SGM Survivors Temporary Communications Page

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Southern White Faced Owl

We do not know what has happened to SGM Survivors. It is very difficult to *forget* to pay your domain name fees since the companies bug you incessantly for months with warnings. If we hear anything (or you do) we will pass along the information.

We are putting up this page to facilitate communications between folks. If SGM Survivors has disappeared down a black hole, we will convert this to a permanent page.

Comments

SGM Survivors Temporary Communications Page — 66 Comments

  1. Well, the last time they posted was July 2016. I’m very thankful for their service because after my time at Covenant Life, I was looking all over the internet to find if I was the only one that thought it was a strange place.

  2. They are the only site composed of members and former members who truly understand the nuances of the issues. I don’t contribute there much, but I go there for accurate updates. I hope they come back.

  3. I had a web company who sold my domain out from under me. They told me that I would be able to renew my domain 60 days before the date the domain subscription ended. I logged on the morning 60 days before, and they had sent me an email that my domain had been resold at 12:02AM, and my ownership would end after 60 days because I was “too late to renew”. I’m sure there was some fine print that everybody was able to buy it at that 60 day point, but it certainly wasn’t made clear.

    I hope if it’s something similar that they have backups of the site. But it sounds like it’s been awhile since they’ve been active, so maybe they just couldn’t keep it anymore.

  4. It wasn’t active for awhile and not many people were posting. That said, I hope that they save the information, and especially the stories.

    I had a similar experience to “Really” in that it was a place where I could go and realize I wasn’t crazy but had gone through some horrific things. And the after effects still pop up at times when I’m not expecting it. It’s a bit surreal when I have to reel my emotions in after hearing something someone says in passing, or out of the blue start getting mad at something CLC “required” us to do during our time at the church. Thankfully I”m in a pretty healthy church, so I don’t usually get triggered at church.

  5. Roadwork wrote:

    I hope all is okay. Kris and Guy and their work mean a lot to me.

    Likewise! Thanks TWW for putting this page up; hopefully we’ll hear something at some point.

    Really wrote:

    They are the only site composed of members and former members who truly understand the nuances of the issues. I don’t contribute there much, but I go there for accurate updates. I hope they come back.

    Exactly; that’s why I have still been keeping up with it. Lots of regular commenters from the SGM world who know what’s going on.

  6. I wish I knew what was going on with that site. It really shocked me to see it being down like this especially after what they said in their last post that they would keep it up basically indefinitely.

    I hope there wasn't a threat of a lawsuit that forced him to shut down. It sure was valuable that maybe mostly has already served its purpose?

  7. @ Steve240:
    I doubt that there is anything on that website that could result in a lawsuit It is very hard to sue bloggers because you have to prove that they knew they were lying when they put up the post Just like us Kris would never deliberately lie.

    I wish she had just stopped all comments and left a final post saying we are shutting down, I find it hard to believe that she didn’t know that she needed to pay the company that hosts her site Plus it isn’t that expensive.

    Anyway if anyone has any email addresses for Kris, I would suggest you email them and let them know we’ve set up this temporary site if they want to come over here and let SGM Survivors know what has happened

    The Deebs are happy to provide a permanent place if needed so you can continue ur conversation

  8. Unfortunately, C.J. Mahaney is also an SGM survivor … he survived to become a Southern Baptist.

  9. Just thinking many people shook the dust from their feet and moved on (a good thing)….those that are still in chains and also bitter should be reading this website….yes, the pain is horrific, there is a way to life and this place can help some, the people that know and care about you can help you shake some of the monkeys off your back…to be free you must work out your salvation with G_d(paraphrasing Apostle Paul here)….the answers are there and don’t be fearful to seek out the truth….though that road will be difficult, I can speak from personal experience that it is well worth and leads to life 🙂

  10. Dee wrote:

    @ Steve240:
    I doubt that there is anything on that website that could result in a lawsuit It is very hard to sue bloggers because you have to prove that they knew they were lying when they put up the post Just like us Kris would never deliberately lie.

