F4F | Interview with Kerri Ferguson RE: Father Provoke NOT Your Child

Fighting for the Faith

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Welcome to another installment of Fighting for the Faith. My name is Chris Roseboro. I am your servant in Jesus Christ.

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This is the channel that compares what people are saying in the name of God to the Word of God. So today's gonna be a different episode.

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We've done something at Pirate Christian Media that that we've never done before, really, and that is is that we have published a book.

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And it's not by me. It's by an author that you may be familiar with if you're a longtime listener of Fighting for the

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Faith, then you may know the name Carrie Ferguson. She's recently written her life memoir, and this is such an interesting work, autobiographical work, because it deals with the topics of bullying, spiritual abuse, physical marital spousal abuse, and all kinds of really dark subject matters.

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And we've had Carrie Ferguson on the podcast discussing this in the past. We've also invited her out a few years ago to Swansea, and she was one of our guest speakers at our

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Pirate Christian radio conference in Swansea. And so with that, I would like to introduce you to Carrie Ferguson.

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Carrie, thanks for coming on Fighting for the Faith. How are you doing today? I'm doing well.

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Thank you for having me, Chris. So we have been working on your book for a few years now, and we finally have it finished in EPUB format at the moment.

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And we'll give details about how you can purchase a copy of the book. But the name of your book is

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Father Provoke Not Your Child, and this is legitimately the story of your life.

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This goes from your childhood all the way up into the very recent past.

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And here's the thing. We published it because we needed to be able to cheat, because any standard publisher probably would have taken out the

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X -Acto knife and tried to figure out how to cut like two -thirds of this work.

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But your story, the way it is told in this work, needs to be told in the long format.

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So introduce us to your book, The Father Provoke Not Your Child, and at least give us an overview of what this book is all about.

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Well, the title, of course, I don't think would make much sense just on its own. You have to actually read through the whole series of events to understand how that title actually is a recurring theme, or just keeps going on and on through my life.

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But the book actually didn't begin as an autobiography. I was approached by a medical professional to write a book about my experience with being the wife of a pedophile.

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And the professional told me that he had done a lot of searching, and there were plenty of books out there written by victims of pedophilia and so on, or child abuse, but he could not find any books that told really the feelings and emotions and the passage and the trials of family members and peripheral people who are attached to this kind of event, if you like.

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And so I began to write specifically for this person, that they could use it in their professional capacity.

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But as I began to write, I noticed that every time I wrote something about my feeling, or my emotion, or my action, or what

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I was considering I would do next, it always was in the back of my mind that it reverted to something that had previously happened.

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I was behaving, if you like, in a way, or thinking in a way, that was very much, it very much reflected my transition to who

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I was now. Had I not had previous experiences in some of the things

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I had, I may have reacted differently. I don't know that, but I suspect that's true.

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And I suspect it's true of a lot of people's lives. The way we are, or the way we react to something, is very much dependent on how we got to this place.

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And I don't know about other people, but I'm a little obsessive in some ways, people would say in many ways, but I watch a news broadcast at night and I see a victim or a person that's reiterating the events that have happened in the news, and I'm always thinking, what brought you to this place?

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What events happened in that morning that made you get on that plane, or that caused you to get on that particular train, or turn at that particular intersection?

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I'm always concerned with the prior events. What brought that person to that point?

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And so as I was writing, that very much became a theme for me. I kept wanting to explain to the person who would be reading about this, why

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I reacted this way? What had brought me to this point? Why I was thinking in the way I was?

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And so I would go back, and then I found myself going back further, and further, and further, and until I got back to, it was like, you know,

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Charles Dickens, I am born. I was right back at the beginning.

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And the other thing that very much, I think, became a point with me was that people began to use the tragedy, and I'll call it a tragedy because it's nothing less than that, in our lives for their own benefit.

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So there were preachers, if you like, in the church, in many churches, using our family tragedy for their own benefit, and there were others, other individuals, using it to promote themselves.

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And so I began to take a closer look at these people and what they were doing, and social media is a helpful tool these days, but it is a very dangerous tool as well, as you know.

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And I began to see and notice things that had slipped by me before, and that there were people using other anecdotes from my life, infiltrating them into their lives to use to promote themselves, or worse still, using those anecdotes and inserting themselves into the anecdote as the person to whom it actually occurred.

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And so I began to take notice. I was not a user of social media. I was new to computers.

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I don't even like technology, as you all well know. So I began to take notice, and what

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I found was horrifying. It brought me to tears many times.

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It made me angry. It made me sad, but I decided that I had to heed my very wise father's words, and he always told me, do not identify a problem unless you are prepared to be part of the solution.

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He always told me that. So I knew I had to do something about it.

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So I began to fight back, and fighting back was something I'd done all my life, so that was not funny.

