Perry Noble Lawsuit Details an Interview With Dr James Duncan

Fighting for the Faith

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Perry Noble is a guy who, it doesn't matter what he says, and boy, he sure does say some pretty interesting things.

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As long as he says it with a flair, he claims that by doing so, he's making the church larger.

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But the problem is that Perry Noble has a chronic and habitual problem. And that is that, well, he acts like a mafiadon.

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That's the best way I can put it. And back in 2009, on my program,

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Fighting for the Faith, I had Dr. James Duncan, who is a communications professor at Anderson University in Anderson, South Carolina.

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And he had literally, from the summer on through the fall, had experienced one of the most harrowing and horrific series of events that I've ever heard somebody suffering at the hands of a so -called

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Christian pastor. Now, I've heard stories like this from people who've suffered these types of things from cult leaders, but real bonafide

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Orthodox Christian pastors, it was new to me. So, and see, that's the thing.

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It makes me wonder, is Perry Noble even that? But earlier today,

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I had the opportunity to interview Dr. James Duncan regarding what has happened and transpired in the last few years, because he's recently begun blogging again, now that his lawsuit against Perry Noble and several of the pastors at New Spring has been settled out of court.

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There's certain things he can discuss and certain things he cannot discuss. And so I invited him on the program to talk about where we're at today.

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And like I told you at the top of this hour, this segment, I'm going to be taking the 2009 interview with Dr.

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Duncan and putting it at the top of the podcast for those of you who subscribe via iTunes, so that you can go back and hear it.

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Because in the past three years, we have so many more new listeners now that many of you may not be familiar with this story, and it's actually quite awful, and you need to hear it.

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And so, you know, the two programs really need to work together. Now, what I'm going to probably do is during the interview today that I recorded with Dr.

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Duncan, I'm going to interrupt the playback of that interview and insert into it a segment from a sermon preached in 2009 by Perry Noble that's referenced by Dr.

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Duncan, so you can hear what he said and what it is that he's referencing. So without any further ado, here is my interview recorded earlier today with Dr.

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James Duncan. Alright, on the line I have Dr. James Duncan. He teaches communications at Anderson University in Anderson, South Carolina, and we had him on Fighting for the

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Faith back in December of 2009 where he told us of a very harrowing story that he went through as a result of being, well, so audacious as to criticize publicly

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Perry Noble. Dr. Duncan, thanks for coming back on Fighting for the Faith. Good to talk to you again,

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Chris. Okay, so it's been a long time since we've had you on Fighting for the Faith, and real quick, can you summarize what initially happened to you, where we left off, and what has happened since then?

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Because as I understand the is that you ended up taking Perry Noble, New Spring Church, and a couple of the leaders from New Spring to court, or you filed a suit against them on particular charges, and there has now been a monetary settlement that they've paid to you as a result of this particular suit.

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So I want to bring everybody up to speed on this story and find out what has happened here.

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Sure, that's all basically correct. The story started, and the story's been told a long time ago, but as you say, some of your listeners won't know this, but in early 2009,

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I started blogging about New Spring Church and Perry and Stephen Furtick and another pastor, mainly because New Spring's right on our doorstep here with their neighbors, and over a couple of months,

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I had attracted their attention, and in June of 2009,

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I had posted something about Gary Lamb, who was a friend of Perry's who had an affair and had to leave the ministry, and there were characteristics of that post that got some of the staff members inside New Spring and some of their volunteers very upset that I was talking about Perry's friend the way

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I was, and consequently, the staff member, he turned out to be a security guard at the church, and a couple of volunteers that he knew started a campaign directed against me and my family, primarily consisting of a

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Twitter account that was run in my name, but run anonymously. In other words,

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I didn't know who it was, but it had all kinds of content about my wife's sexual activities, talked about homosexual affairs and activities that I was engaged in, described in quite chilling detail my son's play equipment in our backyard, and any,

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I think, objective reader would find a lot of that material very threatening. At the time that it started,

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I was in New Zealand visiting my father who was ill with cancer at the time, so I was kind of limited in what

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I could do, and there were other things going on. For example, my wife was fielding phone calls, harassing phone calls at two and three o 'clock in the morning from these guys, and we were getting flooded with phone calls from insurance companies, from solicitations that had been answered in our name, some other things that were going on.

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They wrote a resignation letter that was actually sent to the provost at my school, and he bought it convincing enough that I was actually temporarily resigned from my job.

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I got it back. They sent me gay pornographic email, they subscribed me to a homosexual magazine, all things that typically you would expect churches wouldn't do.

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But I got back from New Zealand. This is not behavior that sounds anything like a pastor or people on staff at a church would be doing.

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This sounds more like the intimidation tactics used by groups like the Mafia. Well, you would think so, except that from within a couple of days of it starting,

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I could see that it was actually being monitored by a pastor and by at least one other staff member inside the church, and this pastor, his name is

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Jason Moorhead, was following this abusive Twitter account. That means that all of these tweets are going into his

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Twitter feed. You've got some people who subscribe to thousands, and anybody they meet on Twitter they subscribe to.

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But this guy, and he subscribed to about 70 people, including this abusive one.

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So it's not as if he could have just ignored it. And the question is, why did he subscribe to it in the first place?

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The public relations director also subscribed to it too. So I knew within about a week that New Spring staff were monitoring it and weren't doing anything about it.

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And I also needed to make sure that, because it was quite personal, this person wanted to meet me, wanted to come to my office and was physically threatening,

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I needed to make sure that they had no idea I was out of the country, lest my wife be exposed, at least they think

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I'm there to defend the home. So when I got back, this was in late

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June, early July, I emailed the church. Now, I'd made a contact with a youth pastor,

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Brad Cooper, several months earlier, because most emails that go to Perry just get ignored. So I emailed

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Cooper, and I said, look, somebody at your church is criminally harassing me and my family.