    But as the IRS and Scientology and Tony Jones could tell you, throw enough lawsuits at somebody, keep them always having to defend themselves in court month after month, year after year, and force them to burn through their savings with lawyers and legal fees, and it doesn’t matter that you “have to prove they knew they were lying”.
    DEEP POCKETS WINS. Whether those Deep Pockets come from taxes, auditing fees, or Tithes Tithes Tithes.

  11. dee wrote:

    @ Steve240:
    I cannot imagine why they would not respond to you just to say that they are done.

    I would think that also. That makes me wonder if something might have happened. I do hope they are OK.

  12. deb and dee, thanks for providing this temporary/permanent page. I had been checking the Survivor page every couple months in case something new was posted. I’m sorry to hear that it is down. : (

    Ellie

  13. I don’t know what’s going on, either. I, too, imagine Kris & Guy would have said good-bye so I am slightly concerned for them. Though it’s probably me being too worried. I keep checking daily, hoping the site will be up and running. There are too many stories which are precious, I believe, in the sight of God to disappear. And given the cost it took many of us to open our hearts and pour out the words, it would make me sad to see it all lost.

  14. @ Spartacus:
    I would love for all those who care about SGM Survivors to help us capture the posts on Wayback Machine. It was around for a very long time and this will be quite an undertaking.

  15. I just tried to buy sgmsurvivors.com and I get this message.

    “Sorry, sgmsurvivors.com is taken.”

    Looks like they own the name but are not paying their host fees.

  16. Seeking some volunteers from SGM Survivors to begin copying the archived posts ASAP. Please respond here.

  17. @ dee:
    The main hiccup we have. beyond the work of getting the posts is whether or not we will be allowed to post them. Copyright and all the stuff.

  18. Hi everyone – long time, no post. 🙂 Hope all is well with you! I was thinking about Survivors today and popped over to the site after a long time of not stopping by and was surprised by the 503 error.

    It looks like the domain name expired on March 15. It’s tough to know if Jim & Kris have decided to just let it go or if it was scooped out from underneath them. I hope all is well with Jim & Kris. Jim & Kris have always been pretty open on more or less leaving it open for those still processing and it looks like most of that has stopped, so perhaps they decided to just let it go.

    On a side note, I was visiting family and attended church with them and the message was on idolatry. That was definitely had me concerned. Next, he mentioned he was reading Keller’s book on idolatry. However, there was no other resemblance to an SGM message on the topic – no charts, no trees, no guilt or condemnation – just hope.

    A family member mentioned that the pastor made a reference to 12 step programs and that this pastor embraces them as a means to help those with addictions and we mused about how SGM mocked 12 step programs. I asked how SGM expected people with addictions to recover and the family member share this video with me. It was so spot on. 🙂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow0lr63y4Mw

    There is grace.

  19. I know timing is critical but I don’t come back up for air for another week. Do you have some instructions?

  20. @ Stunned:
    Hi Stunned. Good to “see” you. The stories are indeed precious. The PDI / SGM / SGC history should never be forgotten. To allow their history to disappear is to allow them to rebuild yet again.
    It was a Trail of Tears. Tears shed by the victims of their flawed and errant theology and counsel and tears shed by those of us that finally saw everything that was so wrong.
    Survivors as well as the beloved Refuge made us face the reality of our ways and helped guide us out those fields of destruction now known as Sovereign Grace Churches.

  21. Jenn Grover wrote:

    It looks like the domain name expired on March 15. It’s tough to know if Jim & Kris have decided to just let it go or if it was scooped out from underneath them. I hope all is well with Jim & Kris. Jim & Kris have always been pretty open on more or less leaving it open for those still processing and it looks like most of that has stopped, so perhaps they decided to just let it go.

    Jenn

    The owners of the SGM Survivors blog you mentioned are Guy and Kris. I think the “Jim” you are referring to was the Jim who had a similar blog titled SGM Refuge.

    Jim ended up taking his blog down after he had a series of technical difficulties.

    It is surprising how all of a sudden the blog was down. In the last blog post that Guy put up I recall him stating they would keep the information up basically indefinitely.