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Yeah, so the book itself, I mean, it covers your time as a

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Roman Catholic, as a little girl. It covers your time as a young adult, and a young mother, and a divorcee.

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It covers the time when you were, you know, later in life, when you were married, had, you know, still children in the house, and your husband, unbeknownst to you, was a pedophile.

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And along the way, each of the chapters of your life, there is an ongoing wrestling match that you have rhetorically with God.

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And so the churches that you were attending, each of them kind of flavors your perspective of God, and how, and your perspective of what you were suffering in each of these different parts of your life.

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But along the way, you're going to know in the book, we don't try to clean up your theology in each of these periods.

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You know, we kind of let it stand as a testament to what you were believing, and how you perceive

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God was like in the midst of all of this. But I would note that for the people who watch

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Fighting for the Faith, that there were some pretty well -known pastors who knew that you were being abused, who knew about the the criminal activity of your husband, and did nothing to to assist you.

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And so a big undercurrent, especially in the, you is really about men like Phil Pringle, it's men like Brian Houston, another pastor at C3 Church, Simon McIntyre, and others, and names like this.

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Your life gets woven into the tapestry of these false churches.

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And one of the things I've noticed is that bad theology, oftentimes people are very laissez -faire in their attitude regarding bad theology.

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But in your case, this bad theology legitimately led to like devastating consequences for you, and for members of your family.

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So much so that seeking justice has been a very difficult thing for you to do, because some of these pastors have actually stood in the way of you getting the justice that you need because of what you've been made to suffer.

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Tell us a little bit about that, you know, so that people can understand that this is a major portion of this actual book.

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Well, as I was just explaining, everything led to this particular event, and everything

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I'd experienced before played into this event, if you like. But as a child, baptized

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Roman Catholic and educated in a closed -order convent, very strict convent,

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I only ever heard that God, the Father, was a big angry

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God waiting to punish me for everything I did.

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We measured sins. I can't even explain to you strongly enough the times that we spent in catechism class, and that was a couple of hours a day studying catechism, a day.

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Everything else went by the wayside. I remember classes where we discussed when a venial sin becomes a mortal sin.

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So, for instance, in theft, at what point if you steal a shilling, it was in those days, or is that a venial sin?

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Yes. If it goes up to one in six, have you committed a mortal sin? Well, not yet, but you know, and we would sit there for hours discussing with the nuns, or they telling us what is and what is not, the crossover into a more serious sin, and all this rotten, stupid theology, all based on the fact that we're waiting for God to punish us.

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It was all about punishment and anger, and so that was always my belief about God, that he was just this big, angry, white -haired, white -beaded man in the sky.

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I always sort of saw him as the guy in the Sistine Chapel frescoes, you know, pointing that big finger at me, and so my life was just, and I was a very obsessive child, and I don't deny that for a moment.

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I've always been obsessive about everything I did, and that again has played into, it's become a very good thing for me, because it's allowed me to concentrate on what

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I have to do in this fight for justice. So, you know, I'm not complaining that I was obsessive.

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It helped me be a good athlete and achieve many things in my life that I wouldn't have otherwise.

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So being obsessive is not necessarily a bad thing, but being obsessive when it comes to religion, or when it came to religion for me, that was a bad thing, because I spent hours and hours each day trying to please

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God, because I was so scared of him. And I have to say this, and make this very clear, it was only when

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I met you and spoke to you that there was one word you said about God that I had never, ever, ever heard describe him in my entire life.

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And that was the word kind. God is kind. I never heard that. And that was a really incredible, light bulb moment for me.

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I found it hard to accept. I sort of thought about it for days and days and days, and that started to flip my thinking, if you like.

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I started to see God in another way. But until then, my idea of God was always that he was just the ultimate judge.

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He was the one that was, and he wasn't a kind judge. He was, he wasn't a really fair judge.

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He just, he had his favorites. The nuns and the priests were favorites. They were all going straight to heaven.

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No passing into purgatory on the way. They got straight there. Which is something incidentally that, and it is in my book, that caused me to think that the only way that I could ever get to heaven was to become a nun.

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So I even pursued that thought. But you know,

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I just never saw God as kind. And so when I later in life became involved with Pentecostal or charismatic churches, this filtered into my thinking then.

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Because they were no different. They were, they were using a couple of fancy phrases and so on along the way, but they were also telling me that God was there to judge me.

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Unless I was totally submissive, he was going to judge me. I had to be a submissive wife.

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I had to be a submissive congregant member. And because I wanted to work so hard at trying to be the best

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I could be, because that was always my training, I just kept failing and failing and failing.

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You can't be best for God. You can't. It doesn't work that way. But they certainly played into it.

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And I think they play into it with a lot of people. It's, there are many, many disaffected

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Catholics, Roman Catholics in these churches. Yeah, I've noticed that Roman Catholic guilt is a thing.

