Embedded Files
No sooner have we got back to Second Life, and reacquainted ourselves with the circle of friends on Truth, but something happened that focussed our attention. A new "Minister" had arrived with a "mission" to beat all.He was, in real life, Carl Honeycutt but calling himself Carlton Homewood and his SL wife (in real life Brenda) was Breee Homewood.
These facts, however, were only discovered by months of patient searching and investigation because this couple - despite claiming to be ministers of a church in Kansas - wouldn't tell anyone who they were. According to his online profile, they were members of a church in Olathe, Kansas but no amount of Googling could find it, and they refused to tell anyone where it was! (He was not a pastor and the church did not exist.)
He came over, from the first, as a know-it-all whom nobody could cross. His plan was simple - take over the whole of the Christian sims on SL, ALL of them, and buy thousands of properties, build hundreds of new churches, all in order to stand ready for the "millions of converts" that were going to flood in!! You might say that nobody in their right mind would go along with this scheme but sadly, it rang bells with California Condor and many others - not only on Truth but elsewhere in the Christian SL community.
They'd already been longing for power and glory and this was a ready-made was to get it!
What is The Call 777?
Official Website for "The Call"
From the title of this page, you'll see the connection to something called 777. The year was 2007. Supposedly, on the seventh of July that year, something BIG was going to happen that would precipitate a massive shift in world religion, resulting in the church being flooded by converts all around the world.
Carlton came onto SL to prepare to minister to these new converts, certain in his own mind that the 777 plan was a "great move of God". Nothing could sway him. Worse, little by little he began to persuade others to join in the lunacy until almost everyone we spoke to was tagging along. Anyone who did not was seen as an "outsider" - in a cult-like way, those "in the Carlton group" were somehow special, on a higher spiritual level and scathing of anyone who dared to disagree. The cult-like elements increased as time went by. Not only did Carlton start acting as a controlling cult leader who was not open to question, but he and his followers started standing around in groups "love-bombing" those who visited the sim. You were either FOR them or you were an outsider, seen as a potential threat.
Now, everytime we went onto Truth, a notecard popped up about 777, and a free tee-shirt emblazened with "070707 IT'S COMING" was dropped into our inventory. All the christian sims were displaying posters advertising this event (and alongside it the JAMPL project, about which I'll speak in a moment.) The claims were so grandiose that most thinking people would find them ludicrous - such as the claim that the fasting and prayer on the 7th July would "bring back the Lord", and it was being called "The Lord's Day" in some advertisements.
As a Christian Minister of many years experience in the discernment field, I had already encountered this and other such false teachings, and dealt with them in articles on my website. I had gone to Secondlife for relaxation and fellowship, as an individual not as a minister, and I was dismayed to find the same heresies popping up on there. However, once I began to understand what the 777 scheme was all about and who was behind it,
I couldn't remain silent and let Christians be deceived. That would have been selfish of me. I could have protected myself from opposition and eventual rejection, but warning other Christians was more important than my personal safety zone. So I started to speak out to any who would listen.
JAMPL and Adam Soler
JAMPL and Adam Soler
In May of 2007, around the same date that Carlton Homewood (Carl Honeycutt) and his followers started their takeover campaign of Secondlife Christian churches ("unity" being the buzzword for this plot) a cocky young student calling himself Adam Soler arrived on the scene to set up a unification project for "all Christian media" on and off Secondlife. It was a hugely over-ambitious (not to say pompous) scheme allied closely to the 777 project - indeed Adam was the designer for the new church sims that they were constructing.
Adam is in real life Adam Fairhead, from Stoke on Trent, England, working as a designer and creative artist, and in Secondlife today as a clothes salesman. This is in stark contrast to his over-weening plan to combine "all" Christian media in a network based on his JAMPL website (now dead.) His information notecard given out in 2007 (and penned by Carl's wife Brenda) said:Jampl is a project which has a focus on bringing together SL christian projects in-world, to help, empower and unite our efforts for Christ. There are many christian projects in SL, all with various intentions; Jampl aims to unite the leaders of these projects ... Through the Jampl board, [a] need will be understood, and all projects and their leaders who can help in that need, will acknowledge the problem and take appropriate action to find resolution...It is this synergy between projects that is the very core of Jampl - to unite SL christian work, to help, empower and unite our efforts for Christ.
The digital christian world is a vast one. ... Wouldn't it be great if there was 'something' to unify this world of ideas? To bring it all together; something that you could search through, full of links and networks to other christian resources. Jampl aims to be that 'something'. Jampl, as a charity, needs people to donate what they can. It will operate entirely on donations.
One of the first manifestations of "bringing the leaders together" to "deal with problems" was the disgraceful hounding of Pastor Bamaisin and the circulation of gossip against him suggesting that he was in sexual sin and needed to repent. We will learn more of these attacks later.
Adam himself described his vision to us as a "Community project, a network that will unite digital christian media across the Internet. It can be called a database, a network, a community-driven resource which is searchable for christian and nonchristian users and which brings everything to a level playing field." Carlton saw the potential of this enthusiast and welcomed him to the "BOARD" they had set up to organise the land purchases, financial backing, advertising and links to public media. In their minds, this thing was going to be so HUGE that it would impact every Christian around the world!Adam Soler was not a man to be stopped. So full of his vision was he that he brooked no opposition and threw all caution to the winds. I myself warned him that he was about to learn "the hard way" which indeed he did. He and Carlton eventually fell off their perches in public disgrace and the Jampl project and site went from the first glorious vision, to begging letters to save the sim from going down, to utter dereliction, in a short space of time. His website, designed to be the very hub of all Christian networking on the Internet, is defunct.
Greed, Power, and Elitism!