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And the point of it was, I need to talk to Perry, because Perry's the only one

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I can trust to do something about it. Now, I was assuming that Perry didn't know anything about it.

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I'm not sure that in the end turns out to be a reasonable assumption, but at least

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I was assuming he would probably have no idea, because I went through his lieutenants, it was his lieutenants that I knew, at least one of them knew about it.

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So they refused to meet me. And in the end, several weeks later,

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I ended up going to the Anderson County Sheriff's, and they had a detective who spent several weeks, and we ended up discovering by,

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I think, August, August and September, that it was a young man named

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Josh Maxwell, who was a full -time security guard at the church. He no longer works at New Spring.

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But even after that, there was no apology from New Spring.

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And I had, after that, tried to meet them, contact them to make sure that they understood what had happened, because their public announcement of it was very casual and somewhat cavalier.

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And, you know, does Perry even know what really happened, and what his senior lieutenants were engaged in, what they were monitoring?

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So I was asking, through the end of 2009, to meet with Perry. It ended up, they sent me a, they flew up an attorney from Texas.

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Now, this is a guy whose whole job is big -name pastors, like T .D.

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Jakes, and Perry, and other people like that. This is, I guess he goes around putting out fires.

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So this was a fire that they wanted to put out. So I'm asking to meet the pastor to talk about something bad that happened in his church, and they send me up an expensive attorney.

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I'm sure it's considerable expense, because you're paying hourly for all of the time he spends on the plane. So I knew at that point, you know, the game had changed, and we had suffered fairly severe damages to, especially my wife's emotional health.

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It felt very dangerous for her to live around here. There was one other aspect of the story that I haven't mentioned that I did mention in our interview, and that was we had an adoption in July, that a young lady had selected us to adopt her baby.

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The baby was about to be born. We turned up at the hospital. We had the car seat in the car.

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We had the baby clothes, the diapers, everything ready to go. And the young lady asked, we actually met her in the delivery room.

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She asked for my wife to come back and talk to her privately, and she confessed, or, you know, told my wife, I feel like they're putting pressure on me.

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They want me to pick another family. Now, we didn't want to manipulate her, so we said, you know, whatever you decide we'll go with.

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But it turned out, we found out about a month later, it was a senior pastor, not the senior pastor, but one of the executive pastors at New Spring Church adopted this baby.

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And then when I look back at some of the tweets that Maxwell was sending out, it was quite apparent that they actually knew about this.

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So leaders in New Spring and this harasser knew that my adoption was going to fail well before I did.

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So, you know, that kind of raises some questions in our mind as well. So all of those, all of that kind of led to us at the end of 2009, when

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I, after I told my story, we found an attorney who, at that point, we decided since there's no personal accountability, there's no apology, there's even no recognition by New Spring that they did anything, we took, and this is what

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God institutes civil government for, is to be able to correct wrongdoing and recompense people who have been wrong.

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So we took that route, and for the last three years, we've been engaged in testimony and discovery, and, you know, we're finding out about them, they're finding out about us, and we were en route to trial, obviously.

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We sued them for a number of complaints, including libel and invasion of privacy,

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Maxwell for assault. But rather than going to trial, we, probably about three months ago, we met, all our attorneys met together, and we settled.

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Now, the amount of the settlement is confidential. Now, for, we,

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I've seen people write about the settlement saying that we won, and I'm sure that probably grieves them, because, you know, for all anybody knows, it might have been a dollar, and we walked away for a dollar, it also might have been a billion dollars.

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So, you know, nobody knows, you know, that's the idea. So they can claim victory, they're going to say, well, we just settled it to make them go away.

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And we might also say we settled it because we agreed on a number that was worth it to both sides.

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The thing is, you don't settle a case unless both sides agree that it's worth it for them to do that, that they feared they might have lost more at a trial, you know, we feared we might have been awarded less at a trial.

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So that's what the idea is for. It's a scriptural concept. Settle with your opponent before you go to court, and things could turn out really much worse for you.

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So it could have been worse for them, could have been worse for us. You know, that's what we, so we were satisfied with the amount they apparently were satisfied with the amount.

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So that's where we are. Okay, now, you had mentioned criminal harassment, what exactly were, you know, in your in your suit against, you know,

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Perry and New Spring and Maxwell and these guys, what exactly were the charges that you had brought against them?

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They, they were, we basically described in the lawsuit, we described what I've just summarized for you that primarily it was the

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Twitter account. There was the homosexual pornographic email, the resignation letter.

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Our complaint against, I mean, a complaint against the church was based on the argument that they were aware of it.

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I've seen some comments on my blog saying, well, you haven't proved that Perry was responsible for Well, there are a number of ways that you are responsible for something.

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If I see a dog mauling a child in my backyard, and I sit in my living room and watch it,

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I'm responsible for the injuries that that child received. I didn't go and beat the child up. But I would be responsible for the injuries that I could have prevented.

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And so we're not saying that, that Perry directed Maxwell to do what he did.

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We're not saying even that Perry knew who Maxwell was, when he was doing it. I don't think he did.

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What we're saying is that Perry knew enough that he could have stopped it. And negligence was one of our complaints as well.

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That they knew enough that they, they could have taken very minor steps to stop it.

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And so our claim that Perry was responsible is based on the argument that he was aware of it and could have stopped it.

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Now, I can't actually tell you what Perry said in, you know, what we discovered and what he said in his testimonies.

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All I can say is, we argue that he knew. Whether or not he did know what he read, only he can actually tell you as a fact.

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But I have a post I put up a few days ago that makes at least the argument that we can see the tweets that Perry received.

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And we know that he read them, because you see him responding. He asks for people to message him, we see him responding to those messages.