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It's like, it's a rampant part of their culture. And no confidence whatsoever in their salvation.

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And as a result of the fact that they've kind of papered over the Gospel with so many other doctrines, it's hard to find it in Rome.

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So when you made the transition to, from kind of Roman Catholic, you had been out of the

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Church for a while. You ended up, was it initially a uniting

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Church that you were at first? And then from there, you found

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Christian City Church. I have to interrupt you, Chris. I did go to a uniting

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Church when I was in my teenage years. Then I left the Church for some time.

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When I began to search for this distant God, I actually sat in my house one night and made phone calls, got the phone book out and made phone calls to all the churches in the area and asked them, what are your rules?

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And then I picked the uniting Church because they seemed to have the least of all the rules, and I'd had enough rules in the

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Church. So that's how I came back to the uniting Church. It seemed to be the least strict, if you like.

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Okay. So, and then from the uniting Church, did you, you ended up in Christian City Church, which people now call

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C3. So how did you go from a uniting Church into Christian City Church?

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I got a leaflet in my mailbox telling me how wonderful life could be, and now we can solve all your problems, and we're all about family, and it tapped into the very thing that was a problem for me.

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I was suffering abuse from my husband, as were my daughter, and it wasn't me alone, it was the whole family.

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But they seemed to have all the answers in one little leaflet.

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So I decided to go along and see what it was all about. All right, and who was your pastor there?

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Pastor Gary Dench. I really feel terrible giving him that title, and I'm not being overdramatic here, but for people to carry that title and then behave the way they do,

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I really find offensive. He is no pastor at all, as I found out to my own detriment.

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Now, here's where I want to kind of make an interesting observation. When you follow social media today, there are a lot of people whose identities, and as individuals, and this is,

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I would note, predominantly among women, that their identities are wrapped up in their previous abuses.

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So if they were married to an abusive husband, or they had an abusive spiritual encounter in a bad church or whatever, everything kind of gets identified, and moving forward, it's almost like everything about them has to be filtered through the abuse that they've suffered.

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One of the things I've noticed in your telling of the story, in what has happened to you, is unlike some of these other people, you're not this big advocate whose entire identity and persona online is identified and defined by these punctuated episodes of legitimate, over -the -top abuse from your husband, and even the spiritual abuse that you suffered from several different denominations,

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Roman Catholicism and C3 Church and other places. So how is it that you've gone through all of these terrible experiences, and you're not out there kind of raging against systemic spiritual abuse and screaming at the top of your lungs, down with the patriarchy and stuff like this?

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I think that's pretty simple to answer, because the fact of the matter is

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I'm responsible for my poor choices and my poor decisions. No one else is.

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I am. They're ultimately my responsibility, and I think, probably again, my dear father was just, he raised me with such a decent moral code.

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I think that I just realized that these things are because of the decisions

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I've made, not anybody else's made, and I don't like the word victim.

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I think it really is a very, very negative word. I don't like it at all.

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I also object to, and it's just rampant in the church today and even amongst people that call themselves pastors,

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I've made mistakes. We're hearing Brian Houston say that all the time now, I've made mistakes.

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I wish the word mistake could be just taken out of the dictionary, because there are no mistakes, or if there are, they're just so few and far between they'd be hard to identify.

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They're poor decisions and poor choices. Nobody else took the leaflet out of the mailbox and looked at it like I did and said, well,

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I want to try this because it's promising me something. I didn't look at that leaflet and think, oh, wow,

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I could really get to know God better if I went to this church. I looked at that leaflet, and I thought to myself, this may offer something that's good for me.

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So who's responsible for that? Nobody else, just me. And you learn every single bad choice or bad decision that you make, you learn from it, you take away the positive from it, and you move on, and that becomes a very valuable part of your history and your decision making process in future events,

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I think. Okay, now, so you got an advertisement, a leaflet in the mail, you decided to attend

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Christian City Church. How long were you there before you were cleaning Gary Dench's house?

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Months. I wasn't cleaning his house, I was wallpapering it. Wallpapering, okay.

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Wallpapering. These pastors, and he's certainly not alone in this, this is something that's very common in these churches, especially in that C3 movement, of which

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I can speak from first -hand experience and other people that I knew, but they use people to do the grunt work and to get free services, if you like.

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And it's always tainted with, well, you're doing this for God, you know, this is

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God's work, and this is how you prove that you're one of God's special people.

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Come and wallpaper my house. And certainly, C3 had a

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Bible college very close to the church and where I live, and I knew many students from there, and I'm telling you the stories that some of those young women told me of the things, the work that they had to do free of charge.

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It's heartbreaking, and it's abuse. It's straight out abuse. Right. So, you were voluntold to wallpaper his house, right?

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Is that how that works? Not his complete house. His main area that was problematic appeared to be his toilet.