Even to the most sympathetic of observers, it quickly appeared that the 777 and JAMPL projects were about much more than they claimed, ie "a simple day of prayer for the nation". The networking that was going on, the Board of leaders set up to monitor and steer events, the aggressive advertising and person-to-person recruiting, the pressure brought to bear on leaders of all the church sims and their members, all this was adding up to a project designed as a TAKEOVER bid - and furthermore, based on flakey prophecies about a spiritual "second coming"!!
When asked, Adam Soler confirmed that he did believe the 777 event would result in the "return of the Lord", and when I said (knowing their beliefs) "Do you mean, the Lord is returning to be IN his people rather than TO them" Adam replied "Yes, what's wrong with that?" Other questions were either dismissed with a sneer or countered with "you need to have a working relationship with God to understand..." This was a project for the Spiritual Elite, and you were either IN or OUT.
In one encounter, Garron Shepherd told us that "it's one of those things that you either "get it" or you dont...and those that don't should get out of the way of those that do!"
Most worrying of all was the amount of money involved and the lack of accountability. While playing their cards very close to their chests, networking privately on Skype with their trusted confidents, and refusing to answer simple questions about their qualifications and church, (which Adam Soler defended as being an acceptable strategy) they were covertly amassing people of power and prosperity like investment banker "Thomas Rosmer" and the very wealthy and influential development company "Brautigan and Tuck" founded by SL couple Tavi Tuck and her humanist husband IntLibber Brautigan.(see some screenshots attached below of the SL holdings of this company and the profile of its owner, whose motto is "anything worth doing, is worth doing for money")
Tavi Tuck divorced her humanist husband, and set up her own company to continue the work of land purchase and development on SL, a business that has netted some individuals real life sums of the millions of dollars. Believing as they did that SL would soon be hosting a flood of new christian converts as a result of 777, Tavi Tuck along with Adam Soler started to buy and design new sims and in her own words "there will be a church on every sim".Calliope Simon frequently made mention of the "25 million dollars" that they had claimed to be aiming for. I myself wasn't a party to that conversation and cannot confirm it, but given the level of hype I am sure she was not exaggerating. With that amount of money at stake, SL land ownership in the offing, and investment bankers on the team, it was of concern that an unknown and secretive man like Carl Honeycutt was at the head of it, posing at the 777 leader.
My Enemy's Enemy is My Friend
Oddly enough, as I have said previously, all of this moved us into a strange world where Christians became our enemies and non-Christians our allies. As the saying goes "my enemy's enemy is my friend" and so it was that some non-believers on Truth like MorelloCherry, and Calliope defended sense and logic over the idocy and arrogance of the 777 cabal, thus inadvertantly providing support for the cause. Calliope couldn't stand hypocrites like Carlton Homewood, and resented the stand he was taking on Truth and other sims, setting himself up as LEADER and GURU. Nor could she abide the tactics of Carlton's group of slavish followers (which included California Condor) - these tactic reminded her of the "Jesus Movement" of the 60's and the Moonie cult who used love-bombing as a method of manipulating the emotions of new converts.
While it would have been relatively easy to expose the shallow and false teachings of Carlton and his followers, they didn't engage in genuine debate, but verbally attacked and mocked everyone who dared to oppose them. Another common tactic was to present themselves as nice, gentle, honest, good-hearted, innocent individuals who were just trying to "get people to pray" - in other words, "butter wouldn't melt in their mouths", so that bystanders then couldn't understand why they were being opposed and "attacked" for their beliefs. Christians who had never studied the subject and knew nothing of cults and heresies, took Carlton at face value and defended him against all-comers.
Opponents are "Jezebel"
Therefore, the few opponents of Carlton became labelled as "troublemakers". The term "JEZEBEL" had often been misapplied (in these cultish groups) to anyone who withstood them - the analogy is drawn from the king and queen of Israel who withstood the prophet Elijah. Carlton and others like him see themselves as latter-day prophet Elijahs and so anybody who tries to stand in their way is the "evil harlot Jezebel" whose fate is to be cast out of the house and have her blood licked up by dogs!!!! (See this website for just one exposition of the false doctrine of Jezebel)
Carlton believed and taught that LITERAL disaster and judgement would befall anybody who "resisted the prophets" - you will see how they began to pronounce curses on anyone in SecondLife who antagonised them!
One person whom we'd met and befriended on Truth was "Pastor Bamaisin" (we affectionally called him BamBam) and although we teased him about not being a real pastor, we had a good relationship. Then we discovered that he'd been denounced and had lies circulated about him. He was reticent to give details but we found he'd been targetted in a vicious and unforgiveable way by Carlton and his team.
We spoke out in public against this kind of evil, but the momentum FOR Carlton was growing ever stronger and the few standing against him were labelled "rebels" and "troublemakers" and "griefers" because of Calliope. Any support of Calliope was seen as tantamount to being as anti-Christian as she was. (In fact it was the other way round, Calliope chose to support us in our stand against Carlton and it caused us to be allies temporarily.)
What did the ALM Ministry on Truth stand to gain?
What did the ALM Ministry on Truth stand to gain?
It's clear that anybody who believed the fantasy that the 777 project would result in "millions of converts" flooding into SecondLife would covet the massive increase in influence, membership and - last but not least - the financial benefits such an increase in membership would bring. Thus almost all the Christian sims on Second Life fell for this tommyrot! They thought that, if they went along with the "call to fast and pray" then according to the publicity a massive influx of new converts would be the result.
Carlton's land-grab, his griefing attack on Wings of Hope, his taunts and threats and behind-the-scenes manipulation
of the ALM leadership will be exposed in the next episode - HERE
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse