01x03 - The Choices We Make

[bunniefuu]

all: ♪ Forever and ever

♪ Hallelujah, hallelujah

♪ Forever

♪ King of kings

♪ And Lord of lords

♪ And He shall reign forever and ever ♪

- ♪ And He shall reign - ♪ And He shall reign

- ♪ And He shall reign forever ♪

- What makes Gloriavale Gloriavale?

The original vision for the church

was to simply build a New Testament church.

- ♪ King of kings

- ♪ Forever and ever

- These ,-year-old principles,

how do we keep them in the th century?

- ♪ Forever and ever

- Issues of separation from the world.

How do we define the world?

How do we keep ourselves separate from it?

- ♪ Hallelujah, hallelujah

- When we look around and see the wonders of our property,

we believe we're in God's will to be here.

And we just think that

God had prepared this for us a long time ago.

[tense music]

- I think most New Zealanders feel there is ample reason now

why Gloriavale should be shut down.

- Allegations of physical and sexual abuse.

- Serious questions about Gloriavale.

- Gloriavale shrouded in controversy again.

- Those things that happened were not done

because the leadership wanted them to happen

or encouraged it to happen.

- Everybody that we've spoken to

after leaving Gloriavale has one thing in common.

When they leave this commune,

they leave with next to nothing.

- I asked God to just let me die

because I didn't want to have to make that decision.

- When one of your children leaves,

to me, it's worse than a death.

- He admitted two counts

of indecently assaulting a child under .

- or adult males inside Gloriavale.

You've got now prosecuted,

including the Overseeing Shepherd.

Gloriavale has to be shut down totally.

I've been beating on their door

with court cases after court cases.

- Christian unity is brought about by keeping them separate.

- I don't know what it takes to get this government to act.

- People want to remove the difference

between Gloriavale and the greater society.

But Gloriavale is the difference.

It's either there or it's not.

[children chattering]

- Sometimes we've been massed together

as this faceless society who's dumb

and doesn't know how to make their own choices

because we're so scared of what the leaders

are going to do to us or say to us or--

what can a leader do to me?

[somber music]

The life I live is my choice.

[laughter and chatter]

This is my reality.

It is not my perceived reality, this is my reality.

[suspenseful somber music]

♪

- Go!

[engine revving]

♪

- If you speak and you speak positively

about Gloriavale and the life,

people ask, you know, how can you be happy?

[indistinct chatter]

I could choose to live another life.

And I think what I really want people to understand

is that it is choice.

- Come on, eh?

- I choose to have ten children because I love it.

I wanted to be a mother. I loved kids.

I loved teaching kids, being with kids.

And because I had had such a good--

[alarm beeping]

Oh. [laughter]

- Sorry, it's my alarm. [laughs]

I have to turn that off.

- Oh.

No.

Not. [laughs]

Wish we were.

You can't be.

You can't live in this day and age without being connected.

Anyway, I'll go back to...

[peaceful ambient music]

Can't you just accept the fact that I love my life?

- Yeah! [children giggling]

- I want to be a mom.

I want to have kids of my own

because of seeing what my mom's like

and I've seen the joy that having kids can bring you.

And it-- it does give you fulfillment.

I know everyone at Gloriavale.

All the people that I live with are my family, basically.

♪

- So the whole community way of life that we had chosen to live

was set up to support everyone.

♪

You can get free food,

free accommodation, free education.

You just need to play a part somewhere in the community

so this can all work.

- You level out, huh?

Other people, other things are more important than me.

That's the fundamental crux of community.

- Well, for myself, I wanted to engage with this process

because everybody else's voice has been heard,

university experts and cult experts

and these experts and those experts.

But no one's asked us.

- When my husband first said something to me,

I was like, no way.

But this is the Lord giving me an opportunity

to tell people what I actually want.

- When I was , I became romantically involved

with a young woman in the community.

♪

It didn't go well.

That is not acceptable within Gloriavale.

And rightly so.

So at that stage, I put forward my wish

to leave the community, that it wasn't for me.

I ended up spending about three months

in a kibbutzim in Israel.

I knew I was there to make the decision

that I would live for the rest of my life,

whether one way or the other.

All right, jump in, gentlemen.

I was as conceited as anybody.

I thought I was pretty important.

[laughs]

But I thought, no, I want to be part of something

bigger than just me.

- Luke and Angel.

[cheers and applause]

- I decided to come back and make my life in the community.

♪

Every day, I make the choice to live my life this way.

♪

- There's a few different narratives around Gloriavale.

One of them, which you actually get

from a lot of people inside Gloriavale

is that Gloriavale is a wonderful place to live.

Sure, they've had some problems.

But they've made changes

and now they're on the right track again.

And there's no need for

anything further to happen, really.

On the other hand, you get the narrative

that is basically Gloriavale is a cesspool of sexual abuse

covered up by a system that just exists

to protect the people that are in power.

Both of them are true in their own way.

- As peaceful as ever from a distance.

Inside, there is grief.

Hopeful Christian truly leaves a void.

The next leader or Overseeing Shepherd gets absolute power.