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Am I allowed to say that? You just did. We're just going to go with it. It's YouTube.

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He had a toilet area, a WC room, that required wallpapering.

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And he invited me to come to his house after church one Sunday. And if you're invited to the pastor's house, this is a big deal in Pentecostal and charismatic churches generally, because they set themselves quite apart from the congregation.

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So when I went to his house, he and his wife took me through and showed me the areas that they wanted wallpapered.

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And I had a lot of experience in that area, in home decorating and so on. And they took me into the areas and asked me if I would be willing to do it.

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And I explained to them that it was a very simple chore, and I could tell them how many rolls of wallpaper they needed and so on.

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And I could give them a few pointers, but they could do it themselves. But they wouldn't hear of it. They wanted me to know that this was

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God's work I was doing. And it was made very clear to me by attitudes, body language, just the atmosphere of the whole conversation, that if I didn't do this, there would be repercussions.

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Dench was not averse to mentioning things that upset him about people from the pulpit on Sunday in his sermons.

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I didn't want to be one of those people. So I said, yes, I would do it.

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But it was a terrible day for me, because as people were reading the book, what was going on in my own life, incidentally, that he knew about, but still required me to come and do this.

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What was going on in my own life made this a hundred times worse than it ever needed to be.

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And it is, as I said, reiterated the whole instance in my book. But I remember putting my head down on the toilet seat that day and sobbing.

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I was so distressed. I was saying over and over to myself,

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God, I cannot do this. I cannot do it. Please help me. And all I could hear outside were the sounds of people enjoying themselves and children screaming and laughing and having a great time, because Dench was having a barbecue for his friends.

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And I was sitting in there, wallpapering this toilet area. And my own children, who

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I spent little time with, because I had a couple of jobs myself to keep the family going. They were sitting at home without me.

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Now, that should have been a big red flag for me. And I think it was.

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But again, I ignored the signs. And I think a lot of people in the charismatic and Pentecostal movements do this, or in bad churches generally.

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You ignore the signs because you want it to be different. So again, my decision, my poor choice, nobody else's.

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But I did meet other women over time. Unfortunately, not in time for me, but over time,

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I met other women who have been asked to work on their pastor's house also. So why these men who are earning thousands and thousands of dollars can't go and get a professional to do their work on their house is beyond me.

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But they use the women. And Chris, might I say, and this is a problem with many churches, and I don't think it's peculiar to that particular movement.

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Women who are struggling as single mothers, or they're raising families on their own for one reason or another, seem to be a target for many of these churches.

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And I often wondered about that in one particular church I was at where I was constantly asked to clean the toilets.

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And found myself alone doing that chore many times in very big churches.

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And I mentioned it to another lady at one stage, and she said, but you've got nothing else to do. You haven't got a husband.

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And I couldn't follow that logic, because that's clearly the way these people think.

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Well, we'll ask them because they've got nothing else to do. I thought single mothers are the most financially stretched and time -stretched people

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I've ever met. And I had five children at home.

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That's a lot of work on its own. Nothing else to do. All right.

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So, and we've talked about this before, while you were attending these charismatic

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Pentecostal churches, you were also being physically and verbally abused by your husband.

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How did the pastors of those churches do in helping you in the midst of your abuse?

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Helping me is an interesting phrase. You can think of it as facetious as you want, because I know that they didn't.

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But that's kind of the point. They not only didn't help you, they actually made things worse.

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I'm sorry. It's such an emotional issue for me, and it's interesting that all these years later, I'm still emotional about it.

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They instructed me that I had to submit to my husband, and that if I was a less rebellious wife, that is,

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I asked a lot of questions, and if I was more submissive, he would feel no need to abuse me.

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So that's the tool that they use constantly. He wasn't, as far as I know, and I have to say that, as far as I know, because there's so much

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I don't know about their interaction with him. I doubt that he was ever rebuked for what he did.

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He was certainly never given anger management training or anything of that description.

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I have to be clear here that that's been confirmed to me by other members of the church as well, that even in speaking to other members of the church, this pastor,

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Gary Dench, blamed me. Always blamed me. Now at one stage,

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I just have to give you some background here. This is a story with so much background that's important, but Dench was probably the biggest gossip

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I've ever come across in my life, bar none, and yet publicly he always says,

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I will never tell anybody secrets. I can't reveal the secrets of people who come to me and everything. But on the other hand, he was renowned gossip.

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He even crept into his sermons and so forth. So he was gossiping to people at a time when certain things were happening in my family, telling them that I was withholding sex from my husband.

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Chris, nothing could have been further from the truth. I adored my husband. I would have liked nothing better than for him to show an interest in me, but his interests were elsewhere, as we now know, with the benefit of hindsight.

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But for Gary Dench to be telling people that was wicked, so wicked and evil, and that story came to me from several different people.

