Perry Noble's Subordinates Abuse and Harass a Critic

Opening Banter and the Interview Setup

It's time for another edition of Fighting for the Faith. Monday, December 7, 2009. Strap your helmets on, get your seatbelts ready, we are off on a ride today. If you've been following me on Twitter and Facebook, then you know that over the weekend, I tweeted a story and put a post up on my wall regarding the, literally, the attempt to assassinate the character of Dr. James Duncan, a fine Christian man who was also a critic of Perry Noble.

And this character assassination occurred at the hands of, literally, employees of Perry Noble's church, New Spring Church there in Anderson, South Carolina. And we've got the first radio interview with Dr. James Duncan regarding this, and we're going to dive right into that shortly.

And then once we're done with that, we're going to take a quick break and we're going to turn around and we're going to review a Perry Noble lecture that he gave at the Unleash conference and we'll talk about scripture twisting extraordinaire.

Perry Noble is in rare form. And I mean, just to kind of give you an idea of what it is that you're looking forward to hearing in this edition of Fighting for the Faith. This is Perry Noble. You guys investigate the obvious.

This next one, now you're going to have to give me a minute. I need to explain it.

So let me say it. Let me explain it. The second I is ignore the jackass. In Greek, jackass is translated blogger.

That's just a teaser of what you're going to be hearing on today's edition of Fighting for the Faith. If you're not up to speed on the story, you will become up to speed on the story. And it's going to be a long edition of Fighting for the Faith.

With that in mind, I don't even think we're going to do a Marty Python. We'll have brief breaks today as we do the program. So with that, here is my interview recorded earlier today with Dr. James Duncan of Anderson University and him telling us the story of how employees of New Spring, known to the leadership, assassinated his character in the most unchristian, unsanctified, ridiculous ways you could possibly imagine.

It's a harrowing story. So here we go. All right. On the line, I have Dr. James Duncan, who is the Associate Professor of Communication at Anderson University. He has a master's degree and a Ph .D. from Regent University, one in radio and the other in communication.

Dr. Duncan, thank you for coming on Fighting for the Faith. You're welcome. All right. The occasion for you coming on Fighting for the Faith is a little bit interesting. And you have a blog that you write called Pajamapages .com.

And it's a blog that's critical of Pastor Perry Noble and some of the things that he teaches and does at New Spring Church. And apparently, being a critic of Pastor Noble has caused a very interesting story to occur in your life.

And I want to give you the opportunity to talk about that. Before we dive into the story proper, I want to ask a couple of questions to kind of frame this so that people understand where you're coming from and maybe even where I'm coming from.

First of all, do you hate the people that attend New Spring Church? No.

Probably. I don't know exactly if they're in some of my own classes are New Spring students. Some of my best students in the last couple of years I've actually recommended for jobs at New Spring. No. And if you go way, way back on my blog, I generally, from my experience, people who attend New Spring are zealous for the Lord, they have a reaching out to people, a heart for ministry.

You know, one of the emphases of the church is personal evangelism, and you meet anybody who goes to that church and you see it worked out in their life. So yeah, absolutely not. What I focus on is the teaching coming from the man or a few of the men at the top.

Okay. No.

All right. Then let me just get this one out. Do you hate Perry Noble? Do you have some personal acts to grind against him? No.

The topic of my attention, because of what he says, I've never met the man, you know, that's part of the story, but I've never met the man. I have no reason to have, you know, the reason that's worthy of attention is he's a very important leader.

Okay. And obviously he leads the largest church in our city, perhaps, I don't know, enough of the churches in our state, I'm guessing probably in our state. He's on the verge, I think, of becoming, you know, in the top echelon of national Christian leaders.

He's just announced he's February, I think, and I think the three headliners were Rick Warren, Mark Driscoll, and Perry Noble. So, you know, I've started paying attention to him a few years ago, but he is certainly somebody who warrants a little bit of extra scrutiny.

You know, when you have a church, he started this church 10 years ago, actually, at our university, and you're not endorsed by the university. He rented our facilities and a lot of students. And when you grow a church from, you know, your back living room into, I think there are around about 15 ,000 members right now.

