Don’t expect Patricia King to settle for the status quo. She is teaching a new Christian generation how to live in the supernatural.
When Patricia King got saved, she was so excited about finding Jesus that the very next morning she knocked on all her neighbors’ doors in her home of Mission, British Columbia, to tell them the good news.

“They said, ‘Have you gone crazy?’ And I said: ‘No. I was crazy, but now I’m not.'”
King was “crazy in love with Jesus.”

“I used to sit on bus benches—I’d hire a baby sitter to take care of my children—and I’d wait for someone to come and sit beside me so I could tell them about Jesus,” she says.

“When my kids took naps in the afternoon, I’d go through the phone book and phone people and tell them Jesus loves them. I led many people to the Lord over the telephone.”

That was in 1976. Yet, not much has changed with King’s passion for sharing God’s love. The 55-year-old grandmother, who wears large colorful jewelry and has funky spiked hair, still tells everyone she can about Jesus and has led hundreds of people to Christ during her 30 years in ministry.

It’s just that now she has more ways of reaching people than she did in the ’70s.
King presides today over Extreme Prophetic, an internationally known fivefold media and outreach ministry started in 2003 that now has offices in Phoenix and Kelowna, British Columbia.

The most popular aspects of her ministry are the globally telecast, half-hour teaching and prophecy show Extreme Prophetic TV, and street evangelism teams that she has commissioned to work in several of the largest inner cities of North America.

A writer of numerous books, booklets and ministry training manuals for Christians, she travels the globe to teach five-day courses she’s written on “prophetic evangelism” and “the glory realm”—a subject that one group of ministers recently criticized for being too much like New Age teaching.

But King describes herself as a “prophetic personality” who is “genuine,” “cutting edge” and “controversial.” As a prophetic evangelist, she fuses her desire to tell people about Jesus with a personal approach that puts hearers at ease and helps to lower barriers to the gospel.

Seeking and Sharing

King’s ability to hear God’s voice and obvious compassion for others was witnessed on a recent tour with her and one of her outreach teams through Ottawa’s Byward Market district.

Kayla, 19, was attracted by the TV camera filming King’s Extreme Prophetic program and shook her head in disbelief when King accurately told her that she often wondered where God was in hard times, especially recently when she was in the hospital being treated for asthma.

After bursting into tears, Kayla accepted Christ.

Eugene—a middle-aged quadriplegic who, rain or shine, sits on the street in a wheelchair with a tin cup—was all smiles after receiving prayer from King.

He said he felt heat in his back and legs and was able to move his legs in ways he couldn’t previously.

King says she actually learned through the Holy Spirit how to listen to God and prophesy over people, even though a year after she accepted Christ she took a course on prophecy.

Her dynamic combination of evangelistic and prophetic abilities, as well as a sociable personality and the ability to put others at ease, has led her to reach out to people just about everywhere she travels. She usually combines spontaneous outreaches—often filmed for Extreme Prophetic TV—with speaking engagements and other planned ministry trips.

“Wherever we have time and we hear the Spirit say, ‘Minister,’ we do,” she says.
A recent outreach in London’s Hyde Park was described by King as “awesome.”

“We led 37 people to the Lord in a three-hour period.

“We just set up a blanket on the grass and put up a sign saying ‘Free destiny words’ and ‘Free dream interpretation,'” King explains.

“Then we went to Buckingham Palace and prophesied over the guard. He couldn’t respond though, of course,” she joked.

A Time of Turmoil

King, however, wasn’t joking with her astonished neighbors all those years ago when she told them that she was “crazy.”

There was a time when she felt like she was. Before meeting Jesus, she lived through a desperate time of emotional turmoil and spiritual searching.

King was raised in a nominal Christian home by parents who she says were “good people and taught us good moral values,” yet there was much conflict at home.

As a teenager she fell for a boy with whom she compromised her morals. When the relationship ended, she fell into an abyss of depression.

“I had a very sensitive conscience, and after I violated my morals with him, I went into a deep party scene, club scene and drugs.