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And I have it in writing, so for him to deny it would be very interesting.

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Now, did he ever, with his eyeballs, witness you being physically assaulted by your husband?

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He did. He did several times. And at this stage, part of the story is

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I've been estranged from everybody. Abusers do that. I was estranged from my family, from my friends, from everybody.

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The only society I knew was this church and any connections

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I made there. And I can't call anybody in that church really a friend.

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They were just associates. They're not really people that I was friendly with.

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I wasn't going to their place for dinner and things like that. So I had nowhere else to go.

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And a couple of times when the abuse got so bad, and again, to fill you in, my husband, the abuser, had been a police officer and all of his contacts in the police department were still very strong.

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So I couldn't go to the police. I had literally nowhere to turn. So I turned to Gary Dench.

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And on a couple of occasions, he did come to our home. The final occasion that he came to our home,

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I had phoned him. I had run to a phone box through the streets in the dark because I couldn't phone from home because I was afraid my husband would hear me.

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So I sneaked out and ran to the phone box and phoned his home and told his wife actually that I was being abused.

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Again, physically abused, and it was quite serious. And things began to escalate about that time.

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Now, it got so bad that I think Dench couldn't hide it within the congregation anymore.

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So he decided to come to our house one night to, gosh,

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I hesitate to use the word council because he wouldn't have a clue in the world. But he decided to come and speak to us, to my husband and I.

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Now, my husband had been at home for some time, but by the arranged time at night, my husband had come home from work.

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He worked locally. He was at home relaxing, watching TV. I had been working in the city, taking a couple of hours to get home.

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I was exhausted, and I came into the house, and there were three of them waiting for me.

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So there was Dench, his assistant pastor, Ian Tracy, and my husband.

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I was very, I'm not going to say angry, but I was very confused, upset.

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I sat down and listened to them start to preach to me about how my marriage should be. And of course, it was always skewed with the fact that it was me who was the problem.

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So after I sat there and listened to them lecture me, and they shouldn't have been in that position, three men speaking at a woman, not speaking to her, but speaking at a woman was quite, was not right at all.

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It was quite out of order. So again, I felt surrounded and abused. And I made a comment that I don't know that I regret.

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It was just made out of ignorance. But I looked at Dench, and I said, well, one thing's for sure now.

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I'm quite positive that God doesn't have the attributes of a man and a woman. He's clearly a man, because no woman would ever behave like you fellows have tonight.

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And Tracy immediately sprung into the conversation and told me that I had then committed the most heinous of all crimes, unforgivable.

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I just blasphemed the Holy Spirit. Matthew No, you didn't. Wow. Jane And I knew from my

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Bible that that was the unforgivable sin. So I knew that I had done the wrong thing. That night.

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I ended up running from the house. And I won't go into the details.

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But I came to a dangerous situation in the streets that night.

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I then ran back to the house. And all I could think of was I had four boys and a girl at that stage.

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And I thought, I have to get my little girl out of this away from these men. That was my thinking. And as odd as it may sound to other people, when they read the book, they'll understand what brought me to this point.

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And I picked up my little girl just a couple of years old.

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And they attempted to stop me leaving the house with her. And my husband attacked me.

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He pushed me across the room and I fell with a little girl went into the air and fell on the floor.

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I hit my mouth side of my mouth on a marble top coffee table on the way down. And they just stood there.

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That's not my husband. He was the abuser. But the two pastors just stood there. No expression, no movement.

38:47

And I stood up and I said, Well, now you've seen it for yourselves. And they said to me, all

38:53

I've seen is a rebellious wife. They offered no assistance, no nothing.

39:01

It escalated again. Then when I went to one of the bedrooms to speak to the boys, they all followed me.

39:10

My husband attacked me again a very serious attack. And they just stood at the doorway and watched.

39:17

Not a word. Nothing. They're the most abhorrent of human beings and a disgrace to to mankind because they're calling themselves pastors, but pastors are not.

39:32

I've known many, many in my life who are not pastors who would never have allowed that situation to occur.

39:39

But, but of course, the thing that we have to remember with these people is that they lie.

39:45

They lie as easily as they breathe. And they will deny, deny, deny everything that you ever say about them.

39:55

Because that's the way they behave. Yeah. Now, unbeknownst to you at this time, your husband was sexually abusing one of your sons.

40:07

And Gary Dench became aware of what was happening.

40:17

He knew what was occurring. And what did he do to stop the abuse?

40:25

The reason I ask is because right now, Brian Houston is on trial for not reporting his father.

40:35

So I'm assuming that there are mandatory reporting laws and things like this, as it relates to child sexual abuse.

40:41

What did Gary Dench do when he became aware of what was happening to your son?

40:51

Well, in all this time, you know, in all, in these incidents that I've just related to you, I had no idea about this abuse.