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And so what does he do? What's he doing when these tweets are coming in? Because he knew who I was. If he sees a tweet from James Duncan, and that was the label of it, he knows me.

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And there's actually an interesting timeline where on the weekend of July the 12th, now he'd been away at his, their church's youth trip.

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And so he's come back and he's got this, Cooper has passed on my request to meet with him.

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So this weekend, he's having to deal with, does he meet me or not? And he preaches a really interesting sermon that Sunday, justifying why he's not going to meet critics.

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And while he's, I know what he's talking about, and he knows what he's talking about. He talks and throws into the sermon a fantasy about wanting people he doesn't like dead.

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Somebody's irritating on the plane, so he prays for God to kill him. There's another story he tells about somebody, he meets somebody in Sam's who criticizes him, and he wants to beat him up in front of his daughter.

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Well, I knew what he's talking about. And interestingly, Maxwell, whose full -time staff and old staff have to go to all of the services, actually tweets

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Perry in the sermon. So Perry would get back and he would see these messages coming back to him that are actually responding to points that he's making in his sermon.

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This guy is just completely kind of losing it. All right, going to pause the interview right here.

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I have found the sermon that Dr. Duncan references in the interview that I recorded earlier with him today.

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And I want you to listen in and hear some of the things that Perry Noble said that Dr.

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Duncan was referencing, which, by the way, was when all of this was happening to him.

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Here's Perry Noble from his sermon entitled, In Rhythm, Let's Get Real.

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Now, I wasn't going to include this last part, but I'm going to include it because it's in the text and I feel like I've got to say it. And I usually teach through this about once a year.

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And so this will be a lot of fun and cause some errors to get shot, which I welcome with open arms.

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Number three, ignore the pigs and dogs. Ignore the pigs and dogs.

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And it's hard to ignore things sometimes, isn't it? I mean, it's just annoying. It's always there.

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When I went to Kenya back in February, we flew from Nairobi to Amsterdam and we got on the plane to Amsterdam.

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We flew from Amsterdam to Detroit. On the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, there was a man that sat right next to me in the plane and he sat down.

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And as soon as he sat down within five minutes, he was sleeping. And about two minutes after that, he was snoring.

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And I'm not talking about a little, I mean, I'm talking like so much that the stewardess came by and looked at me and went,

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I've never seen anything like that. And so literally we took off and it's like, and I want some of those Bose headphones things.

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I don't have them right now, but I'm sitting there. I'm trying to pay attention. I'm watching a movie and I was like, God kill him.

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You know, I started praying. Okay. That's, that's number one. Okay.

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Again, this is what Perry Noble from time to time has a tendency to do.

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He did it a couple of times in the sermon. Keep this in mind. I'm going to play a bonus soundbite from this sermon.

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So this is under the section of ignore the pigs and dogs. And by the way, no doubt who he's talking about here, critics of new spring church is critics of Perry Noble, pigs and dogs.

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That's what he refers to them as in this sermon. Let me fast forward a little bit so that you can hear the other soundbite referenced by Dr.

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Duncan regarding a critic that, uh, well, basically let Perry Noble know in public, in front of his daughter at like Sam's club, what he thought of him and what

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Perry wanted to do. Listen in the other night, Lucretia and, and Karis and I went to Sam's because we needed cologne and trash bags.

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That's why God made Sam's and where else can you buy cologne and trash bags?

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And so I've got cares and I'm, I'm holding her and Lucretia is like, let me go get the trash bags.

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And I'm like, well, let me go get the cologne. I'm kind of standing there holding my little girl. And this guy walks by me with a buggy and he looks at me and he, he like gives me a go to hell.

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Look now, let me just stop and say this. That's the best way to describe that. Look, I get that look all the time and I'm fine with it.

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I just smile now. I'm just like, can't Jesus. And so, um, I, that's, I mean, that's what goes on.

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I'm holding my two year old little girl and we're kind of sitting there and kind of talking to her about Sam's and kind of breaking down why you have all this stuff in this one place where I'm kind of talking to her and having fun.

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He stops, I watch him and he turns around and he comes back by me and he stops, he looks at me and says, are you

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Perry noble? And I said, yes, I am. And this man in the middle of Sam's proceeded to insult me like I've never been insulted.

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It didn't bother me that he did it to me. It bothered me that he did it in front of my daughter and I'm going to have to explain to her growing up why stuff like this happens.

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Some of you are like, what'd you do? Thank Jesus. I didn't do what I wanted to do. What did you want to do?

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Perry? Cause I wanted to be like, honey, just hold on right here. Turn your head. I'm about to go Samson.

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You know, I'm about to go Samson. Okay. So that's what he wanted to do.

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And that's what he preached. Notice praying that God kill this guy.

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He wants to go Samson, but remember there's a, I want to throw in an extra one from this same sermon.

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Remember the segment, this section of his sermon is entitled, ignore the pigs and the dogs.

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And I want you to hear from Perry Noble's own mouth, who he thinks a dog is here again is pastor

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Perry Noble on the flip side. He talks about the dogs. Now let me have a heart to heart with you.

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Okay. Now who are the dogs? Okay. You got to ignore the pigs and the dogs. So who are the dogs?

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Because you're supposed to ignore them according to Perry. So who's a dog? Listen to how he defines a dog as your pastor.

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From time to time. I get this question from people in the community. I address this about once a year. So I'm going to address it right now.

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And I won't address it much for the rest of the year, Perry.

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I come to new spring and I started coming and my family hates me for it.

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Like you had family members start praying that you would get back in church. You got back in church, but it was this church.

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So family members who are praying that you would come back to church. So these would be family members who are

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Christians. Okay. Listen. And so your family reunion on Sundays turns into a family rebellion.

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And you find yourself fighting people over this church. I've had people going,

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I'm having to defend this church. I'm having to, I mean, I literally had a lady the other day, tell me face to face.