“The more I went into darkness, the more I was ridden with guilt and shame,” she recalls.

“I was raped twice in one year, but I just felt I deserved it. I was suicidal because I didn’t know who I was as a person.”

She met her husband, Ron Cocking, in a bar and they married when King was 22.

“He really, really loved me. His love was very healing. It was the best time in my whole life. I felt whole because I was loved.”

When her first son, Chad, was 6 months old, King became emotionally volatile and prone to fits of rage.

“My son picked up on that, and he started showing hyperactivity. I needed help, but I couldn’t get help in the natural—I took courses, I went to doctors—so I pursued the spiritual route.

“I got heavily into transcendental meditation, astrology, numerology, spells, white witchcraft and tarot. The more I went into it, the worse my behavior got.”

The situation came to a head when King was pregnant with her second son. She became so angry that her blood pressure shot up and caused her to have a convulsion.

“I was in the hospital and I had a vision of the devil—he asked me to give him my son. Then immediately, Jesus came to me in a vision,” she says.

Soon after, she developed epilepsy and became addicted to morphine. Her blood pressure was still high, and she was in and out of hospitals for treatment. During that time she began hitting her oldest son.

New Life and Purpose

Help finally came in the form of an Anglican clergyman who invited King to a home meeting of charismatic Christians after she’d called his church and told him her problems.

“I asked the Lord to come into my heart that night, and He didn’t hesitate,” she says.

“I felt Him take the sin away—I literally felt the guilt, the shame, the dirt go. Within three days, I was baptized in the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues.”

Ron accepted Christ 11 months later, and by 1980 the couple had quit their jobs and started training at the Youth With A Mission (YWAM) base in Kona, Hawaii.
Although King has never stopped talking to people about Jesus and His love wherever she goes—”Restaurants are my favorite,” she quips—her first foray into teaching evangelism didn’t come until 1981.

A local pastor in her hometown spotted her evangelistic gift and invited her to teach his congregation how to win souls.

“I spoke to his youth group and decided to take them to Vancouver’s Skid Row because they were scared about evangelizing in their own neighborhood, where they’d see people they knew,” she recalls.

“They saw God do miracles, they led people to the Lord, they saw drug addicts totally sober up. They went back to their schools, told the kids the things they saw on the streets and started leading them to the Lord.”

In 1982 King and her husband organized a Youth for Jesus event for which 1,500 young people showed up. After the couple were asked the same year to come on staff as home evangelists at their church, membership leaped from 15 people to 120 people in three months.

In 1984, King started working for Christian Services Association, an organization founded in 1974 for teaching and equipping the body of Christ in the Holy Spirit.

She taught on the gifts of the Spirit, evangelism and intercessory prayer as an itinerant minister traveling across the western half of Canada and sponsored similar events in the Vancouver area. By 1990 she had been made president of the association when its founder, Mary Goddard, retired.

King’s itinerant preaching and teaching continue to this day. During any given week she has one to three speaking engagements.

Some 80 percent of her invitations come from American churches, though she is asked by pastors to minister at churches in Canada, the United Kingdom, Holland, Germany and as far away as Kuwait. King’s public exposure led her to change her surname from Cocking to King in 2003 after her ministry began receiving vulgar messages.

Controversy Hits

Some ministers, however, have been critical of her teaching. Between November 2005 and April 2006, King’s ministry came under fire from a network of prophetic pastors in the Phoenix area who widely circulated a letter claiming that “an element of the New Age remains in her work, which can be spiritually misleading.”

“It went to a real high level of apostolic-prophetic roundtable and impacted on a global level, and they were saying, ‘What shall we do about Patricia King?'” she told Charisma.

“It’s like a theological war that comes with every new move of the Spirit. There were some added things because I’m a woman in ministry, and they were trying to say I’m rebellious; I’m not accountable or submissive.”

King and her ministry staff checked with every place where she’d ministered in the 18 months prior to the allegations. According to King, none of them have complaints about her.