In that short a period, I think you're allowed to pay a little bit of attention to how that might have happened and what might be going on there. You know, the other thing that, you know, Perry is often deliberately controversial in what he says and attracting attention and buzz and, you know, that his attention to you because of your controversy and maybe he has a problem with that controversy, I think that should come with the territory.

I should not really be surprised if that's the game you want to play. Right.

So let me throw this out on the table right off the bat. I mean, Perry makes it clear that he claims lives are being changed at New Spring and that people are giving their heart to Jesus, and he seems to think that should exempt him from scrutiny and accountability.

What do you think about that claim?

Well, it's great. Lives are being changed. There's no question of that. But anybody can point to that. Oprah changes lives. Dr. Phil changes lives. The Mormon Church changes lives. Heck, my life was changed by his church.

For the good, any secular person can point to lives being changed. Heretics can do the same thing. So, no, to say no, it doesn't exempt him. What matters is what he says and, you know, any, you know, often any kind of teaching can result in life being changed.

What is he teaching? That's what's important. And I'll rejoice if you're wealthy. I'm happy that you're wealthy.

That's my concern. Okay. Now, on your blog, Pajamapages .com, which, by the way, is a brilliant name, I've been following your website now probably since the beginning of the summer. And you have a blog post called Holy Rage at the Spring, and in that post, you tell your story of how insiders at New Spring, that would include leadership, staff, employees, and volunteers, have attempted to corrupt your family, sabotage an adoption, destroy your career, and ruin your reputation.

And this entire thing became the subject of a police investigation, and you claim it was conducted with the knowledge and encouragement of New Spring's senior leadership. Walk us through this. Oh, you got six hours?

We'll try and condense it. Yeah, please. This is radio, not an audiobook.

There's 10 ,000 words there. We're not going to get there. I guess people could go and read it if they've got time themselves. Yeah, it started... Well, I started to notice a lot of trouble back in...

This is when Gary Lamb, he's a person a lot of your listeners probably are familiar with.

Yeah, we've covered Gary Lamb and... I bet you have. Yeah. He announced that he'd had an affair.

Obviously disappointing, but no great surprise. And I'd just arrived in battling cancer, and thankfully he's doing very well now. But we'd just arrived there, we were approached by Gary Lamb. So I posted a kind of an observation on it, and showed how he had been talking about this woman that he had had the affair with six weeks earlier, and kind of her as his own property, and made that observation.

I think at the same time, Perry had mentioned it on his blog, perhaps during his service, but not, I think, a lot of details. He just said, a good friend. And I think what happened, hearing the accounts from some of the people who ended up getting involved in this problem that occurred later, is they started Googling for Gary Lamb, and came across my article about him, and were all of a sudden exposed, criticizing Perry.

I don't publicize the blog, I don't invite people to go and read it. So a few people read it, but not to have a large audience. And then within a couple of days, some really strange things started happening.

I first noticed my email inbox got filled up with all kinds of acknowledgments of, apparently made for life insurance, and auto insurance, and financial advice. An email from somebody with a picture of porn.

A little bit after that, perhaps the next day, I got an email that actually included those pictures in the email. Now, they were sent by fake addresses. It was not obvious who it was from. At the same time, my wife, who was back here by herself, and with our son, emailed me and said, we're getting all of these calls from insurance companies.

What's happening? And I kind of figured out what was going on, and tried not to worry her. I said, it was probably just some spammers. I was replying to everybody as quickly as I could. I didn't do this, please don't call again.

In the middle of all of that, I got a notice that I'd been subscribed to a gay magazine. From New Zealand, trying to match up. Contact that magazine to make sure I was taken off their list before they put something in the mail.

So that my son doesn't go out. My son, who generally collects their mail, doesn't go out. What is this magazine doing here? Then, this was all happening within a couple of days. I woke up and opened my computer to check my mail.

There's a message from the provost at the university, regretting the fact that I'd resigned. Now, I'm happy to know that he actually regretted it. That would have been sad if it had been rejoicing. He regrets the fact that I've resigned, and asked a couple of people to pan out once I leave.

I was like, wow, how did this happen? I called his home, his office, and emailed and said, no, this was certainly not me. It turned out, and then a friend emailed me and said, somebody started a Twitter account in your name.

It was called jduncan .com, D-O-T-K-A-C-O-N was spelled out. I went and checked it, and it had my photograph on it. It mentioned my street name. It mentioned my son and my wife. It mentioned the president of the university in a derogatory manner.