    I again do hope they are OK.

    Steve

  22. Hey all SGM Survivors

    Steve 240 has offered to her me get as much from Wayback as possible. There is one problem. Kris and Guy hold the copyright to that material. I guess I could put some of it up and see if they protest. Then I would have to take it down.

    Also I tried to buy the SGM Survivors domain name but it is still owned. Do Kris and Gu own it or is it someone else at this point?

    I am frankly a bit stunned that they have not communicated their intentions.

  23. It has been my gaol for awhile to create an SGM page specifically to keep track of the goings on in that ministry. It looks like the time for that is now.

  24. Hello, I am the director and now webservant of Spiritwatch Ministries. I’ve come to know of the SGM survivors page through FB and Cindy’s Under Much Grace page (Cindy is a friend of mine and we helped get her talk on the cultism of “Christian patriarchy” online almost a decade ago). Spiritwatch.org, our website, is one of the only places on the internet that has tracked the abusive career of Gwen Shamblin, founder of the Weigh Down Workshop and the cultic church it started, Remnant Fellowship and helped keep it exposed almost since it’s inception. We know that the site has been used to thwart, expose and warn hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people since 2003 of the danger of the Shamblin cult. You can Google us, Remnant and “Christian patriarchy” and see what’s gone on with all of the above.

    FWIW .. We were sued not once but twice by Shamblin and her tribe for “slander” and both times the Lord and solid lawyering pulled their plans to litigate us out of existence. Their houses of cards collapsed when the truth behind our expression of First Amendment protected commentary on them became quite literally our defense. Trust us when we say we completely understand what the experience is like and what legal definitions of slander actually mean. When it comes down to it, we found that if you are telling the truth about a controversy that you can factually and accurately document with testimony of eyewitnesses, and the perceived intent of that is to voice opinion about it, you’ve slandered no one. Slander is when you go out of your way to intentionally disseminate outright lies and falsehoods about someone to smear and impugn their character, in full knowledge of the actual truth. Watching the cult concede, backtrack and admit to their hamhanded and cavalier approach to this was a joy and a delight that all of our court documents (which are online) have preserved. The main lesson? TELL THE TRUTH and be ready to present the evidence!

    Spiritwatch.org continues on this mission to keep this cult under the glaring light of reality. It is troubling, therefore, and sad to hear of the SGM Survivors site going down the way it has. Preserving and keeping publicized the archived site will be a huge, huge job and worth every bit of effort.

    Again, FWIW .. the easiest thing to do would be to open up dialogue with the site owners – who have apparently let the domain name registration lapse – to check out their intentions. Hopefully, you will be able to negotiate with them to achieve ownership of the account and and work with GoDaddy, the hosting site, to reactivate the account there. Usually, site hosting services maintain the accounts administratively offline for a time after the domain name expires. I am assuming that GoDaddy provided both domain name registration and site hosting. The two may have been separate transactions and have separate expiration dates after which the site was deleted.

    Hopefully, you can get the owners and GoDaddy to work with you. Time is of the essence for this.

    Buying that domain name would be a top priority. It would not at all surprise me if SGM and its tribe are trying to or have bought it out. Cultic movements like the Local Church et al have a history of doing that. It has what prompted Spiritwatch Ministries to stay way ahead of that game and keep our domain name renewed for several years ahead of time. Push comes to shove, you can buy a new one (I see sgmsurvivors.info and others like it are still available) and relaunch it pointing people to the archives on archive.org’s Wayback Machine.

    As you said, you’d have to await the site owners to voice their objection to reposting the site as it stood. This material is too valuable to await doing otherwise. Reposting the material downloaded from the Wayback would be a long and arduous task there but it could be done. I would hate to think that the owners have caved to any perceived SGM legal threat and perhaps felt they needed to move on.

    You good people who created the site, I truly hope you will find those among the SGM survivors who are willing to work to sustain the critical history and analyses it held. You can’t let this fade away! I cannot imagine letting Spiritwatch.org do so with such a vital, toxic and reprehensible pack of wolves such as Remnant Fellowship continue to plague the world with its Laodicean leaven. Don’t let your silence do the same for SGM!