A full accountability report about the controversy is available on her Web site at

The criticism centered on elements of King’s teachings, particularly “third heaven” encounters and what she calls “the glory realm,” a term coined among charismatic and renewal churches to help explain experiences in which believers claim they are transported spiritually by the Holy Spirit—into heaven for deep encounters with God, into hospital rooms to minister to dying people, into countries to discern the spiritual climate of specific locations.

Some people report seeing angels and “glory clouds” or receive tangible expressions of their journeys in the form of gold dust, feathers, gemstones or manna.

Although some Christians align such beliefs to a false source, King says the same kind of supernatural experiences were common in biblical times and shouldn’t be feared by modern-day believers.

“Moving in the glory and third-heaven encounters is just walking with God. The supernatural has always been available and God’s always wanted it for us, but we haven’t been open to stepping into it because our heads have gotten in the way.”

She believes Western society has entered a “supernatural era” in which unsaved people are seeing the reality of the unseen realm because they are living in very troubled times and are looking for a power greater than themselves.

The body of Christ, she believes, should be pointing the way for them.

“The church should be teaching the nation how to operate in the supernatural—the occult shouldn’t be getting there first,” she says. “Once you know the truth of Christ, you can tell the difference between truth and counterfeit.”

Her ministry maintains a combined North American and European advisory panel that includes James Goll of Encounters Network, Steve Shultz of Elijah List, Ché Ahn of Harvest International Ministries and Mary-Audrey Raycroft of Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship. Her ministry colleagues include Graham Cooke, Bill Johnson, Bobby Connor and John Paul Jackson.

Setting Prisoners Free

When she isn’t traveling to teach or going into an urban area to share Jesus on the streets, King attends her home church of New Life in Kelowna, formerly pastored by Canadian revivalists Wesley and Stacey Campbell.

She offers a simple explanation when asked why she feels led to minister to the down-and-out. “I feel a tremendous burden for the addicted because they’re prisoners. The Bible says to go release them.”

“I look at the anointing as operating best in the darkness. With street ministry, it’s about letting people know love because God is love, and love is what will set them free.

“It tests our love, doesn’t it, when we allow them [to get] close, but that’s where you find out if you have any [love].”

King is qualified to make such statements. She and her family lived in Tijuana, Mexico, for four years in the late 1980s ministering to a community of street people. Addicts lived with them in their home in Honolulu during their YWAM training.

Today it sometimes works the other way around—King and her team at Extreme Prophetic live at street level with the addicts. Recently in a Phoenix suburb called The Zone they stayed in slum hotels for five days and lived on the street for 24 hours with no money, no cell phones and no toiletries.

“Before that, the street people wouldn’t respect us. It was, like, ‘Just get out of our face,'” King says.

“But when we sat on the pavement with them, when we stood in the food lineups with them, it was a statement to them because it gave us understanding,” she explains. “They’d tell us their stories and really opened up.”

King’s team subsequently formed Extreme Homeless Fellowship, a street church that meets on the pavement three nights a week in The Zone.

“Now when they see us coming, they run up to us. We’re seeing miracles on the street. One person with a crippled leg saw their entire leg straightened out in one day,” she says.

King says the main requirement for outreach teams is to love and to have knowledge of the Word. “[Without love and faith] it’s just a formula. We teach teams to ask God to help them see what they need to, not to be in a hurry, and not to view people as mission projects. It’s about humble love, it’s not a big, splashy thing.”

She says people who watch the filmed outreaches on Extreme Prophetic TV frequently set up their own teams. “Now they’re taking the world by storm,” she adds.

Wesley Campbell, King’s former pastor and today an apostolic leader with Ahn’s Harvest International Ministries in Pasadena, California, describes King as “a go for it lady.”

“A lot of people hear from God and think about it. Patricia hears and does it,” Campbell observes. “She’s obedient to the Word, has compassion and great personal integrity.

“But her best attribute is faith. She can just grab hold and believe, which is why she’s a starter of new things.”

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Josie Newman is a reporter and freelance writer based near Toronto and a frequent contributor to Charisma.