And that comes down to Howard Temple,

a -year-old American who is the official next in line.

[indistinct chatter]

[somber music]

- Howard, he was in the U.S. Navy.

I think he joined when he was

after being born in Arkansas and raised in Mississippi.

Came from a very, very poor family.

Sharecroppers.

I think he told me that the first time

he ever got three square meals was when he joined the Navy.

- How are you today? - I'm great.

- Oh, yeah?

- You haven't had a horrible day?

- Had a great day.

- A very, very practical man.

Very down-to-earth, very loving, very kind-hearted.

- My grandad would have been quite happy to not become

the Overseeing Shepherd.

- Jesus Christ--

- He would have been happy to not be a leader.

- Responsibility.

And--

[scoffs] Become the scapegoats if something goes wrong.

- Police have confirmed an investigation is underway.

- A storm is brewing around Gloriavale.

- An investigation continues

into a range of alleged offenses.

- Newshub has approached Gloriavale for comment.

Was a journalist over the past years.

I've heard a lot of fairly worrying and damaging claims

about Gloriavale.

- There are people who have left Gloriavale

who have told their stories,

but never before had there been current residents

who would sneak out in the middle of the day

to meet a journalist in the bush

on the outskirts of the property.

- [indistinct]

[voice distorted]

- At the time, we went to some lengths

to try and obscure their identities.

- At that stage, I was still at Gloriavale.

And as soon as that clip came on the internet,

it took me one glance and I said,

I know exactly who that is.

And I was like, oh, no, that's Boaz.

Listening to what they said, I was like, wow.

He's brave.

But he's also quite stupid for doing that

because he's going to get found out

and there's going to be hell to pay.

[tense music]

[tense music]

- You can disguise your voice, you can mask your face,

you can not even film anything but their arms.

But, you know, I knew what his arms looked like

and I knew how he rolled up his sleeves.

Like, you live on everybody's lap there, so you know

all these ridiculous little things about them.

And so I recognized it straight away,

and I was like,

this is bad.

He's going to get into a lot of trouble.

- It was one of the bigger, you know, rebellious outbursts

from someone that was living there

that had happened in my lifetime.

[tense music]

They called all the men from Gloriavale.

Most of the work around the community pretty much stopped,

and we went up into what's now the school library.

[scoffs] They call it a meeting.

But it was basically like a massive,

big verbal abuse session.

And it went on ten hours straight that first day.

Calling him a traitor, calling him a Judas.

He thought, yeah, I know I'm in trouble.

But I should be able to handle it

or just basically try and shut out what they're saying,

ignore it.

[wind howling]

By the second day,

I could actually see that it was breaking him.

Well, they wanted him to accuse his son.

♪

That's actually half of what made him collapse, too,

because the leaders got his own father to turn on him.

I mean, he had no hope.

- It was the first time any current member of Gloriavale

had blown the whistle on what was going on.

- WorkSafe says it found no evidence of worker fatigue

when its inspectors visited Gloriavale

this week after current members told Newshub

they worked shifts of up to hours

with little sleep between them.

- I don't know what it takes to get this government to act.

I've been beating on their door

with court cases after court cases.

- We've come across some very interesting characters

in the last few years.

[tense music]

Brian Henry has a thing about us.

- My instinct straight away, I'm a hard-nosed litigator,

what are they covering up?

- He's got a way of thinking about us

that I believe is a little bit twisted.

- Having decided they were covering things up,

you start questioning and you start digging.

- Personally, I think they're running out of things

to talk about, grizzle about,

that they must be clutching at straws.

- You started to realize that

this place was breeding victims.

- Absurd, in some ways.

- And that became my view.

- We get slandered with all this nonsense

about being a cult and mind control and all that stuff,

you know?

No! I'm doing this out of my own free will.

I'm here because I love it.

- They know that if I let the pressure off them,

they can go right back to what they are, were, and still are.

[cattle mooing]

- I'm independent of Gloriavale.

I'm not a member of Gloriavale.

But I'm chief executive

of the Christian Church Community Trust.

The trust assists in managing the businesses,

and also where the community needs expert support

on improvement and development.

[peaceful ambient music]

Brian's comments, I was surprised from a lawyer,

quite frankly.

Brian's only once visited the community,

and that was very briefly.

But I think his knowledge of the community

is somewhat removed.

♪

- Brian Henry cannot understand

why we as Christian people do what we do.

Now, I perfectly understand this.

The scripture says that the natural man

does not understand spiritual things.

OK, children, for scripture this morning,

we'll go through the First Epistle of John, chapter .

What on Earth motivates me as a -year-old

to forsake my goods, to forsake my family,

and go and live with a bunch of wackos

on the West Coast of New Zealand?

Jesus is the one who forgives us of our sins.

Most people look at that kind of thing

and say, well, there's got to be something wrong

with these guys, you know?

There's something weird about this.

But what does the scripture tell us

about people who say they're Christians,

but don't keep the commands of Christ?

- They're liars and the truth is not in them.

- That's right.

Normal people don't do that.

