed to have contacts outside of the group, even though I went to a normal school, a public school.
“I was forced to have the bare minimum of contact, saying hello and bye.”
Films were shown to the group of people burning in hell or being beheaded “because of their beliefs”, and Wnendt was told that would happen if her too if she didn’t follow the rules. “They preach that every sin is dividing you from God, so you have to tell every sin to your counsellor. When you don’t tell a sin and you die like in an accident, you’re going to hell … and they decided what sin was, like wearing the wrong clothes, or talking to a boy.”
Women and girls were expected to be “pure”. Contact with men and boys was banned, and girls were taught that they were the reason that boys had sinful thoughts, so were told to cover up in neutral colours and wear no makeup. “Being invisible was the goal.”
At choir practice girls and boys would sing alongside each other but they weren’t allowed to talk to each other.
Wnendt’s father was tasked with deciding what she would do once she finished school. Being an insurance broker wasn’t her first choice, but it made sense for her father as he tried to keep his daughter under the control of the group. One of the leaders had an insurance office where Wnendt was supposedly sent to learn, but in reality it was about being “under the control of another man”. “I was someone who would always try to break the rules and he knew that so he tried to keep me under control as long as he could.”
Marriage partners selected by God
The selection of a future marriage partner was left to God. A young man would be encouraged to pray to God to ask who he should marry, “even though they didn’t know the girl … The counsellor would go to the girl and say, look, God told this young man, he had to marry you. Go and pray.
“Then they say it’s the decision of the girl … but when you’ve grown up like this, you had no choice because when they tell you the man prayed and God told the boy that he should marry you, then it’s clear.”
When a couple got engaged, a special Sunday church service would be held in front of the whole congregation, but even then the couple had to wait until marriage to have their first conversation. “This was one of the biggest reasons why I left … because I always said I couldn’t marry someone I don’t know.”
Expelled and shunned
Eventually Wnendt realised she wasn’t comfortable telling every thought she had to a counsellor. Confessing her sins was a relief but then sometimes she’d have “the wrong thought” and “I couldn’t stand it”.
Wnendt couldn’t keep her newfound feelings to herself. “I started to criticise [the KSB] a lot, talking with friends … and they told the leaders. I was expelled from the choir and shunned.”
Telling her father, at age 18, that she wanted to leave the KSB wasn’t as difficult as she expected as her father, without telling his family, had quietly quit the group two years before. Although he still believed in KSB’s ideology, “he questioned some of the thing happening on the mission,” says Wnendt. However, he wanted his family to stay in the group because it was easier to raise them under the KSB’s strict rules. He wanted them to control us,” explains Wnendt. “It made his job far easier.”
Despite this, Wnendt’s contact with her family stopped when she left the group. Now a mother of two she has attempted to develop a connection between her children and their grandparents, but it can be difficult as her parents still believe the fundamentalist doctrine of the KSB.
‘I didn’t know how to speak to men’
As a teenager, freshly outside of the group, Wnendt struggled to find her identity and went from group to group trying to find a sense of belonging and purpose. With her upbringing, she found it was easy to fit into groups but then, true to form, she would act out and leave.
“I felt like an alien … I didn’t know how to behave, how to even speak to men because I never was allowed … I had to learn everything.”
In her early twenties, she gave up on God and went partying, “drinking without any boundaries” believing that “I had to go through it like every other kid”.
But the nagging fear that the partying path might still lead to hell remained, and Bible College became her next step. Studying the ancient text helped Wnendt make some sense of her KSB experience. “It was helpful to realise a lot of the rules I learned, they were written for people during that time and probably made sense then, but not in our modern times, like the marriage rules.”
Three years ago, a grown woman with a family of her own, Wnendt finally built the confidence to seek the therapy she needed but had avoided out of a lingering fear that it wouldn’t be confidential. The experience of having everything she confessed to the KSB counsellor passed onto leadership had made her distrustful. But getting over that fear and seeking therapy was essential, she says. Because, despite having put many years between herself and the KSB, parts of Wnendt’s mind remained bound.
“I had to go to therapy to get over it,” she says. “To find a therapist to ask me the question: why am I still believing? And then for the first time I realised that, to be honest, I always believe, because of the fear of burning in hell or losing eternal life…
“After that moment I could let go. I won’t say that I’m not a believer anymore but … I don’t need these kinds of religious things anymore.”
Wnendt is now studying psychology, and she questions almost every so-called religious group that she comes into contact with.
“I would never say that church per se is cultish but the line is very very thin. Like when it impacts the freedom of people or when it starts to be unhealthy.”
Decult aims to open up more conversation and support those who escape coercive groups. (Source: 1News)
Wnendt understands that the issue is far from black and white. “Some people are happy in cults and won’t say they’re in a cult and won’t say they’re harmed. It’s a difficult topic.”
Helping to organise this weekend’s Decult Conference in Christchurch, Wnendt wants cult survivors to get the help she never had. And also for everybody to be able to see the “red flags” that might indicate that a group is cultish, abusive or coersive.
Mainly, she wants people to know that help is available and where they can find it. “Because I didn’t.”
The Decult Conference is on this weekend, Oct 19-20, Tūranga Central Library, Christchurch. It is also being streamed online.