Thousands of Christians are turning to the Internet to find romance. But is this a safe way to secure a mate?
Cinthia is an articulate environmental auditor from Brazil. She was 29 when she met Craig, a 27-year-old American aerospace engineer, through Christian Café, an online dating service. Craig was 27 and had dated a lot in search of the right person; Cinthia had an active social life but had dated less frequently.

“Craig and I met by a fluke really,” Cinthia recalls. “I matched all the categories he was looking for-except geographical. He was looking for a woman in his state of Colorado but forgot to type that in the day we hooked up. He told me that when he saw my profile and my response to the standardized questions, he said to himself, ‘If I could pick a wife, this is how I’d expect her to answer.’”

After two months of frequent e-mails, the couple exchanged phone numbers and talked every night. “The more we talked, the more I saw how much we had in common on the important issues of life, like faith, values and long-term goals. … We weren’t head over heels but fell in love slowly.”

After two months of phone calls, Craig flew to Brazil where the pair spent four days getting to know each other. Seven visits and one year later, in September 2003, Craig and Cinthia married and now live near Denver. Cinthia says their marriage is “really great.”

This couple’s love story originates from one of the fastest-growing Internet industries-both inside and outside the United States. Internet dating sites account for 1 percent of all U.S. Web sites-compared with 1.9 percent for travel and .73 percent for music-but garner the most content revenue, according to Jupiter Media Research, which keeps current dating-site statistics. In 2005, Jupiter researchers expected $516 million to be spent in the U.S. on Internet dating, and to rise to $642 million by 2008. In 2004, 21.8 million Americans browsed online dating sites.

A New Kind of Courtship

In the U.S., there are 870 sites devoted to dating. Although Christian Café is based in Toronto, it is ranked as No. 36 on the list because of the size of its membership and the number of hits it receives. Started for single Christians in 1999 by businessman Sam Moorcroft, the site has between 750,000 and 1 million members compared with 8.5 million members who subscribe to the No. 3-ranking eHarmony. Created by popular psychologist and author Neil Clark Warren in 2000, eHarmony is used mostly by Christians although it’s not exclusively for believers.

“Most people are so busy these days that meeting potential dates online seems a lot more convenient than going to a dance or a dinner,” says Bill Tancer, vice president of research for HitWise, a company that tracks 162 online industries and their users. “The fact that they spend 12 minutes max looking at a site says it all. The biggest competition for Christian dating sites is other dating sites because when people browse the Net, they’re following links.”

Jupiter analyst Nate Elliott says a recent poll showed that 44 percent of Americans are looking for a serious relationship when they use dating sites, 39 percent just want to date, and another 20 percent want to marry.
Moorcroft was a 30-something single when he founded Christian Café. The day he spoke with Charisma, his wife, Polly, was going into labor and later gave birth to twins.

“I started this company because the options are extremely limited for Christian singles,” he says. “It’s kind of hard to ask a girl for a date during after-service coffee and cookies. It’s even harder for single-agains with kids to meet anyone.”

Today Christian Café has an annual revenue of $2 million, Moorcroft says. The site allows members to make their own decisions about who to contact but doesn’t tolerate sexual talk, profanity or abuse, and promptly kicks off anyone who violates the rules. Potential members are invited to fill out a questionnaire about their beliefs, backgrounds and goals and are encouraged to post pictures.

EHarmony is interested in finding people the right “life-long mate,” says spokeswoman Marilyn Warren, who has been married to eHarmony founder Neil Clark Warren, Ph.D., for 46 years. “When Neil worked in psychotherapy, he spent a lot of his time presiding over the death of marriages, and he wants to see a different outcome,” she says.

Neil Warren worked eight years as dean of the psychology department at Fuller Theological Seminary in California and worked for 35 years as a clinical psychotherapist. Every potential eHarmony member is subjected to a barrage of 463 questions that Warren and a team of five psychologists crafted.

Marilyn Warren says the questions are designed to assess the fundamentals of applicants’ personalities so they can be matched with those they would mesh best with over the long haul. Members are not permitted to choose people at random but are matched scientifically, and are allowed to communicate with their matches in slow, steady stages while having their privacy protected.

