Seeking to Understand Why Organizations like Bethesda and Grace City Find Fertile Soil In The…
My journey to understand more about Grace City Church in Wenatchee, Washington has led to many conversations with longtime Wenatchee Valley…
My journey to understand more about Grace City Church in Wenatchee, Washington has led to many conversations with longtime Wenatchee Valley residents. What’s interesting is that almost every time I ask about Grace City, folks who were here back in the 70s, 80s and 90s bring up Bethesda Christian Center.
After my first piece on Grace City and the struggle for temporal power in our bucolic town, I had a few former members of Bethesda reach out to me. So I sat down with one for an interview this week. His name is Mike Magnotti and he joined the organization in 1973, the year he moved to the valley. Right after we sat down he asked why I’m so interested in Bethesda, so I told him.
“I want to understand why the Wenatchee Valley is such fertile soil for organizations like Bethesda and GCC,” I said.
See, I grew up in a strong faith tradition in the Yakima Valley where there are a lot of Latino Catholics and mainline protestants. There’s even a Latin Pentecostal congregation and an old Shaker church on the Yakima Reservation, but indie religious organizations like Bethesda and GCC aren’t popular in the Yakima Valley. If they do exist, their leaders are certainly not driving around in matching gold Cadillacs, urging their followers to sell their homes and give the money to the church or trying to influence local politics and cozy up to elected officials.
So I started the interview by asking him why he joined Bethesda.
“There was a lot of benefits to it. I mean it kept me out of trouble. I met my wife there–but it was cultish,” Magnotti said. “They wanted to build an empire. They had a bookstore and a gas station. They had a school. The old Wells Fargo bank was a school for a while. Some of it was good, some of it wasn’t. It ended up imploding because of money issues.”
Magnotti said Bethesda leadership was really into the concept of the prosperity gospel, which teaches that if you give your money to God (in reality his representatives on earth) you will be blessed with great wealth.
You can read all about the fraud that brought Bethesda down in “The God Biz” by James Haught online, but here’s one passage that briefly breaks down what happened:
“Bethesda Christian Center at Wenatchee, Wash. — a gospel church, radio station, school, magazine publishing house, college, and gasoline station — was jolted in January 1980, when more than $1 million was reported missing and administrator James Eyre was jailed on embezzlement charges. About $340,000 that members lent to the church has vanished, authorities said. So has nearly $1 million that members put into deals such as diamond investments.”
Magnotti and others I have spoken to say that Eyre had an active role in the caper, but that Titus and the other leaders were attempting to scapegoat Eyre and escape repercussions by shifting all the blame on him. The leadership disbanded after that. The main leader, Larry Titus, first went to Ohio and ended up in Texas. He’s still running a religious organization called Kingdom Global Ministries.
Pulling up stakes and moving to another community to do it all over again. It’s a pattern you see repeated over and over with charismatic indie sect leaders like Titus and Mark Driscoll, who moved to Scottsdale, Arizona and set up Trinity Church after Mars Hill imploded in Seattle. According to this article, Driscoll’s pattern of abusive leadership has continued there.
Finding local news clips from Bethesda’s “implosion” as Magnotti described it has been surprisingly difficult. And that’s why sitting down with those were personally involved is so important to understanding Bethesda and the context and history of fringe religious groups in the Wenatchee Valley. Each one is a little different and emphasize different things. For Bethesda things like money and personal image seemed to be the main focus.
“He (Titus) has this idea that having wealth is somehow an indication of your relationship with God. I mean if he saw my truck — see that’s the thing, if your truck’s not clean it’s evidence that your relationship with God is poor,” he said.
The mindset was such that if you weren’t dressed correctly and if your vehicle wasn’t clean enough that was a negative reflection on your relationship with the almighty creator of the universe.
The obsession with personal image aside, it’s the money stuff that really piqued my interested when locals started telling me about the cars, the diamond importing scheme and members mortgaging their homes and giving the money to Titus and church leaders.
“We were giving at least 10 percent. We were tithing, but we were always taught, and we still do now. I mean I tithe to my church and I give more than that, he said. I don’t regret any of the money that I gave to Bethesda because I knew my heart was right about it, if that makes sense. I could be irritated about how the people used it, but that doesn’t do me any good, you know?”
He went on to say he and his wife Rosie still tithe to the church they currently attend, and much of that money goes to mission work, but with Bethesda it was different. Magnotti said that he wasn’t high up enough in the organization to know where the money was going but that it was all about internally building the church, primarily the compound near Monitor, about 10 minutes from Wenatchee on Highway 2.
It was also about improving the lifestyles of church leaders like Larry Titus.
“The money really got out of control. I mean we went to church three times a week and we were hit up for money every service. Members of the choir were hit up after choir practice because we had to pay for the bus that drove us around,” he said. “People had nice clothes, drove nice cars, a lot of the people in leadership. I don’t think they all did. But yeah, what they did the money I don’t really know.”
Magnotti related an instance of being verbally dressed down by a pastor because he was “like his father,” which he described as a “rebuke.” He said he considered leaving the organization on multiple occasions.
“There were times I was so irritated and frustrated I just wanted to quit. I mean I’m not making excuses. I was young, impressionable. I mean this was my home, my family, this was my whole support system,” he said.
He said when he and his wife moved to Seattle and left the church they felt like they were let out of a prison.
When I asked him about the mortgage scheme, he confirmed it for me firsthand.
“They encouraged everyone to sell their house and give the money to the church,” he said. “Some people did.”
When I asked him where those people would live after they sold their homes he said, “Well, you find a place to rent.”
Magnotti said he didn’t know how many people followed this direction from Titus and church leaders, but he knows that some did. He also said that he believes Titus to be a merciful man. We ended our conversation talking about what makes organizations like Bethesda and Grace City similar, and how they’re different. I told him what I am really interested in is understanding how the power and leadership structures in these fringe, indie religious organizations lend themselves to all manners of abuse, whether it’s physical, emotional, financial or something else.
Magnotti summed it up pretty well:
“You’re going to have a more successful church if you tell people what to do. If you set down rules. If you somehow establish that idea that you’re the right ones.”
I’ll get into the the money angle of the Grace City story more in the future. One former member reported that GCC founding pastor Josh McPherson would frequently jokingly exhort members to “Pay my bills!” and told people to pay the church before covering their own household bills. That’s for another time though. For now you can read more about Bethesda and another man’s experience with that organization here.
And if you’d like to watch a praise and worship service from Bethesda Christian Center recorded in 1978 you can do that here. It’s a time capsule snapshot of the culture that organization was cultivating at the time. Do make sure to watch the Bethesda Bible College commercial at about the 20 minute mark.
If you are a former member of Bethesda, Grace City or any other indie religious organization in the Wenatchee Valley and want to tell me your story, please reach out via a direct message on Twitter.