I figured this was probably the same people who were doing this other thing. Now, at this point, I didn't have any idea who this was, but it appeared to be connected to the Gary Lamb done just a few days ago.

If you look at some of the comments that are in that post, you'll see that there are some people who get very, there's somebody who comes in there who calls himself Burning P, and also identified behind these things that were going on.

Twitter closed that down for me within a couple of hours. They were very good about that. But then within a day, somebody had started up another one, calling this one James Duncan AU, AU standing for Anderson University, and had put a note up in the top that said this is a parody site.

Now, under Twitter rules, it meant I couldn't. It was not a parody. A parody takes what you're doing and turns it a little bit to make... You could certainly do that with me. I wouldn't have a problem with somebody doing a parody of me, but this was not.

A gentleman by the name of Josh Maxwell, who turns out that he was, at the time, a full-time employee of the church. He was a security guard. And he had actually been made aware of my blog back in May.

This is actually very important. I had been making... One of the characteristics of churches, or leaders, you know, tag the whole church, but leaders like Perry Noble and Stephen Furtick and Gary Lamb, they are the three main imposters that I kind of tracked, was that they really can't handle dissent.

And they are paranoid of dissent. And part of why they can't handle folk like me, people who work for them, always have to be investigated and monitored in case they move out of line. And I quoted some things that Furtick had said.

And to mindset that filtered through the entire organization, I'd found... I'd read this maybe, I don't know how long ago, but weeks or months earlier, and this came to mind and I had to go and search for it.

It was a post by a pastor of the church, I think he's the creative arts pastor, his name's Shane Duffy. And he had this account of how he had... Somebody had been questioning... One of his volunteers had been asking him about something, and he said something about his expression made me question his buy-in into the vision.

Now, you know, if you read these, the vision is everything. You've got to buy the vision. But it was his non-verbals had made him question... And I strongly questioned him to just determine the level of his buy-in.

And so I quoted Duffy as, you know, this guy gets the enhanced interrogation techniques because of a facial expression. Well, a couple of days later, his blog's work, and put that on his Twitter account, the esteemed link to me.

He had a couple of them, but one was... Well, his Twitter handle at that point was Mr. Mouth. And Maxwell said, Seriously? How much would you pay to... Duffy says, Oh, don't worry. I'm not really worried about...

Well, then, starts tweeting himself. Instant reply to it. I'm not saying Gary Lamb ever saw this, but he says, Gary Lamb, I need to get a gang of rednecks together, and we need to organize a gangland beating.

And then a few minutes later, T-F-O-J-D. Just those letters. Well, I won't say it, but beat the meat out of James Duncan. You can fill in the blanks. Wow. Right after that, and obviously in reply to that, Duffy is one of my favorite people.

He's got lots of rage, and I like that. Here you have a pastor of the church who has just watched somebody go into a violent orbit. He's going crazy. I'm recruiting people for a gangland beating. That's a word he used.

And I'm on my way to T-F-O-J-D. Expect that if you're seeing somebody who is an employee of your organization start to act this way. And one of the other things that Bill and his friends who get involved a little bit later, is that they are fans of, I guess, mixed martial arts, ultimate fighting.

I don't know if they're two different things or the same thing. But anyway, they like violence. They like, in terms of entertainment and violence. It's big in the South. It is. And these are, people talking about gangland beatings are what he's talking about.

And Duffy would have known this. Rather than saying, calm down, guy, you're going way too far, to actually come along and endorse it and pat him on the back. Now, I didn't know, at the time, somebody pointed out to me that Duffy was tweeting about this.

I could see what Duffy was saying, but Maxwell I had blocked off. So you had to be one of his followers. So I didn't know what Duffy was replying to. Just, you know, I was curious. Who's in a rage now?

I didn't know what he was responding to. Otherwise, I might not have gone back home. We might have gone to a hotel that night. It was a little bit later that I, for some reason, Maxwell together, which was kind of chilling when you read it in its context.

Now, Maxwell did not come and beat me up that day. Maybe he was goofing off. Maybe he had intentions.