40:58

This, this, this was revealed some time later, some years later, actually. But, but Dench knew.

41:07

And that was only revealed to me years later too. Whether there are mandatory laws or not relating to this, and they've only come in in later years, there has always been the crime in the

41:21

Criminal Code of the misprision of a felony. You cannot cover up a felony. That is a crime.

41:28

And child abuse is a felony. The rape of a child is a felony. So there's no question that Dench was committing a crime in covering this up.

41:39

But he, he knew about it and did nothing with,

41:46

I had no clue, and it's hard for people to understand that. But again, when they read the book, they'll understand the, the atmosphere that you're living in and why you don't know about these things.

41:56

And abusers are very clever, very, very clever. But when this was finally revealed to me by my son, he, the abuse,

42:09

I mean, at the same time, I, I, well, I guess I was in shock.

42:14

I think that would be fair to say. But I asked my son, why did you come to me? Why didn't you tell me? And he, he said, you wouldn't have believed me.

42:22

Now, that's not true. I most certainly would have believed him. I defended him through a lot of things through his life.

42:30

Nevertheless, I then asked him, well, why didn't you go to someone? And he said, I did. I said, who did you go to?

42:36

He said, Gary Dench, Pastor Gary Dench. And it was, and then the floodgates opened.

42:43

And I, and I began to find out how many years before he had gone to Dench, that Dench knew that all the time

42:51

I was in his church, and we were sitting in his pews, he knew what my husband was doing to my children, and to particularly this one lad.

43:00

And he never said a word, not to me, but perhaps to others.

43:08

So the very, that was told to me, was revealed to me, disclosed by my son one night.

43:14

The following morning, I phoned Dench at his home. And of course, caught him by surprise, because by then

43:21

I had left his church. After that incident of the abuse in my house that night that he witnessed, we didn't attend his church much after that.

43:31

And I left with the children, and eventually, I guess my husband did. But I had his home phone number, and it was a silent number, because only the privileged are allowed to have the numbers of these pastors.

43:46

And we were privileged when I first came into his church, because we were now a big family of what, six, seven people, you know, this is a big thing in a small church.

43:59

So I had his home phone number, and I used it, and caught him by surprise. So that phone call, and the transcription of that phone call is in my book, and it is nothing short of shocking, absolutely shocking.

44:16

It's been stated and sworn to in police statements. It's been sworn to at the

44:21

Royal Commission. Gary Dench has never denied to me what he said.

44:28

Now, he gets up in church, I understand, or has from time to time, and denied it in front of his congregation.

44:36

And, you know, they call the person that's making these charges a nutter, or, you know, they're possessed, they have all sorts of excuses.

44:47

The fact is, nothing will ever change what he said to me in that phone call that morning.

44:53

And he admitted that he knew about it, he admitted that had been disclosed to him by my husband and by my son, they had both spoken to him about it.

45:04

And I asked him, why didn't you tell me? Chris, I just kept thinking of all the abuse my children and I had taken over the years while that man knew.

45:15

It could have been stopped, I would have left immediately, because pedophilia is a deal breaker, you know, a lot of women take it.

45:23

It's a sexual sin that is biblical grounds for divorce, for sure. Exactly.

45:29

Well, you know, I had considered divorcing my husband from time to time, but kept being told by all these wonderful Christians, who are so centered on just giving you a little specific part of a chapter and verse that they think is relevant, that the only reason you can divorce is on the grounds of adultery.

45:55

Well, I knew my husband, otherwise, again, in my book, I knew he had not committed adultery. Or I thought

46:02

I did. But he had. He committed adultery with my son. So I had the means to get out of that marriage and was being tied by this law, no gospel, just law.

46:17

And Dench just admitted it, said he knew all about it. And I asked him, why didn't you tell me?

46:24

And you know what he said? Frankly, Carrie, it was none of your business. They were his exact words planted on my memory forever.

46:38

It was none of your business. I was fighting to hold my marriage together, fighting to try to get the attention of my husband, fighting to stop the abuse of me and my children.

46:51

And this man carried this secret and had the audacity to tell me it was none of my business.

46:59

And I asked him what because remember, I'd only had it disclosed a few hours early, so I was still in shock.

47:07

And and frankly, I have to tell you, I didn't really assume Dench would admit to me his part in this.

47:16

I thought he would lie, as he had on so many occasions before about so many other things to me.

47:22

I just thought he would lie. But I think that the shock value of getting this call out of the blue after a few years, he didn't have time to get a story together or anything.

47:31

That's all I can put it down to. Certainly, I don't think it was put down to his good character of telling the truth. He actually said to me that it was none of my business.

47:43

And when I asked him, well, did you do something for the boy? What did you do?

47:48

Did you get counseling? And he said, Oh, no, no, no. He said to do that would not be having faith.

47:59

Oh, gosh. So I asked him what he did do. We prayed for him.