  25. Thanks @Steve240 – I knew that but was obviously mistaken in my post…. my mind was on blogs. Guy and Kris have performed a huge service for years. I hope all is well with them.

    I think most of us who exchanged emails with Kris did so through the Survivors email domain.

    The company that hosted the SGM Timeline closed with no notice or ability to export content. I do have the RSS xml file if someone gas the ability to do something meaningful with it.

  26. I’m willing to help with gathering the archives, so please include me if you need someone else. I just now saw that the site was down, after only last week posting a blog article that linked to several parts of it. http://www.heresthejoy.com/2017/03/four-ways-teaching-christians-to-embrace-im-the-worst-sinner-i-know-is-harming-the-church/ I still want to keep helping to deconstruct abusive teachings, and though I pretty much never comment, blogs like that SGMSurvivors and TWW and some others have been huge to me in my learning.

  27. I feel that when somebody decides in advance to do something, they will explain themselves first. To disappear in a sketchy way seems that 1 – something has happened to them, 2 – someone has threatened them, 3 – their Go Daddy renewal email is in their Spam folder.

  28. @ Really:
    I think there is another possibility. They got fed up and decided to bolt. The fact that they will not return an email from Steve (who has a real one) is disturbing. Even if they were getting sued, which I do not believe to be the case, they could say something innocuous like “Its over and we don’t want to discuss it.”

    They can only get sued if they wrote something that they knew was a lie. I have followed their website for years. As far as I can tell, they didn’t. Also, Go Daddy has multiple phone numbers as well as emails. They call incessantly. I know.

    Also, even if they checked their website once a week, they would know it wasn’t there. I feel sorry for the folks that depended on that website for support. After all these years, I think they should contact someone to get the word out.

  29. Dee Your possibility of just deciding to bolt is possible. It could have been if they made an announcement they would have to deal with people trying to talk them out of just shutting it down.

    Hopefully we will hear something but who knows. Again I do hope they are OK.

  30. dee wrote:

    They can only get sued if they wrote something that they knew was a lie.

    Doesn’t matter if you sic enough lawsuits and attorneys on them until you burn them out.
    Just ask Elron Hubbard and David Miscavage.

  31. Steve240 wrote:

    It could have been if they made an announcement they would have to deal with people trying to talk them out of just shutting it down.

    They could put up an announcement and close the comments.

    Question: Does anyone know who they really are? When the Catholic sex scandal broke, the Catholic Church set up hot lines to *help* those who had been abused. It was discovered that they were actually defense lawyers. One former SGM Survivor asked me if that was possible. As I said then, I don’t know who they are and anything is possible in the absence of real names, etc.

  32. @ Steve240:
    The longer this goes, the more I wonder. They had promised to keep the blog up if they ended it. They did not.

    By now they know it is not up and they could have taken care of it with the flash of a Visa card. They have chosen not to do so.

    They have not notified any of their loyal readers and friends. That is one of two things: worrisome or blow off.

    Even with a threatened lawsuit they could have simply said the site is closing and refused to post comments. Kris certainly knows how to do that.

    So, I am left with three options:

    They have passed away
    They just don’t give a darn and never did.
    They were covert SGM leaders/BFFs

  33. dee wrote:

    Even with a threatened lawsuit they could have simply said the site is closing and refused to post comments. Kris certainly knows how to do that.
    So, I am left with three options:
    They have passed away
    They just don’t give a darn and never did.
    They were covert SGM leaders/BFFs

    Well I really doubt that they were covert SGM leaders.

    We certainly are grasping for straws here on possible explanations. If there was a threat of a lawsuit sometimes the settlement is where no one says anything so under that scenario just shutting it down Ike this might be an option. Then again, you would think they would keep the domain but just shut it down.

    Hopefully we will hear something but I am not that optimistic.

  34. I’m just worried for them. They have been incredibly faithful. I just hope they and everyone in their family is OK.

  35. One thought-what was the last story in the discussion line? Didn’t it have to do with someone getting fired due to long time sexual abuse of pastoral staff?