Now, I want to pause for a second. I think people need to just reflect on the fact that we're talking about church staff. Right. We are talking about people who are given the task of discipling people in the doctrines of Christianity and the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And Jesus Christ himself basically says, if you save your brother Raka, you've already committed murder in your heart. These guys have already murdered you according to Jesus' death. And these are pastors.

They didn't, they didn't, not only did they not stop him, they green-lighted him. When we get to the end of the story, Duffy's comment ties them into, here's a low man on the totem for turning. He said, this is our argument.

We have 109 full-time employees and Perry Noble can't be aware of what everybody's doing. And this guy, he works second shift. Nobody knows what he does. Well, first of all, just in terms of corporate responsibility, that's not how it works in the real world.

If you are employed by a business and you mess up and the CEO doesn't endorse it, the CEO doesn't know about it, but the CEO is on the hook for it. That's a part of management. That's why you get paid the big bucks.

First of all, he's an employee of the institution of the church. You have a responsibility right there. Even if you said, we condemn everything we have condemned, we kept telling them not to, but they didn't.

Duffy says, this is the kind of action that I like. This is the kind of action that gets you in my good books. What does a low-level employee want to do? You want promotion. You want the big guys to like you.

How do I get the big guys to like me? Destroy people like James Duncan. So, he didn't act at that point, but he's got, let me just make it, as somebody who kind of looks at communication and media, the fact that these people conducted this conversation on Twitter is really, this is the kind of, the fact that they would, for anyone who, anything you say is a public record.

You have these really loose conversations and threat record, it's evidence that ends up getting investigated by, later getting investigated by the local police. But, it's a part of these conversations that they even exist.

Not everybody puts it together, but you see on my blog, I put that together and you can see the timestamps as if you were sitting in the room of this conversation.

So far, at this point, you've talked about the fact that you've been getting, mysteriously getting gay pornographic email, a subscription to a gay pornography magazine, you've got these really frightening Twitter things being mentioned about you, and then you've got this fake Twitter account that's gone up.

This is a complete invasion of your privacy.

Yeah, I'm not sure I had much privacy for them to invade, but whatever I had, they did. At least of my peace of mind and security, they invaded. The Twitter account that ends up running from the beginning of June sometime in August, had some very vile material.

There's all kinds of accounts on homosexual activities, homosexual fantasies of mine, homosexual fantasies I have of relationships with pastors at New Spring Church. There are accounts of me being abducted, and the idea is that this is an abduction.

So there's a lot about me, but there's the Twitter mentioned my wife by her name, my son by his name and his age, and his school. Correctly identified his age, name, and school. My vehicles, make and model, describes trips that my wife took in our car.

At one point it actually gave my address in an invitation for people to come to a sex party at my house. Now, I know that there's not going to be a party at my house that night, but the thing with Twitter is you can search.

If somebody's looking for types in sex, party, Anderson, bam, mine comes up, and there's nothing to indicate, if you do a Twitter search, there's nothing to indicate this is a parody.

There's nothing about that that is a parody anyway. And this is all being conducted, put on Twitter by an employee of NewSpring.

Right. It ended up, the person who was doing this, Mr. Melph, who was, uh, you know, Yes, Maxwell is doing this. The other little wrinkle, now there are a lot of people, one very interesting follower was somebody who went by the handle of Jay Sizzle, J-A-Y-S-I-Z-Z-L-E.

I didn't know who it was at first, maybe somebody who searches a lot of complimentary things about Perry Noble, Perry Noble has, and so I did a Google search and eventually find out that it's somebody by the name of Jason Moorhead.

Now Google is telling me that, this will be important later, but Google tells me that he's the executive pastor of the church, and I'm not sure for how long he was the executive pastor. I'm seeing, now I didn't know it was Maxwell doing it, but somebody's doing this by the executive pastor of Gary thing just right there in itself.

Now, in terms of Moorhead, I don't know things he probably needs to account for. One, how did he hear about it? He only followed about 70 people. And he was following his account. I found luck to uninitiate it, but in Twitter that's not a lot.

Go ahead.

Yeah, here's the deal, I mean, personally, I only mostly follow heretics on my Twitter account. Some of my friends are really sad because I don't follow them on Twitter. It's like, you don't understand, I use it for research.