48:06

We prayed for the boy. And we prayed for the father. See, this this conversation is planted on my mind in such sharp detail.

48:15

Even after all these years, we prayed for the boy and we prayed for the father. Yeah. And walked away.

48:25

Nothing. No help. Assistance. No going to the police. No reporting it.

48:31

Nothing. Nothing. And then later when it when and it took me and I say it took me because it was my fighting and my obsessive nature that got this matter to court in the long run.

48:47

And my husband was charged with serious offenses that were so ugly to read on a piece of paper.

48:59

And then went to court. Not not for the victim, not for my son, but for the pedophile.

49:11

And he stood up in court. Gave testimony under oath.

49:18

In a court of law. Yes, he knew about it. He knew it was moral, immoral.

49:24

He knew it was illegal. But he'd do it again. He gave this evidence in court supported in newspapers.

49:33

And this is what I do not understand about these congregations. And what makes me truly angry is that these fellows can stand in court and deny all these things happen to their hearts content.

49:46

But these things are reported in newspapers. They are they are record in the in royal commissions.

49:54

They are police record. And still these congregations sit there with silly grins on their faces and believe these fellows and applaud them and and throw money at them.

50:07

And stay and sit under their leadership. I can't understand it.

50:13

I've tried. I have made many mistakes. And I question Gary Dench from the very first day

50:19

I ever met him. Something in my spirit told me there was something not right about that man.

50:24

And I kept putting those feelings to, you know, to the side, because I wanted it to be different.

50:31

I like the church. I like the music. I like the dancing. You know, I wanted it to be different. And a lot of my friends were there.

50:38

I wanted it to be different. But, you know, had somebody ever revealed to me that a pastor had done something like this,

50:48

I've been out of that door so fast. That's that's I think there's a line that some people just draw and say that's that's a bridge too far.

50:59

But most of these people sitting in these congregations don't seem to have any boundaries. I don't care what pastor does.

51:07

You know, I reiterate time and time again, that very infamous speech, or I'd call it a sermon that Chris Pringle gave me, and I think it was

51:17

San Diego. The most disgusting, despicable thing

51:23

I have ever heard a pastor say, from stage. And I just can't believe that it's, you know, the computer allows us to, to hear this, the history is there for us.

51:38

And that people could actually hear that, and still turn up to his church next week, and not only applaud him, but you can hear that the cackling of the women, and I can only call it that, as they laugh and giggle along with this silly man.

51:54

And he tells the story, and this is particularly relevant for me now, because I think, had

52:00

I known he was that kind of man before, I wouldn't have gone to him for assistance.

52:08

But he tells them, don't come to me. I'm not a counselor. Don't come to me for counseling.

52:14

I think he says, because you'll only end up worse than ever. And tells a story of a woman that came into his, came to him for counseling.

52:22

He said, I put my head in my hands, and I went to sleep.

52:28

And I woke up a few minutes later, and she was still talking. And when I heard that, Chris, I was mortified.

52:36

I went to him for help. I could have been that woman. And my child had been raped.

52:43

And this is his attitude to people who come to him for help. And he clearly said in that speech, don't come to me.

52:52

I have not got an empathetic bone in my body. What a wicked thing for a man who wears the title of pastor to even admit to anybody.

53:04

And he said, I don't do meetings. I don't do counseling. I don't do this.

53:10

I don't do that. I wonder what he does do. That's a good question.

53:18

That takes everything off the table already that a pastor is supposed to do.

53:24

Exactly. But he did something much worse, because he was part of a fraud in all of this.

53:33

And that, again, is detailed in my book. And if people are not shocked by what he did, along with his friend,

53:41

Simon McIntyre, also now calls himself a pastor, well, then

53:47

I can only say people will get what they deserve. Yeah. And here's the thing.

53:54

We've just barely scratched the surface of what is in your book.

54:01

And so, the best way I can put it is that we published this with all of the grueling details.

54:11

And we did a long form memoir, because we truly believed that this would actually be helpful for people who are struggling with similar circumstances.

54:23

And the hope is that the pain and suffering that Kerry has gone through will help, will assist others to spot this type of abuse, these types of red flags, so that people can make decisions to leave some of these bad churches or identify abusers in their own life, whether they be a spiritual abusing pastor like Gary Dench or Phil Pringle, or even

54:55

Brian Houston, because he makes a cameo in your book as well. But this book deals with so many dark issues, but it walks people through these dark seasons of your life in a way where they may be able to spot that what you went through is what they're going through, so that they can kind of fast forward and figure out how to get out of some of this stuff.

55:22

So, but like I said, you and I, we've barely even scratched the surface of what's in this book.

55:32

And police corruption, you know? Oh yeah, that's a whole other bit to all this total police corruption.