She says at least 30,000 marriages have resulted from eHarmony matches. Between 60 percent and 65 percent of those who subscribe to eHarmony are born-again Christians, and members come from 220 different countries.

“We screen people’s applications, and we turn away between 12 percent and 18 percent of them because they’re too extreme,” Marilyn Warren says. “Determining the emotional health of our members is very important, so we’ve never had a problem with ex-convicts or sexual predators.”

Psychologist and author Kevin Leman, Ph.D., headlines MatchWise, a Christian site that started in April. It capitalizes on the idea that birth order is a major key to finding the right mate. Ranked No. 174 of all American sites, MatchWise celebrated its first engagement in the summer, just three months after it launched.

“People are busy working hard, and the singles events are so staged; that’s why so many people go online,” says Leman, who has been married for 38 years and has five children. “Some of my kids have used online dating, and my nephew met his fiancee through a site.”

Applicants to the site are asked 70 questions based on the psychology contained in Leman’s book The Birth Order Book. Questions focus on people’s childhood personalities, their strongest childhood memories, their views of the opposite sex, and a description of their parents and siblings. A team of psychometrists reviewed the questions before they were put on the site.

Applicants to MatchWise must be Christian, over 18, single and U.S. citizens. Approximately 10 percent of applicants are rejected because they don’t meet these criteria or because they post sexually suggestive photos. The site states it doesn’t allow non-Americans to join to guard against aiding those who simply want a visa to come to the U.S. or to marry an American in order to gain citizenship.

Camerin Courtney is editor of , an online singles column with a subscriber base of 25,000. Courtney, a 34-year-old single woman, met two men whom she dated several times through eHarmony. “Online dating is a viable option for many Christians,” she says. “It’s not right for everyone, though, which is why it must be done cautiously and prayerfully. I have one friend who tried it for a year and only had one date, while I have another friend who met her fiance through a site.”

Courtney says the church is ignorant about the singles in their midst. “We’re not doing community well enough,” she says. “Singles rarely get invited to couples’ houses or to family picnics. If singles aren’t going to social activities and if we’re not getting connected to the body, then we’re creating the perfect storm for confusion over the single identity. Maybe Christians wouldn’t use dating sites so much if we felt included in the church.”

She says online dating can be a little less risky than dating within one’s own church circles. “If there’s a messy break-up, then one of the people might end up leaving that church,” she says. “With online dating, it’s easier to avoid those painful scenarios.”

Unhappy Endings

Statistics on the outcome of online matching are sketchy-partly because it’s hard to track people’s successes and failures unless they voluntarily report them and partly because the fiercely competitive industry doesn’t want to publicize unhappy endings. And there are lots of them, according to groups that act as industry watchdogs.

Katherine (not her real name), a 57-year-old divorcee, is one of the casualties of online dating. After 10 years of being single, Katherine decided to try American Singles, a secular online dating service based in California. In February 2004, she was contacted by a man who appealed to her because he described himself as “a born-again Christian who wanted to be married” and posted pictures of himself with his grandchildren. They corresponded by e-mail for one month and then talked on the phone for three more months before they met.

“By the time we met, I totally trusted this man, and we were talking about marriage,” Katherine says. “I flew to his city, he met me at the airport and then we drove to his place to stay. We agreed beforehand that we’d sleep in separate rooms and there’d be no fooling around.”

But in the middle of the night, she says, the man came into her bedroom, put his hand over her mouth and raped her. “After he did it, he said, ‘I thank you so much for letting me make love to you before we get married.’ I knew then how sick he was.”

Katherine says she was held hostage 12 more days. “He told me he had a gun and said I better not think about leaving because he knew how to find me,” she says.

She finally convinced him to let her return home-after she pretended to accept his proposal of marriage-so she could get her affairs in order. He continued to call her two or three times a day for two weeks and she played along with him.

“I knew I had to come up with the right plan to get him out of my life permanently,” she says. “I told him I had serious vaginal bleeding and had to go to a special treatment clinic in Colorado. He bought the story. The next day I changed my phone numbers and had a friend of mine in Colorado mail him a letter I’d written.”