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She said, my mother and father who were involved in another church said they would not come to my wedding unless I stopped coming to new spring.

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So, and so basically her parents are upset.

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They're Christians. They attend another church. They are so upset that their daughter is attending new spring at this point is causing family problems to the point where they won't even go to their wedding, her wedding.

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Could it possibly be that her parents are absolutely right and justified in their eternal concern for the soul of their daughter because of the type of person that Perry Noble is.

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And the reason I say that is because Perry Noble is who he is. And it comes out in spades when he's preaching.

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So how do you deal with that? How do you deal with that? Jesus said, don't throw your pearls to the dogs.

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Don't throw your pearls to the dogs. So if you have Christian parents and they've got any kind of biblical discernment and they're worried about their children or child who's attending new spring, according to Perry Noble, those

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Christian parents are dogs that you don't throw pearls to. Those are his own words.

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This should tell you the type of person that Perry Noble is. And this is the evidence that I wanted to bring in extra to help buttress what

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Dr. Duncan said today earlier in my interview with him. So let's get back to that.

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Without any further ado, here is the balance of my interview with Dr. Duncan regarding Perry Noble and his lawsuit against him.

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We continue. And that's one other thing I've reflected on in the last couple of years is, and the point of the sermon is that Perry argues why

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I can't be ignored, that I'm a dog, that I'm not really a Christian. And so we can ignore them.

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He owes me no duty. He basically doesn't need to care, which is how he acted.

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But my question is, this is a pastor. The number of pastors who were involved in the story,

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Pastor Noble, Pastor Moorhead, as his title of the pastor, Pastor Cooper. He talks to Pastor Furtick that afternoon about this case as well.

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You can deduce that from what he says. Perhaps they're not my pastor.

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They don't care what happens to me. But it's very obvious that there's a member of their church.

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Now, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. They didn't know he was a staff member. But at least there's a member of the church who's about to do damage to me, and in doing damage to me, would do severe damage to himself.

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Let's say he assaults me. Let's say he vandalizes my home. Well, he's going to be charged with a crime.

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He's going to probably lose his job, whatever that would be. Why don't you at least stop him from doing harm to himself?

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And they knew that. They could see what he was doing, and yet there's no evidence at all that they lifted a finger to do anything.

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So that's just the callousness that is kind of striking, both towards me, but I think if you're a

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New Spring member, I don't expect you to like me. But if you're a

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New Spring member, this is your pastor. This is your shepherd who is going to basically let somebody become collateral damage, become a martyr for the cause.

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And though he's not going to lose his life, but he's going to lose important things. He's going to lose liberty.

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He's going to lose wealth. He's going to lose reputation in taking some kind of action against me, and why they didn't try to help

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Maxwell. And Maxwell has been damaged by this. He no longer works at New Spring.

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I think, from what I can tell, he's actually estranged from New Spring. He felt actually quite betrayed by New Spring.

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They really threw him under the bus after this happened. All he's trying to do is what they are telling him to do.

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This message that Perry preached, and especially his non -reaction to Maxwell acting out as he's preaching about wanting to ignore critics, tells him that he's okay.

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The fact that he's being monitored by Jason Moorhead, the senior pastor, one of the executive pastors, he's on their board.

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The fact that he's being monitored by him and by their PR person tells him that the church has no complaint with what he's doing.

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Right. In fact, I think somebody could make the case that, based on a couple of things, for instance, my master's degree, the emphasis of my master's degree is in leadership.

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One of the things that is drilled into your head as you study the concept of leadership is that organizations have an uncanny tendency to be like the person at the top.

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They begin to manifest the traits of the person who is the leader at the top of the organization.

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When it comes to approval, there's two different types that are very prominent.

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There is outright vocal approval of what somebody does, praise for what they do, but then there's another level of approval, and that's tacit approval.

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Tacit is an unspoken approval where if somebody isn't telling you what you're doing is wrong and they're aware of it, then they're tacitly putting their stamp of approval on it because they're not correcting you.

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What's interesting about this is that I monitor Perry's sermons, and over and again,

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I hear him talk about the importance of being more like Jesus and how that's really what we

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Christians are called to do. But what happened to you couldn't be farther away from what Jesus is like, and it just makes me wonder as somebody who is a student and has a graduate degree in leadership that what we're dealing with here is somebody who isn't like Jesus at all, and it makes me wonder if he's even qualified to be a pastor because this behavior, again, it's nothing like somebody who is a repentant sinner who trusts in Christ for the forgiveness of his sins and is bearing fruit of the

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Spirit in his life, which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self -control.

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Over and again, the person who listens to and monitors Perry Noble sermons, what they hear is a constant litany of ad hominem attacks against anybody who would dare challenge him, criticize him, or say anything negative about him on a blog.

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The way he talks about bloggers, for instance, at the 2009 leadership thing that they did at Newspring in the spring there, it's called

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Unleash, he actually called me a jackass from the stage there at Newspring in March of 2009.

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This is not behavior of somebody who is exemplifying the fruits of the

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Holy Spirit in their life or is somebody like Jesus. I don't recall Jesus ever saying of his critics that they were jackasses or saying he wants to kill bloggers and things like that.

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If anything, Jesus was patient and long -suffering with those who were critical of him and on the cross even prayed for them and said,

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Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing. But Perry Noble isn't like that at all. Right, I don't see it like you said.

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That approval, tacit and vocal approval, they actually do both.

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That sermon from July 12th, you have the tacit approval of not making any response to Maxwell's tweets directed to him during the sermon, but there's vocal approval in the sermon.

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Perry preaches about himself, he is his own walking parable, and when you use yourself as that parable figure, as the moral lesson, we understand what that moral lesson is, and it's that you are violently to the point of murder, really.

