Adsideo Community Church is a small community-based church in southwest Portland, Oregon of about 50 full time members who all live together in communal houses. In order to become a member I joined their yearlong discipleship program but left after 4 months, unable to handle the stress and pressure any longer. These are my experiences, and a warning for anyone who is thinking of joining them. My sister also tried joining them, but left after 6 weeks, and I have used her input.
Everything else under a read more for emotional manipulation, cult mentalities, etc.
I joined Adsideo Church for a variety of reasons: their ideas of community and helping each other through hard times, their dedication to each other and God. I hoped I would have a chance to explore Christianity more and learn what I really believed in. I was also scared of being too alone and who I become if I don’t interact occasionally with people I can trust and rely on. I left 4 months after joining for several reasons: their heavy-headed emotional guilt and blackmail as a method of control; their refusal to deal with disagreement and differences; their constant insistence that while being ‘different’ wasn’t bad, you should always try to be better (a “better” which was always in likeness to what they did and how they lived). I also had theological problems with how they interpreted Jesus’ words and actions throughout his teaching and further, how we should talk and live out those actions today.
I am making these posts because when I thought about joining, I looked them up and there was literally nothing written about them except one personal blog by a woman whom I ultimately ignored because I believed the issues she had would not bother me as much. If someone is thinking of joining them, that is well and good, but I would beg you to read this and THINK HARD about if it is really for you, because it was VERY hard to leave. Joining Adsideo means you will also be asked to stay a year for their Discipleship program, which involves submission to the group ideology. If they weren’t part of a Western religion their behavior would give them ‘cult’ status instantly (even though the line between cult and accepted religion is pretty thin, but I mean about the behavior and how much pressure they put on you).
Emotional Issues
1. The collective conscious or group philosophy is very strong there; it’s the most important and basic reason I left. While I was there, I found I was gradually losing every care or motive that drove me as they pushed the collective consciousness of ‘do what we want you to, not what drives you.’ I came to feel very robotic, where things like who I was, what I enjoyed, loved, or hated didn’t matter; I had things to do for them, and that was all that mattered.
2. They use emotional guilt and blackmail to change people, hopefully for the better. It is very heavy handed and I stopped doing things I loved out of guilt because they demanded it. Questions like “do you really want to be a part of Adsideo”, “you’re not showing enough emotional growth,” and “you don’t act like you want to be a good Christian” were often asked, creating a constant and difficult pressure. Shame is also used as a huge motivator to push others into interacting or doing chores; “don’t be so lame, just join us”. I have a problem with longterm depression, was suicidal and occasionally it comes back. But I have learned to handle it in my own way, what to avoid or what to do to feel better. They wanted me to change all that because they did not like how I did things to help myself. When my sister also lived there, she had a panic attack that they handled badly. Too many people rushed her and tried to communicate with her, repeatedly asking what was wrong. Eventually they left her alone, but out of guilt and shame she could not utilize anything to help the attack pass. She tried to do certain things (rehydrate and write down her thoughts) but Pastor Jim told her that “writing down her thoughts was bad for her emotional state” and she needed to stop. Despite her knowledge of what would help her, they literally and emotionally prevented her from helping herself, believing they knew better than she did.
Behavioral Issues
1. I was literally never allowed to be alone. Everyone rooms with someone else; I had 3 (female) roommates. The houses are therefore pretty huge, with 10-14 people in a house (and 3 houses total). You are required to join everyone else at dinner time, even if you’re not hungry or feeling well (unless dying). If I tried being alone or having downtime at all (reading, going for walks, listening to music on headphones), there would be talks from the house pastor, ‘why was I avoiding them,’ ‘why was I not trying to involve myself,’ ‘why wouldn’t I spend time in the living room’ ‘was I trying to not be part of the community’ and so on. I am very introverted and although I greatly enjoyed spending time with my housemates and watching movies or playing games or whatever, I also greatly valued my time away from them and they did NOT like that.
2. They were also (unsurprisingly) very much in the heteronormative, sex equals gender, trans people are just confused etc. camp, despite being largely liberal in many other areas such as appearance, speech, and issues like birth control, medical aid, etc. They would use these norms to strongly guilt people out of behavior they disliked for being too different, such as how I didn’t look very feminine. (The talk we had about it was confusing because they couldn’t understand that I was alright with not looking feminine, “why did I not mind people assuming I was a guy, didn’t I want to be pretty?” “Oh its alright to be different, we accept you however you are. But wouldn’t you like to be accepted by other people??”)
3. It only happened a few times, but Pastor Jim would sometimes twist things and lie, not straight out, but enough to make me doubt what I had said or agreed previously, before getting a chance to think and realize he was full of bullshit. Sometimes I would use a descriptive word and he would define it as something very different than what I knew, he even pulled out his iPhone and read a dictionary for it, then claimed I obviously didn’t know what I was talking about. When I looked up the word later, it had the definition that I’d originally understood. When I told him I wanted to leave the community, we argued for hours (a very painful day that was) and the other pastors and him kept saying “you’re a quitter, why wouldn’t I stick out the rest of the year I’d promised them,” etc. Then when I was leaving, Pastor Jim talked about how “he really wished I’d only stick it 1 more month to attend a special celebration of theirs, and then I could leave if I still wanted to,” and afterwards I realized that last part was totally false; like hell they’d be all right with me leaving after that.
Theological Issues
I won’t touch on this a lot because I am definitely not versed in arguing scripture or various influential interpretations, that is not a skill I have; and they used that against me often, “you clearly don’t know the material,” “you didn’t study the passage enough”, “you didn’t pray hard enough,” etc.
1. Many of the things they spoke of left me incredibly uneasy and feeling pained and often doubted even staying a Christian. My main disagreement was that they literally believed a church body was the incarnation of the Holy Spirit from Jesus’ Ascension to heaven. The most problematic part of this is that if I ever disagreed with what they were teaching or interpreting, I was literally disagreeing with the Holy Spirit manifested by them. I am not exaggerating, this was directly asked of me by the pastors a few times and I had no response because I don’t even understand how they can believe they have that level or religious authority.
2. Their idea of love and how it is shown differed very greatly from mine, such as the belief that ‘Koinonia [community/participation] loves you because it doesn’t care about your problems’, which is a concept that was never explained well enough to my liking. They didn’t mean it in the ‘doesn’t care if you have problems, but doesn’t care what your problems are, you’re going to do what it wants of you anyway’ way.
3. Their constant self assurance that all other churches had good intentions but were weak and unfit to even be called Christian because of how they did not fully live the bible’s word. People who were not as fully dedicated to community (as Adsideo deems it) could not call themselves Christians because they obviously they didn’t truly care about others and live as the bible was telling them to.
I hope this was enlightening, if you ever have questions on my experiences or the church, go ahead and ask me