If I'm following you, it's generally a bad thing, but if you insist on it, I'll call ahead and follow you on Twitter. Here's the deal, if you're familiar with Twitter, when you follow somebody, everything they say shows up on your Twitter page.

How did he decide? First of all, why did he decide to follow? And if you follow people without reading it, what's the point of following? If you follow people without reading it, I'd expect to see that he follows 20 ,000 people.

And he was the executive pastor at the time that he was following this guy?

Not at the time, formally he was. At the time he was the chief operations officer, which he still is today. Got it. Following it as well, but he's the most important. I might have expected, or anybody might have expected that, especially when you see the content, and they know my name, because a couple of years before I published an article in our local paper that caused a little bit of a stir.

Right. And they know I have a blog. Or, did he know that there was a fake Twitter? Even if he says that he never read it, the other problem with that is Maxwell, every time he logs into this fake account in my name, when you log into Twitter, they have, I guess, 64 little icons over on the right, 481, or something like that, where you can see who's following you.

So for every day, and it wasn't every day, Maxwell would do five, sometimes 20 a day on my account. And it wasn't an occasional thing, it was incessant. Every time he logs in, he sees that Jay Sizzle's still following.

Every day that Jay Sizzle doesn't say, shut this thing down, a little bit more. Over time, it seemed to me that the content got wilder and wilder, and I think part of that is, Maxwell's kind of as far, are you going to apply death threats that come a little bit later, threats of vandalism against my house and property.

The endorsement of him being there. The other angle on this, is that anybody going into Jay Sizzle's, there's more heads, is that I'm on it. On his little stack of icons, back down on the bottom right, there's a big JD, which was the icon that Maxwell used for this.

If I'm looking at, the reason that they're there is Twitter says, if you're interested in this guy, you might be also interested in his friends.

Alright, we're going to pause the interview right there, and we're going to take a quick, quick break, and when we come back, we're going to continue with our interview with Dr. James Duncan. If you'd like to email me regarding anything you've heard so far on this edition, or any previous editions of Fighting for the Faith, you can do so.

Talk back at fightingforthefaith .com or you can ask to be my friend on Facebook, that's facebook .com forward slash piratechristian or follow me on Twitter, my name there again, piratechristian. We will be right back.

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Alright, we're back. A lot of ground left to cover today. I just want to let you know that I did invite Pastor Noble to come on Fighting for the Faith and offered him equal time to present his side of the story and to basically say whatever he wanted to say in his own defense and to lay out New Spring's position regarding this incident.

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Let's continue with my interview earlier with Dr. James Duncan of Anderson University.

Perhaps people are clicking on that. One of the things that the you know, kind of jumping to the end, but these, Maxwell and his three other friends, accomplices, were interviewed by a local detective and Maxwell, what the detective told me is Maxwell said that there were multiple people within the you know, the 15 ,000, I'm assuming most of them, 99 .9 of them didn't.

But within the offices of the church, there were people that Maxwell was aware of who were reading it. I think that's what Maxwell kept. That's part of why Maxwell kept going. To me, it seems it became a source of entertainment.

Near the end of his run, Maxwell actually start four ideas, because he's run through all of the gay abduction and all of the rest of it, and he says, okay, next thing I'm going to do is maybe I can turn James Duncan into a transsexual.

But if any of you have any other ideas, and he said, those of you, he said, I know there are many of you who I never let on that I was reading it. I never let on that I was storing this stuff, partly because I needed to let him kind of, actually I'd be able to figure out who was behind it.

So he acknowledged there were people in the church who knew it was there, but he said they didn't know that it was there. People did know that it was there. Well, here's the question I have for those people, and I don't know their names, except for Morehead and one or two others, but why did nobody put up a red flag and say, this is not good?

There are Twitter posts on there that very evidently, very obviously come from inside NewSprings services. If you look at the date stamps and the content, he's in a service or he's perhaps watching online, but he's tweeting about Perry's sermon.

And these are all the same kind of things as my homosexual fantasies about Perry, but they match exactly what he's saying in the service. So somebody who's obviously a supporter of the church, a member of the church, and somebody who's saying all of these vile things about me, that nobody, and I don't know whether it's 5 or 50 people, but that nobody thought this is really not good.