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I mean, why else pray that God would kill somebody? He was irritated because somebody was snoring beside him.

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He wants God to kill him. And then he said, you know, I know you all want God to kill your spouse when he or she snores as well.

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Funny joke, but there's somebody in his audience who's listening to that and interpreting it as I think

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Perry intends it to be interpreted, and that is critics ought to be ignored to the point of death, because he follows that up with the example of wanting to just beat the daylights out of this gentleman at Sam's, and he finishes off the story saying,

33:14

I really wanted to lay my hands on some people. Well, Maxwell, and I know he's also talking about me here, so he's giving vocal approval to it as well.

33:22

Yeah. One other, you talk about the Unleash Conference, the next year, no, it would have been 2011, two years later.

33:31

The legal wheels work very slowly, so it was two years later that they deposed me, which means they get to ask me questions under oath.

33:39

It took about eight hours or so. It took a whole day. But this is a very important case for the church.

33:47

I know, you know, obviously Perry knows about it. He's a defendant. The senior leaders at the church would have to know about it.

33:54

So you would figure that, especially because we're arguing about a culture that they have created, negligent training, that they might want to prove that this was a surprise, this was an aberrant case, that this

34:11

Maxwell just went off the rails and no one else is like that. You know, what's your culture like?

34:17

The problem was that they had somebody who had turned violent and made violent threats against me.

34:23

So during this Unleash Conference, two years later, the very day that I was being, giving testimony, all of his lawyers were asking me questions.

34:34

Clayton King, he's New Spring's teaching pastor. He's also Perry's best friend and Perry's personal confessor.

34:41

Perry confesses, kind of an accountability partner. I would assume

34:46

Clayton knows a lot about this case. This is certainly very personal for Perry. He's personally.

34:53

And Clayton King also is very involved in Anderson University. He would know who I am. So Clayton King gives a session on how to protect your pastor.

35:01

He's preached at Furtick's church and at Noble's church about the same thing. But you can see it in the notes, but somebody also tweeted during it, so we know he said it, but he said, church members, we need to train church members to grow fangs to protect the pastor.

35:21

In the notes, they talk about becoming attack dogs. Okay, well, a couple of things. That's not scriptural.

35:28

The idea is that the shepherd protects the sheep from the wolves, not that the sheep turn into wolves to protect the shepherd.

35:37

It's completely backwards. So scripturally, it's just a non -starter.

35:44

But where's the wisdom? Where's the... you anticipate you're going to one day be in front of a jury who's going to ask, is this something that you do all of the time, or is this just a one -off thing?

35:57

And you are two years later saying, yeah, we need to train people to grow fangs to protect the pastor.

36:05

To protect the pastor from what? From criticism. Well, Maxwell did exactly what they taught.

36:10

Now, they've been teaching this before he did it, but there's no change. There's no, you know, we probably should dial back a little bit on this fang business.

36:20

No, they're still going ahead with this militant, violent response to critics.

36:27

And I was actually rather amazed. My attorney told me once we'd filed, don't talk about it.

36:36

Don't talk about this to anyone. Don't blog about it. Just shut up. We were amazed that they kept talking.

36:42

There's all kinds of leadership podcasts where Perry talks about criticism, and bloggers, and jackasses, and they're demonic.

36:49

You know, we're demonic. To grow the fangs. It was perfect for our case.

36:55

We would have gone to a jury and said, there's no repentance. It's actually that doubling down on this, saying we did the right thing.

37:04

I mean, New Spring and Perry have not apologized for anything. Maxwell has. One of the volunteers has, and personally apologized.

37:12

But they have not acknowledged that they did anything wrong. They have not offered any apology to me. So I've got to believe they don't actually think anything wrong happened.

37:22

Even the settlement doesn't acknowledge guilt or fault. It just says, we're done. We're not going to take this any further.

37:29

So I think that's part of the reason why I'm blogging again now is, okay, we've got a personal settlement.

37:35

We were satisfied that we're personally compensated. But there's,

37:42

I think last Sunday, 27 ,000 people went to New Spring. Yeah. He's trying to get 100 ,000 people in the state.

37:49

There's a lot of people who need to know what this man's heart is. And it's not one that withstands a lot of close scrutiny,

37:57

I think. Well, I think the worst thing that could happen to the state of South Carolina is 100 ,000 people who call themselves

38:03

Christians claim Perry Noble as their pastor. I think things would take a turn for the worse in the state of South Carolina if that were the case.

38:12

Now, just so the listeners know, on your pajamapages .com

38:18

website, you have a blog post entitled, Here's What New Spring's Pastors Were Reading in 2009.

38:24

And you link to a 27 -page long PDF of the tweets that we've been discussing.

38:32

And it is quite the read. Yes. So I should warn people that what you're going to read there doesn't sound like anything

38:43

Christian at points, let's just put it that way. Yeah, it's not suitable for work, as they say.

38:49

But suitable for pastors, apparently. Right, apparently. See, if you're at work and you get caught reading this online, you could probably be disciplined as per your company's internet policies.

39:03

But seriously, go and get this PDF and read these tweets.

39:10

And ask yourself, how is it that anybody associated with a church would think that this even remotely is appropriate?

39:21

Right. And when you know that we can establish factually without having to resort to any testimony, but we know that two of their staff members, one a pastor, one a senior leader, followed it.

39:34

They had to have read it once to at least hit the follow button, and you don't hit follow unless you actually want to read.

39:41

Right. And I know their public relations office is tasked with monitoring what people are saying about Perry.

39:48

So I've got to believe that they really were reading this. Whether or not Perry was reading it, well, he was being sent it.

39:57

Yeah. And yeah, if your listeners go and read, you don't have to read very many to know something's askew.