  36. I understand the disappointment on the part of those who relied on the site, but my guess is when you’ve been doing this sort of thing for years, you can just want to walk away sometimes, after hearing all the stories of abuse. Not everyone is cut out for that over the long haul.

    They may have just gotten sick of the whole thing, always fighting to sort out truth from lies, probably getting regular emails and social media venom from unhinged SGM people and former SGM people who still sympathize with SGM (and there are a few unhinged ones, I’ve known some and been the subject of the attacks of some who were all sweet and clean on the surface but absolute brutes inside). Maybe they became fatigued over the years and one day decided to walk away and don’t even want to look at it again. To me, that’s the most likely scenario, not lawsuits or double agents.

  37. dee wrote:

    One thought-what was the last story in the discussion line? Didn’t it have to do with someone getting fired due to long time sexual abuse of pastoral staff?

    That last discussion item was about Charles Schmitt who was the Sr. Pastor and founder of Immanuels Church being forced to resign due to repeated actions including with a staff member. This was something that CLC (Gathering of Believers at the time) alleged with Schmitt back when they excommunicated him in the early 80’s that I had heard people were bringing up about his past.

    For whatever reason this information about Charles Schmitt seems to be most well kept secret I have seen for a while. Survivors was the only place you would have information about what was going on with Schmitt until Brent Detweiler placed up a post about Schmitt:

    http://www.brentdetwiler.com/brentdetwilercom/charles-schmitts-50-plus-year-history-of-homosexual-sex-with.html

    As well hidden is with this information about Schmitt it wouldn’t surprise me if this information being posted and the Survivors blog being shut down are related.

    Last time I did a Google search you couldn’t find any information out about this scandal except for one blog entry:

    http://www.blogster.com/trashedandburned/do-not-understand

    and now Brent’s recent post.

    Immanuels has basically deleted most if not all references to Charles Schmitt off their website so it appears what has been alleged is true. A church wouldn’t normally do this with their founding pastor.

    I do hear that attendance is down at Immanuels so that may be on thing that gets their attention but still you would expect to see more reporting on this with it being harder to keep secrets like they use to be able.

    Both Schmitt’s wife and I understand another family member is on the payroll of Immanuels (Dianna Whittle their daughter). Thus like where you have the nepotism like you would see with SGM they can control things more tightly there.

  38. There was also a discussion about PJ Smyth and allegations about Smyth’s father including people alleging that PJ Smyth wasn’t being truthful.

    I don’t think the PJ Smyth discussion would have been the issue though since it is so widely discussed.

  39. Steve240 wrote:

    Both Schmitt’s wife and I understand another family member is on the payroll of Immanuels (Dianna Whittle their daughter). Thus like where you have the nepotism like you would see with SGM they can control things more tightly there.

    Nobody does nepotism like the Saudi & North Korean Royal Families.
    BJU, SGM, et al still have a ways to go.

  40. @ Steve240:
    Good thinking, though. The Deebs are so confused we are now getting tin conspiracy theories. That is dangerous!

    Hey Kris-If you are reading this please contact someone and let them know what in the world is going on! Seriously. Do you really want SGM Survivors to wind up on a *liberal* blog like TWW?

  41. Nickname wrote:

    Has anyone been in touch with Jim from Refuge? Maybe he can find out if they are okay.

    I only have been able to find contact information for Jim on Facebook which he doesn’t post to that often. I use to correspond with Jim using an email address from his blog which is now down.

    The phone number I used to talk with him on is now disconnected. Hopefully I will hear back from Jim fairly soon.

    Not sure what else to do.

  42. dee wrote:

    One person who used an old email to contact Kris had it returned to her-no such address.

    The old email address I had for Kris didn’t come back returned when I sent it about a week ago. I just tried it again and didn’t get it returned. Also resent an email to guy and didn’t get it returned.

  43. Kris and Guy’s email address tied to SGM Survivors didn’t work for me either. Usually I would think that would be the case with the website registration being past due.