Bethesda's Larry Titus In His Own Words

The Bethesda Christian Center leader on why you should donate your retirement savings and give up that 'nest egg'

A photo of Larry Titus in the Seattle PI in June 1980, right after he left the church.

The Bethesda Christian Center story is probably the biggest scandal you’ve never heard of if you’re under 40 living in North Central Washington. And if you’re over 40 there’s a good chance you’d rather not talk about it. But it’s a pretty familiar story arc for charismatic “indie” Christian churches in the US going back more than 100 years. A compelling personality founds a church, takes advantage of his followers, it implodes and in a puff of smoke the leader is gone. The people he took advantage of are left to pick up the pieces and ask themselves what just happened.

We’ll get into the details of the Bethesda story in future posts, but first I want to establish how I came to learn so much about Bethesda and Larry Titus. During my journey to understand Grace City Church and the hold that the McPherson family have on their followers, ex-members Bethesda members have been reaching out to me.

Over the course of about five months I have accumulated boxes of old Bethesda magazines and newspaper clippings.

One box of newspaper clippings given to me by a very well organized Bethesda aficionado.

There are also tapes. Tapes of “pastor” Titus and his wife Devi preaching and teaching. Tapes of Titus’ mother Rachel preaching and teaching and tapes from Jeff Smith’s reporting on Bethesda right before its business manager James Eyre was arrested on more than a dozen counts of financial crimes and went on trial in Chelan County. The trial made national news and Titus and Devi left town not long after Eyre was acquitted.

The hold Titus had over his followers, and his ability to extract wealth from them, is something of a local legend. There are tales of houses and orchards being mortgaged and the money handed over to the church. Savings accounts were emptied. People were wiped out.

But what did Titus do and say to compel people to hand over so much cash?

In a tape of a sermon titled New Testament Financial Order, Titus gives you an idea. You can listen to an excerpt below.

“There’s a man came to me this week and he said ‘We just want to know what to do because we consider it our obligation to help pay all of the bills of this new building. What can we do?’ They had been praying about it. And he said, ‘Brother anything, anything that we can do we want to do it.’ He’d already been to his banker. He had emptied out his account,” Titus said.

That quote reminded me of another local religious leader who has raised a lot of money for his own building in recent years and exhorts his followers to “Pay my bills!” according to one ex-Grace City Church member.

Not everyone in the Wenatchee Valley was in thrall to Titus’ honeyed words however, and one reporter starting asking questions. His name was Jeff Smith, and he worked for KPQ, a news radio station in town at the time.

In a series titled “Take Two,” Smith interviewed Titus, some Bethesda followers as well as folks who had been burned by Titus and didn’t have anything nice to say about his impact on the Wenatchee Valley.

We’ll get into that in greater depth in the future, but I wanted to start with this segment because in it Smith speaks with Titus about his education and background and gets Titus to admit that he was not even an ordained minister at the time.

More than a few ex-Bethesda members have told me they feel like they’re experiencing “déjà vu” when they look at what Grace City Church is doing to the Wenatchee Valley.

But it’s more than just an eerie feeling of familiarity. There are plenty of ex-Bethesda members who have found their way to Grace City Church – from Titus to the McPhersons.

How do I know this? Well I don’t just have old tapes and newspaper clippings. I’ve got the Bethesda membership directory from 1979, the year before the wheels came off the bus.

I also have a source who can tell me who’s in GGC’s directory.