40:04

Something is not quite right here. And going back to the point I made about pastoral responsibility, how many pastors does it take for someone to say, we need to reach out to this guy and tell him to stop?

40:16

I don't care about Duncan, but this is one of ours. We need to have this stop. Because he's obviously a fan of Perry.

40:23

He's obviously a fan of New Spring, a New Spring member. And they made no effort. And it was very easy to do, actually.

40:30

One of the things, if you look at those tweets, there's a lot of tweets sent to a character. She changed her handle partway through, but Hot Gym Diva was her

40:39

Twitter title. If you click on, at the time, if you clicked on that, it would take you to her page.

40:44

It announces what her name is, and it tells you that she's a member of New Spring. It would take less than five minutes for them to say, okay, who's this guy talking to?

40:54

Oh, it's a New Spring member. Well, she's got to know who this guy is, because they're talking about all kinds of very personal things.

41:00

You wouldn't talk about that to a stranger. She's got to know it's not me. You just make a phone call to her. Hey, this is

41:05

Pastor Noble. Notice you're having this conversation with a guy called James Duncan. We know it's not James Duncan.

41:11

We're trying to figure out who this is, because we think he's on the wrong track. And it would have been shut down.

41:17

Very easy to do. Yeah. Okay. Now, there's another aspect to the story, and you talk about this in your blog post entitled,

41:25

You Should, You Can't, You Must, You May Never Again Talk to Perry Noble. This is a strange story, and it's a little bit confusing.

41:33

Can you walk us through this? Yes. Excuse me. I'm trying to, recovering from the dreaded lurgy that's been going around.

41:44

One of the things that you, it's not just Noble, but Furtick, and Young, and all of these characters.

41:50

One of the things that they will say is, you can't criticize us, because you don't know us. You haven't met us, and you have no right to criticize me unless you know my heart, unless we've had this person -to -person meeting.

42:01

And in the first, you know, incarnation of my blog, critics would come on.

42:07

New Spring apologists would come on and say, you know, go away, shut up, because you haven't talked to Perry, and you can't criticize him unless you met him.

42:14

So I actually made multiple attempts to meet with Perry. Not that I'm a fan of Perry, or need him to pay attention to me.

42:22

It's just, okay, this is the standard that you have, that your people have, that we've got to meet you. So let's do this. I don't mind meeting you.

42:29

And, you know, there was no response. I never got to meet him. Now, I don't think he should meet me.

42:37

He needs to meet me. Because you ought to be able to criticize somebody, especially somebody who's saying things in public, without having to have a public meeting with them.

42:47

Look at political bloggers. Should they demand Obama meets with them before they criticize him?

42:53

No. So I don't think Perry needed to meet me. But that was their standard. That was their rule.

42:59

And I was happy to go along with it if they wanted to. Okay, so that's the, you should. You should meet with Perry.

43:05

Okay. I tried, but I can't. When the harassment started happening, that's when my request for meetings became more serious.

43:17

And I actually made clear to them, look, this is not, I'm not asking to meet with Perry to talk about the blog, to argue anything with him.

43:24

I'm not going to talk about that at all. This is a whole different deal. This is a criminal issue that's going on here.

43:31

And they sent me their lawyer. So that's the, you can't. You can't meet with Perry because he's not going to.

43:40

We're going to send you a lawyer. Well, now at that point, he's, he's represented by his lawyer.

43:47

I understand that. And if very soon after that, we went to, we, we filed and we're in litigation.

43:54

Now, when you're represented by counsel, if you've watched law and order, you know, it's, you know, the detectives are asking the questions.

44:00

As soon as you say, I want a lawyer, or you call your lawyer, they can't talk to anymore.

44:06

Right. You can't communicate once you, once both sides have attorneys, everything's done through the attorney.

44:12

You can't just call the person up on the phone. Right. There are exceptions to that.

44:18

If only attorneys know you can't have private meetings, but, but yeah, that's generally the rule. And ethically, if somebody is represented by an attorney, you talk to the attorney, not to the person.

44:28

So that was the situation in 2010. We'd filed our suit. Perry had not met with us after our request.

44:35

And then one day I got it, came into work and early in the morning, got this email says, howdy. I bet this is the last email you expected to get today.

44:43

Anyway, it turns out it was from Perry and it said, uh, of, uh,

44:48

God has told me that we should meet. And I haven't talked to my attorneys.

44:54

Uh, he said he hasn't talked to his attorneys. He hasn't talked to anybody else. Uh, but he wants to meet me without my attorney, him without his attorneys, me without my attorney.

45:04

Well, I can't do that because let's say Perry doesn't understand this, that you don't meet without your

45:12

Perry's. I owe him the respect of making sure he has the advice of his counsel, but he also needs to make sure that he's not trying to, let's say, manipulate me out of dropping the suit without my attorney's advice.

45:25

I owe it to my counsel, to my attorney to make sure that he's aware of anything that's going on. So I immediately forwarded it to my attorney, not knowing that, you know, as far as I was concerned, it was probably just a prank.

45:38

Uh, cause this was so kind of out of the blue that first of all,

45:43

Perry would establish contact and then he'd want to do this. Uh, so my attorney called his attorneys who probably swore a little bit and they apparently didn't know about it.

45:52

And after that, the meeting is off. But this is the, you must, because the you must part is if God tells

46:00

Perry, and this is what Perry claimed, God told me we should meet. Then this is the 11th commandment.

46:07

If God has told him and me, we must do something. We must do it.

46:13

Well, if you don't meet with them at that point, you're disobeying God. I am no less seriously than if I'd broken one of the 10 commandments, not that I haven't already, but you know, it would just be the 11th.

46:25

So that's a very serious thing to say. And, you know, especially to say to somebody who's engaged in, you know, legal dispute with you.