The man continued to harass Katherine by phoning her son and her workplace, telling them he was coming to town and would find her. Katherine says she didn’t press charges because her grandchildren don’t know what happened and she never wants them to know.

Most dating sites post safety tips, such as don’t reveal your home address or phone number, meet in a public place-which Katherine didn’t do-and listen to your gut instinct about a person’s character. But only a handful conduct background checks on prospective clients. , a dating site in Texas, conducts criminal checks through Rapsheets Criminal Records and also verifies the marital status of users.

Taylor Cole, senior director of public relations for , says the company does checks because clients express concern about the safety of online dating.

“When we started off in January 2004, we weeded out 11 percent of our applicants just by doing criminal checks and verifying their marital status. Statistics show that 67.5 percent of convicted criminals who are released from prison re-offend. We did a poll and found that one in three users of dating sites believe the sites are doing background criminal checks.”

“During 15 months, in Texas, more than 500 people were denied membership because 134 were convicted felons,” adds Herb Vest, president of . “The crimes ranged from homicide to sexual assault, injuries to children, aggravated assaults, organized crime, stalking and terrorist threats. In Florida, 497 people were rejected over a four-month period for material misrepresentations, felony and sexual offenses.”

, which is a secular site, backs the efforts of the Safer Online Dating Alliance (SODA), a coalition of 137 organizations that are advocating a 50-state initiative that will require dating sites to state clearly whether they conduct criminal checks on potential members. So far, six states have introduced bills to their legislatures, but none have been passed, Cole says.

Jayne Hitchcock, president of Working to Halt Online Abuse (WHOA), is a former victim of online harassment. In 1998 she succeeded in getting a bill through the Maryland legislature that allowed Internet harassers to be prosecuted with a $500 fine and up to three years in prison. Today 45 states have cyber-stalking or harassment laws on the books.

“If the problem is addressed soon enough, the person doing the harassing often stops,” she says. “Sometimes, though, people wait until it’s escalated so far that the stalker has brought the harassment off-line. Then the police have to be called.”

Marilyn Warren believes the best antidote to bizarre online behavior is to screen members before allowing them to contact others. “Often someone who’s sick will want instant gratification and not want to go through the hoops,” she says. “People who are emotionally healthy can work the online system to their advantage until they meet a good match. One of our happiest endings was an 81-year-old widowed professor who found an 81-year-old lady online and eventually married her.”

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Josie Newman is a freelance writer based in Toronto.

Emotional and sexual entrapment can happen in the church. If we get honest, we can learn to overcome these problems–and help abusers and their victims.
Jane met Jim when they collaborated on a project at church. Jane found it a little unusual that Jim had grabbed her hands and stroked them as he prayed for her about a tough situation in her life. But she thought no more about Jim until he began calling her periodically, asking how things were going and wanting to pray with her.

She was touched that he seemed to care about her situation. When he suggested they go to a movie some time, she agreed, and two weeks later they had their first outing.

They continued to get together and seemed to have a lot in common as they grew to know each other. However, Jane started to wonder about Jim’s motivation when he repeatedly refused to attend church with her.

She found it unusual that none of their friends witnessed any of their meetings, and Jim seemed to arrange it that way on purpose. Whenever Jane questioned him about it and expressed her concern, Jim would make excuses and tell her she was imagining things.

Jim’s comments became increasingly sexual. He even asked Jane whether she’d had any sexual activities in her previous relationships, despite an agreement between them that their own relationship was platonic.

When Jim was at Jane’s house one Sunday afternoon for lunch, he asked to slow-dance with her and invited her to sit on his knee. Although she participated, she was very uncomfortable. After Jim had playfully slapped and grabbed her backside several times and massaged her shoulders, she decided she’d had enough.

Jane told Jim she didn’t like his actions or his questions about her sexual past. He tried to slough off her comments, but Jane persisted until he got the point.

Chatting with Jim one night on the phone, Jane discovered he would be at a conference she was attending the next day. In fact, they had discussed going together but Jim initially had said he wasn’t interested.