55:41

But the problem was, because I didn't know who God really was, all

55:47

I did was for all of these decades, shout and scream at him, do something, do something.

55:54

Why aren't you helping me? And it was only when I finally came to the end of a very long road that I looked back and saw he was there all the time.

56:07

He was always there, holding me up and helping me through things that no one could have survived had he not been there.

56:17

So, it's a story of faith. Yep. It's a story of corruption and the faithfulness of God, even when you did not properly perceive what

56:28

God was doing. He seemed far away, but he was with you walking that whole stretch.

56:35

So, I don't want to give away too much more, but the best way

56:40

I can put it is that you need to get the book, you need to read the book, and it's going to take you some time to read it.

56:47

The name of the book, again, is Father Provoked, Not Your Child, and we're going to put a link down below in the description, which is going to take you to a website called

56:57

Lulu. We chose to publish it through Lulu. We're still waiting for approval from several other platforms for the book to be made available for sale, but right now you can purchase it at Lulu.

57:11

It's an EPUB format, so you'll need an e -book reader to read it. We do have plans in the future to publish it also as a paperback, but it'll be a phone book when we publish it as a paperback.

57:30

But right now, you can get the book, and if this sounds like something that you need to read, then you actually need to get it.

57:36

It's not an expensive book. It's only $9 .95 US, and whatever that translates to in your part of the world.

57:45

But a book that we believe would really be a great resource for people around the world that are suffering from spiritual abuse, physical abuse, even political corruption and police corruption, that also takes it.

58:01

Kerry, you're the expert when it comes to all kinds of corruption, because you don't have theoretical knowledge of this stuff.

58:09

You actually have lived it. I remember as we were editing this book,

58:15

I was thinking, how are you even alive? Two chapters of your book would have done a whole lot of people in, but that's just two chapters of 33 chapters of your book, and each of these instances, each of the difficulties that you've gone through, again,

58:37

God was completely faithful. And my thanks to you and your whole team who allowed this book to be published in its entirety, because any short version of it would not have been the truth.

58:57

The facts would have been, but it wouldn't have been the truth. And with your courage,

59:02

Chris, because you stepped into an area that no one else was prepared to step into.

59:09

I thank you for that. Well, we were told by multiple people we needed to cut this thing down, and I said, no.

59:21

And the best way I can put it is that if you guys remember back in the day, there used to be television programs, and every television program was like a one -off, okay?

59:30

Or you think of a movie, a movie is like a one -off story. But now we have Netflix, and Netflix has series, and you can binge watch.

59:39

So, this book is like a Netflix series, and it's probably like three seasons of a

59:45

Netflix series. It's kind of that big. I think it puts Shogun to shame as far as its length is concerned.

59:52

But now I'm dating myself. But Carrie, I want to thank you for the service that you're bringing to the body of Christ in putting this out.

01:00:03

And also, thank you for your candidness in opening up, because this is the kind of stuff that one might be reticent to want to share with the world, and you're willing to walk us through so many of these dark episodes of your life for the purpose of helping people so that they can identify what's going on in their life and maybe get help as a result of it.

01:00:32

And I will note this, and that is that in the book itself, at the end of the book, there is an email address that if after reading it, you need help, or you want to reach out to Carrie for the purpose of communicating with her to kind of sort through maybe something difficult that you're going through, there is an email address that only

01:00:51

Carrie is going to get that you can actually contact the author.

01:00:57

So, there is an actual email address for you to be able to contact Carrie in it. But Carrie, thank you for this little tiny tidbit of a preview of an interview with you.

01:01:07

Again, it's like, when you read the book, everyone's going to go, oh my goodness, they didn't even barely talk about anything.

01:01:15

But that's kind of the difficulty here. It's like, I feel like we've talked about one episode in a long series of events, but that's the part that I might, it piques people's interest, but they need to get the book and walk through it.

01:01:32

So, thank you for your time. And I pray that this book will do all the things that we hope it will do for people.

01:01:41

Thank you very much. I hope it encourages others too, Chris. Thank you. Indeed. Let me,

01:01:46

I'm going to sign off here and then we'll chat for a second here. So, if you found this helpful, or you'd like to get a copy of the book, the name of the book is

01:01:55

Father Provoked, Not Your Child. And there's a link down below for you to get it via Lulu.

01:02:03

And it's only $9 .95. It's currently in ePub. And so, if you have a computer, or you all have computers because you're watching this on YouTube, or an iPad or a tablet device, or even a phone, you can get it and it works perfectly through that.

01:02:20

And it's immediate download, total fulfillment immediately. And this is a resource that we believe that will be a great value for you and for others, especially if you're dealing with spiritual abuse, physical, sexual abuse, or even police corruption and political corruption.

01:02:38

It's all part of this. So again, the name of the book, Father Provoked, Not Your Child, link is down below.

01:02:45

And until next time, 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.