46:36

God told me, well, if he told Perry, he's also telling me God's not going to tell somebody one thing that wouldn't apply to somebody else.

46:45

God told me we should meet. Well, I don't think Perry hears from God. And so I don't think

46:50

I'm disobeying God and not meeting him in this case. The Bible has enough in it that tells us how we should meet and what progression we should go to.

46:57

And I think, you know, Matthew 18, I think I'd been through that progression. He wouldn't meet, and we treat him like a tax collector, we treat him like a pagan.

47:03

We go through the civil courts, that's where we were at. So I think there's enough written that God tells us what and whom we should meet.

47:11

But for him to say God told me, there you're taking on a really high burden, and God is telling me to do something unethical,

47:22

God is telling me to do something that, you know, for all I know is illegal, especially trying to talk me out of having a meeting without my lawyer.

47:31

And so that's the you must part of it. I don't think

47:37

Perry hears from God nearly as much as Perry says he does, but the problem is 27 ,000 people in our state believe that he does.

47:44

And Perry believes that he does, and his leaders believe that he does. You know, Perry's basic motto for Christian life is, you know, it's really easy to know what to do because you listen to God and you do what he says.

47:58

So God tells you this, and you do it. You listen to God, tells you to have a meeting with your legal opponent without attorneys, you do what he says.

48:06

Well that's unwise, unethical, and, you know, it's not

48:11

God. God's not going to say that. So what, you know, think about if you're a new springer, and it's not just Perry, there are all these other pastors trained to do the same thing.

48:24

When the pastor stands up and says, God told me we need to open this campus, or God told me we need to do this, is this the same

48:30

God who told you that you should meet with Duncan without his lawyer? Because if he's wrong then, how do you know he's not wrong now?

48:38

And this is why Scripture is so important, because in Scripture God speaks to us in the same way, and in the same voice, and with the same authority.

48:47

And Matthew 18 tells us how and whom we should meet. That's the standard that we go by. And the other thing, you know, what, was

48:54

God sleeping? Why didn't God tell Perry in June of 2009 to meet with me then?

49:01

That could have actually done something. Why does God wait two years to, oh, wait a minute, Perry, you should meet with him?

49:07

Don't blame God for that. That's your fault, not God's, for that delayed advice.

49:14

Right. So that's the you must, and then the fourth part of that title, you may never. Because my reason for not meeting with Perry was because we were in a legal context, we both had attorneys, and I couldn't do it.

49:29

So the day after the settlement, we negotiated the settlement, and then it took a couple of weeks for all the papers to be drawn up and signed.

49:37

But the day that that finished, or the day after that finished, I just replied to his email, because God had told him to meet.

49:44

He had laid out some things he wanted to talk to me about and acknowledged that we'd been hurt by somebody in the church.

49:50

So I replied to it. I explained, you know, I couldn't accept your invitation back then because we both had attorneys, but now that they're all done, you know, we are settled.

49:59

The case is over. The attorneys are no longer relevant. Now that we're done, I'd be happy to meet with you.

50:04

A few things I want to talk about. I know you're probably upset at me. You know, why did we sue a church? Why did we hold you personally responsible?

50:11

I'd be happy to answer those. You know, I'm sure you're not very pleased with me right now. I'll be happy to explain my thinking to you too.

50:19

So my offer was, you know, let's meet now, wherever you want to, whenever you want to, I'll be happy to meet.

50:25

The next day, my attorney got a letter from his Texas attorney again, the T .D. Jakes guy, saying your client must never approach

50:36

Perry Noble to talk about anything related to this case again. So that's where we are.

50:42

It's not a restraining order, but essentially it's don't you ever, ever talk to Perry again.

50:48

So I haven't heard from him since. I met him during his deposition. We had him testify, but I brought him to him once at Starbucks.

50:56

We talked for 30 seconds about iPads, but you know, I have not had this, you know, brother to brother conversation and I'm not,

51:05

I don't necessarily want to talk to him about the litigation. That is settled. There are other issues, you know, that the lawyers aren't real, don't really care about, that I think would be worth talking about.

51:16

But you know, we, it was our heart from the start to to reconcile with them.

51:24

That's why, you know, why I didn't tell my story until the end of 2009. We wanted to meet with Perry.

51:32

We wanted to see some kind of change that, that yeah, we, I see why we, why we might be responsible for what happened after the settlement.

51:41

We, it was again, our desire, especially my wife, she's much more interested in reconciliation than maybe

51:47

I am. I'm a bit more, you know, let's go on and let loose. But you know, she especially wants to,

51:53

I want to be reconciled with these people. I want to be at one with these people. And you know, when, when you get the, you may never, the attorneys say you may never, okay,

52:03

I guess, I guess that's a bridge that for the immediate future is not about to be rebuilt.

52:09

I'd love it to be. And that's, it was kind of that, but that motivated me to, yeah, we probably do need to tell the story and to, you know, what has happened in the last three years, because I think, you know,

52:25

I think there's some things that people ought to have warning about.

52:32

And I don't think, you know, one of the, one of my close friends told me as we were going through this, he said, you, you could tell everything, you know, you could put, you could put his whole,

52:42

I can't, but you could put the whole transcript of his testimony up and people aren't going to believe you. And that's, if you look at some of the comments on the blog, well, you haven't proved your case and you haven't, well, you're not going to, people are not going to believe this.

52:56

What I hope is at a certain point, there'll be people, I think the two main audiences that I want people to read.

53:01

One is the people who are in the movement now, who one day will probably maybe step away and say, you know, you were right back then.

53:10

I see what I didn't see now. And not so that there'll be,

53:15

I told you so, but that there was somebody early on who was saying, you probably should be a little careful here.

53:21

And then the other one would be for people who are thinking about it, you know, what, what, what's up with Newsring?