He told her a pastor friend had asked him to the conference and that he felt obliged to go and to sit with the pastor in his section. When Jane said they should meet up and sit together, Jim declined.

For Jane, that was the beginning of the end of their almost yearlong relationship. When she discovered Jim would be hosting a conference at their church and had never told her he’d been working on the event, Jane ended the relationship, realizing their “friendship” was simply a selfish manipulation of her on Jim’s part.

She confided in her senior pastor about Jim’s behavior. The pastor prayed for her and admonished Jim. After that, Jim dropped out of sight.

Marian enjoyed going to coffee hour after church and thought nothing of it when she gave her business card to Alan. But when he began sending frequent e-mails and leaving dozens of phone messages for her, Marian became scared and angry. She told him to stop pursuing her, but he didn’t listen.

Coffee hour didn’t hold the same appeal it once did because every time Marian turned around Alan was standing close by, staring at her. He told her he was just trying to show her how highly he thought of her.

After three months of this harassment, she confided in her senior pastor, who had a meeting with Alan and asked him to stop contacting Marian. Alan complied but left the church shortly afterward.

How It Works

Situations such as Jane’s and Marian’s are not uncommon in churches, says Stephen Arterburn, co-founder of New Life Clinics, a group of Christian professional counseling and treatment centers scattered across the United States.

“This happens a lot because we put people together in churches–whether its in small groups, cell groups or work teams,” says Arterburn, co-author of Every Man’s Battle (Waterbrook Press), a study guide for men battling sexual addictions. “One of the downfalls is when we accept someone’s wrong behavior simply because they’re Christian.”

In Jane’s and Marian’s cases, the men weren’t seeking to establish sincere relationships but were preying upon the women emotionally and physically.

“We should never cloud the fact that many, many Christian men are living with sex addictions and romance addictions,” states Arterburn, who frequently tells his own story of how he got a Christian girl pregnant while attending college and then persuaded her to have an abortion.

Mark Laaser, founder of Minneapolis-based Faithful and True Ministries, an organization established to offer accountability and healing to sex addicts, says many so-called predatory relationships begin as Jane and Jim’s did–when one person disguises himself or herself as a “helper.”

“They lend an ear to the victim and can appear superspiritual, even quoting Bible verses, while they’re really secretly feeding their own desire for control and adoration,” he says.

Laaser is himself a former pornography and sex addict. He believes spiritual intimacy can easily lead to sexual intimacy–followed by a further entanglement: “The next step is to tell the victim he or she is the predator’s soulmate.”

Arterburn says a woman shouldn’t let a man off the hook just because she believes his being a Christian is the most important prerequisite for dating.

“Women need to start listening to their inner voice, their gut instinct about a guy. If something feels wrong, it usually is. The most important thing is not to be desperate for a relationship,” he says. “The next most important thing is to look at the way the man treats others, study the kind of friends he has and observe the relationship he has with his mother.”

Men who recognize the aberrant behavior in themselves and want to do something about it can start getting help by joining a men’s group, Arterburn says. “Men get healthy by being with other men, not by trying repeatedly to have romantic relationships with women.”

Chris Burge, who leads a 600-strong singles ministry in Manhattan, New York, believes it’s crucial for pastors to preach the empowerment of women. The message is vital, he says, for enabling a woman to treasure herself and to distinguish between a healthy man and a predatory one.

“We need to be raising up spiritual divas like Abigail in the body of Christ, women who have faith and integrity but aren’t doormats. We don’t need to keep giving sermons on the victimized woman,” says Burge, who is 38 and single.

The modern church lacks accountability, he points out, and large churches with “buffet-style” Christianity enable men to prey with more ease on unsuspecting women.

“Men can … easily enter a big church and then leave again. The itinerant parishioner needs to be pinned down. Simply the presence of more male ushers can deter a sick guy from lingering,” Burge observes.

At the church he attends–charismatic Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, New York–50 percent of the 21,000 members are men. Accountability is a big factor among the many small groups.