Even if you just, even if you think I'm worth destroying, this is probably not the best way. All it would have taken is for somebody to alert Noble or maybe one of the executive, the executive pastor, for example, to say, somebody needs to send this guy a private tweet.

You don't need to know who he is. He could be a 12-year-old sitting in a basement somewhere. You don't need to know who it is, but it's obviously somebody who respects Noble.

You must stop this. Well, and this kind of begs the question, and that is, is that anytime somebody mentions my Twitter account using the at sign on Twitter, I can see it. I can see when I'm mentioned.

And you document the fact that this bogus account in your name on several occasions mentions Perry Noble, his Twitter account, which means that he's going to see these things. Exactly.

There are a lot of messages that are sent, and as you said, I listed them on my blog. And if you read them, none of them are innocuous. You're not going to read that and think there's a sane person. My blog is, what did he do with these?

Cooper, the youth pastor, both get inundated with these. If you scan through Noble and Cooper, you'll see that they'll make all kinds of little drops to their at sign in the message. You know, thanks for the love, or I'm looking forward to being there, or really happy for what you're saying.

Well, they monitored these things.

Right. Perry's even responded to one of my tweets to him once.

Well, congratulations. You've got more out of him than I ever have.

Well, I've actually met the guy. He's actually pretty nice in person. Well, yeah, but.

The options are did they read them and not notice anything wrong with them, which seems unthinkable when you see them? Did they read them and think they were just funny? Right. Did they read them and you can block somebody from sending these to you.

Did they block it? Well, that seems like a reasonable answer. How many tweets did it take for them to do that, and why? Why did they block it? My name's on it, and it's got this vile content. If you're blocking it because it's vile content, either it comes from me, and if they really think it comes from me, they should save that and use it to destroy me, or destroy my reputation, or if it's not from me, then they have to know it's from somebody who's appropriated my identity.

Right. Blocking that in that case seems like a pretty weak thing to do. ...identity, and is doing it in a way that is reflecting poorly on the church. Right. Blocking it seems to be not a terribly good answer.

Well, it all comes down to who knew what when, but again, here's the deal. I've been a CEO. I have a master's degree in business administration from Pepperdine University. My emphasis happens to be leadership, and you're actually painting a picture here using my education in business.

You're painting a picture of a good old boy's almost mafia-like insular management team that rewards unquestioning loyalty and attacking of foes, especially anybody who would dare to attack Perry Noble and his vision, and demonizes those who dare to question his ideas, methods, and teaching, and whether or not they're anointed of God.

I mean, you're basically describing a very toxic insular culture here, and I can tell you this as somebody who's studied leadership and actually experienced it out in the trenches in the corporate world, organizations always take on the attributes of the person on the top, and it sounds to me like this culture that allowed this to happen was inculcated by Perry Noble himself.

That's my argument. I don't claim that Perry knew exactly what was happening. I do have a question about what he did with these tweets that came by him. I have a question about how his senior leadership didn't do anything about what they apparently knew.

The argument that there's 109 employees and he can't know about what's happening with everyone is fine. Actually, that's a bogus argument. They basically insulate him from.

You know, I don't expect that he knows everything that Josh Maxwell's doing. Actually, here's the deal. I say that's a bogus argument. As somebody who's worked in large corporations, when you have a CEO, he can really be effective and know what's going on all the way down to the individual employee level, what's going on in their life, up to about 150 employees.

That's about the point where he starts losing track, and he's well within that 150. That's just some leadership stats that comes out of the business world.

That I would disagree with, but I certainly on the leader, on the visionary, that you basically protect the visionary from all distractions. I tried to send messages into the church that there are so many gatekeepers before anybody ever gets to Perry, that an underling can't go directly to Perry.

It has to go through stages. Even so, Perry does have a social relationship with Maxwell. You can see that in some of the way they talk to each other on their... Maxwell's continuing his personal Twitter account while all of this is happening.

Now, there is a level at which they do draw the line. When they found out, or when I think they feared, Maxwell ends up getting... By the end of July, what was happening was going to result in... Now, people will look at what's on there, and they might think, well, you're just overreacting.

They're just putting this... You underreact, and then you end up... Right about the same time, I think, or Michigan... I don't know how many people died, but I know the aftermath of the story was people went and looked at this guy's blog, and here he's making all of these threats about things he's going to do, and no one took him seriously.