53:27

What's up with Perry Noble? Well, I'll, I'll, I'll give you some evidence. I'll give you something to think about. And then you go ahead and make your own decision, knowing that there is another side of the story.

53:35

There's they aren't going to tell theirs, but no, it's not to, I'm not trying to, to pile on.

53:42

I'm not trying to beat them up. It's here, here's some things that I know. And I think people who are interested probably should, should know this too.

53:50

Well, I think one of the most chilling aspects of what you've posted on your blog recently is from the

53:55

January 8th post entitled a few details about our Newspring lawsuit, abbreviated edition, where you explain what their official defense was.

54:06

And what it basically boils down to is that their defense was, it was your fault.

54:11

Explain that. Yes, there, I don't have the language right in front of me, but it is on the blog, but their defense was that it, it's not their fault because, or they're, they're not responsible.

54:27

We shouldn't be suing them because everything that happened to us was our fault. And in our, they also include my wife and my wife never wrote a word on the blog.

54:37

She, she rarely even read it. So it was our fault, the harassment, the pornographic email, the, the, the adoption, the resignation letter, all of that was our fault.

54:52

And the reason was because we criticized Newspring. So their argument is because he criticized

54:59

Newspring, everything that happened to him, he should have been able to foresee. This was a preventable and foreseeable problem.

55:09

And so when I read it, and this was one of the first things that they posted, and it is a public document.

55:15

You can, as I did myself, you'd go down to the Anderson County courthouse, you ask for the Duncan Newspring case, and they'll give you all of, they'll give you our complaint and they'll give you the, their answer.

55:24

But it, it blew me away to read this, that they would actually say this, you know, and this is a signed legal document.

55:31

They, they are asserting that they actually do believe this, that the reason we, we encountered all of these problems was because we criticized

55:39

Perry. What are you saying, that it's foreseeable? Well, if it's foreseeable for us, it was also foreseeable for you, right?

55:46

You know, that didn't you see this? And that, that was exactly our argument, that you have created a culture where it is probably foreseeable that somebody like Maxwell is going to go off and do these things.

56:00

So there's a, there really is a lingering threat, even in saying what they've said now, because they're putting anybody else on notice.

56:09

Our position is, if you sue us, bad things will happen. And if they happen to you, it's not our fault, because that's just the way it is.

56:16

It's kind of breathtaking that they would make that argument. So Perry Noble is so untouchable that it doesn't matter what he says.

56:23

If you criticize him, well, you risk bad things happening to you. And we wouldn't want bad things to happen to you.

56:30

So it's probably best if you just not say anything negative about Perry at all. Is that pretty much the gist of the argument?

56:38

Well, they don't actually say they don't want bad things to happen, but yes, they would say it would be best that you not criticize.

56:45

I, I don't know why there's not, why there wasn't somebody who read through that, that paper and said, you know, we really can't be making that argument.

56:56

This is not something that, that we as a church need to use as a defense. And you know, a lot of the defense is boilerplate, but that really stuck out and saying, no, it was your fault.

57:07

Blame the victim. They should have known it was going to come. Yeah. And that's what I've seen a few,

57:12

I mean, over the years, you, you, you get the occasional rape case that comes up in the news where some, you know, the, the rapist says, well, it's her fault because she was wearing a mini skirt, you know, or her fault because she was wearing something that was provocative.

57:28

It's the exact, it's the same family of argument. I want to say it's the exact same argument. It is the same family.

57:34

It's the same reasoning. Wow. You were provocative. And I mean, some of the questions that their attorneys asked me during my deposition, which, you know, because I was there and said, it's not secret, but basically we could see that their defense was going to be, well, you boarded on yourself.

57:53

You stirred the pot, you, you stirred this all up, you know, now you're just being oversensitive that, that you got some back.

58:03

I don't think that it's quite, quite like that, but what we got back was quite what we were, you know,

58:08

I was using words on a, on a website. They were doing something much more personal, destructive. Yeah.

58:14

So, uh, all right. Well, uh, Dr. Duncan, I mean, this is some very interesting information.

58:21

It looks like you're going to be blogging again for a little while. Probably. Yeah. There's a few, few more things, uh, aspects of this that I'll, I'll cover.

58:29

Right. Which of course requires me to ask you, do you live in your mother's basement? No. Yeah.

58:37

That, that always seems to be their ad hominem attack. Anybody who says something on a blog, well, it's somebody who's antisocial, who's 28 years old, still lives in their mom's basement and obviously exists on a beanbag eating

58:50

Cheetos rather than being a productive member of society. So. Right. But I thought these churches didn't have dress codes and didn't care about what people wore except pajamas,

58:59

I suppose. Yeah. So again, your website is pajamapages .com if anyone would like to go there.

59:06

And I strongly recommend any of the listeners here at Fighting for the Faith, take the time, go to pajamapages .com

59:12

and look at the new posts that begin January 1st of this year.

59:19

And, um, and, and the reality is that you went silent for, you know, from December of 2009 until now.

59:27

So even the, uh, the very long post that you wrote in 2009, telling the entire story of what happened to you is still available on page two of your blog, but it's pajamapages .com.

59:40

And, uh, we'll, we'll pray that, um, that you will be safe now that you're taking your life into your hands again and, uh, and criticizing the person who cannot be criticized.

59:51

I suppose this time I know better, but maybe they do too. So I hope I will be. Yeah, we'll see.

59:58

So again, thank you for coming on Fighting for the Faith and giving us this update. Thank you. Good to talk to you.

01:00:04

All right. So what'd you think? I'd love to get your feedback.

01:00:11

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01:00:16

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01:00:22

forward slash pirate Christian, but follow me on Twitter. My name there at pirate Christian till tomorrow. May God richly bless you in the grace and mercy won by Jesus Christ and his vicarious death on the cross for all of your sins.