“Charismatic churches, at times, are notorious for preaching on limited subjects that revolve around faith, healing and prosperity, while it’s increasingly important to preach on life issues like this,” says Burge, who is also co-author of His Rules: God’s Practical Road Map for Becoming and Attracting Mr. or Mrs. Right (Waterbrook Press).

“Men must renew their minds when it comes to sexual stuff, while women must renew their minds romantically,” he points out. “Both sexes must do their due diligence in checking out the history of a person they’re interested in and should know them for a while before dating them.”

Further, he exhorts men and women who are seeking a relationship with the opposite sex to first take an honest look at themselves to determine if they are the same kind of person they hope to attract.

In the United States, 47 percent of the adult population are single, divorced or widowed, according to statistical evidence from 1999-2000. The percentage is similar in Canada and Europe. In contrast, a disparate 94 percent of pastors are married, a recent study commissioned by researcher George Barna determined.

“It’s astounding that people in church leadership are not aware of the statistics on singles. They’re so bent on the family unit that we now have an unfortunate social gap between singles and married people,” says Virginia McInerney, a single, 47-year-old legislative writer and researcher for the Ohio General Assembly and author of Single But Not Separate (Charisma House).

She notes that although most pastors are married, “They don’t have the personal experience of being a single adult, nor do they have many friends who are single.”

“Singles are given a contradictory message from the pulpit,” she adds. “While we’re all told how wonderful marriage is, when singles approach the pastor about their desire for marriage, they’re frequently told to just focus on the Lord.

“We’re often quoted Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 7 where he says it’s better to be single than married. This leaves singles confused. Many churches have a large number of singles who are vibrant and confident in their 20s, but as they age and remain unmarried, they’re pushed off to the sidelines. They feel wounded and stuck in a rut.”

She says the church ought to be inclusive of the entire body of Christ to enable singles to feel worthwhile and valuable, and to help prevent the destructive, secretive behaviors that predators engage in.

Having led a monthly series about singleness for several years at the Columbus Vineyard Church, where she is one of 7,000 members, and spoken at conferences in the U.S. on Christian singleness, McInerney is not a proponent of singles gatherings. She believes they foster a separation mentality and hold the potential for abuse. She prefers to see families and couples drawing singles into their lives.

Henry Cloud, a clinical psychologist and co-author of Boundaries in Dating (Zondervan) and the recently released How to Get a Date Worth Keeping (Zondervan), agrees that Christian groups can be fertile territory for emotional or sexual predators. He notes that those who want to pick up others commonly do so by frequenting church singles groups.

“I’ve seen situations where men are asked to leave the church after it becomes known that several women experienced a common pick-up scenario,” he says. “A guy I know who was warned by church leadership had an established pattern–he would zero in on someone, lurk in the background and then begin to follow them around. He was well-dressed, successful and charming, and fooled people for a while.”

Why Dating Matters

Cloud proposes that one reason this behavior is more possible with Christian singles than with non-Christian singles is because the church has effectively outlawed dating.

“Singles are only supposed to have spiritual friendships, so people are becoming distorted in their behavior,” he observes. “It seems taboo for a man who’s interested in a woman to ask her out directly, so you’ll often find men just hanging out with women as friends, while they really want something more but don’t know how to pursue it.”

He advises women, as Arterburn does, to learn how to trust their feelings and avoid relationships with male friends who make them feel off-balance or unsafe. If the friend is a good man, Cloud says, he will become clear about his intentions for either friendship or dating.

Cloud also argues that dating is an important way to learn about relationships–it helps a person gauge what he or she likes or doesn’t like in another person.

“In the Christian culture, dating needs to be demystified,” Cloud states. “Jack asked Jill for dinner and a movie, but it doesn’t mean they’re looking at bridal magazines the next day. It’s important to have periods of time when you’re dating just to have fun and not to be serious.”

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Josie Newman is a veteran freelance reporter based near Toronto whose work frequently appears in Charisma, The Globe and Mail, The National Post and other publications. She is a single Christian who has personally experienced some of the hazards described in this story.