And they're right. Normal people don't.

[all singing indistinctly]

♪

I wanted to do the will of God.

so why wouldn't I want to throw in my lot

and live with people who had the same beliefs that I had?

[soft somber music]

- Well, I'll put it to you very simply.

I don't believe sex offenders are a religion.

But if you do,

keep talking to me about it,

because I just don't agree with you.

[all singing indistinctly]

Those that think this is religious are fooled

by the bullshit they're selling.

It's a business.

This is a financial institution,

in my book, that's gone rogue.

It's worth , million, no debt.

So you use hardcore corporate law

on what is a corporate body.

We want the assets released out of all those structures,

where we can get at them as compensation

for the plaintiffs.

- Employment Court Chief Judge Christina Inglis

delivered her landmark decision today.

The decision could have major ramifications

for the reclusive community.

[suspenseful music]

Since its inception,

Gloriavale has been run by men.

But today was a win for the women.

- Vindicated that their time working

at the Christian commune was not as volunteers.

♪

- It was creating quite a strain

on the way we had traditionally lived and operated.

We had been operating under the understanding

that we were volunteering our lives and serving one another.

♪

- We've transitioned people from largely

turning up on a voluntary basis

to now, where they're paid just like me and you.

♪

I can categorically say there are no children working

in the businesses of Gloriavale.

[cattle mooing]

Has change been too slow?

I think as

a chief executive, I always believe change is too slow.

You're talking about an organization

that's years in the making.

And it's not just a commercial organization.

It's commercial, it's spiritual,

it's people's lives.

- We're involved in what I call lawfare.

It's a term I borrowed from Donald Trump

'cause he's been under this lawfare problem

for quite a while.

- Oh, we've been busy.

We just quietly get on with the job.

And I'm succeeding.

- I honestly think it's a very wrong way of using the law,

to target a particular people or a particular corporation

and use the law to beat them down.

And it does have an effect on us.

We've had a huge financial drain

through legal costs, of course.

And that does have a tell.

- They're using quite mercenary tactics

to attack our businesses.

They contact suppliers,

say, if you have anything to do with Gloriavale,

we'll blacklist you.

They're saying the same things to our customers.

People that we've dealt with for years

are forced to look elsewhere for their business.

- It's a massive burden for people

who are going through a massive change in their life,

quite rightly, to also feel that their very existence

is under threat.

[somber music]

♪

- Gloriavale has got genuine people in there

who are genuine Christians.

♪

But they're a smokescreen.

- You take the mom, dad, and all the kids out.

You take them away from the influence.

You get them to start to see

and become part of the real world.

♪

So the parents actually wake up

to what they're doing to their kids,

because they are not looking after their children.

- If we put our names up there in this way,

then we'll probably be defendants in the next case

irrespective of what we've done or haven't done.

To put your head above the parapet is to risk that.

- I'm not going to stop until I get all these kids out.

[Julia Johnston's "Grace Greater Than All Our Sin"]

♪

- ♪ Marvelous grace of our--

- I thought the world of my dad.

I thought he was the best Christian.

all: ♪ Grace, grace

- I didn't know %

of the things that came out about him later.

I didn't know any of it.

all: ♪ That is greater than

♪ All our sin

- He admitted two counts

of indecently assaulting a child under ,

three of indecent as*ault of a child between and ,

a charge of sexual violation,

and five charges of indecent as*ault.

He pleaded not guilty to other charges.

[tense music]

- I knew I had to decide.

Was I going to believe what they were saying?

Or was I going to take my dad's side

and say, no, he's innocent?

- It was all my fault.

It was my self-will.

It was me that was starting to change.

- He was the best Christian ever.

- Tears filled my eyes.

- He was up there next to Hopeful in my mind.

But I was like, no, I'm--

I'm not going to just live in denial.

I started taking the view that

if there are victims that are saying this happened to them,

I'm not going to call them a liar.

It was one of the hardest things

and periods of my life ever to go through.

To call my own father a pedophile,

it was no small thing.

[somber music]

- A former Gloriavale member has been sentenced to

years and months in prison

for more than charges of sexual offending.

Several of the charges date back as far as the s.

- To this day, some of our family's

still getting more information about it,

just coming from all sorts of people.

And I'm just like, well, how did everyone else know this?

- Jonathan's family was basically

isolated a wee bit from the rest of the community block.

We never told the children why,

never told his wife why.

♪

- I remember as a young girl asking,

why did their family never live with the rest of us?

Why are they always separate?

And my mom said because he's not a safe person.

My mother's his sister.

She said he's not a safe person.

- As a general rule, we did not report some things.

But in , we did have a meeting with the police

about Jonathan Benjamin.

It was handled by the leadership here.

The girls shared some of the things that had happened,

and we did report these incidents to the police.

At that stage, none of the parents or the children

were prepared to go to court and to press charges.

So the police were in a bit of a fix.

They came up with a safety plan for Jonathan.

- Yes.

- Yes. Mm-hmm.

- Yes.

- After Hopeful died, I believe that

that agreement we had with the police

was unknown to the next person who worked out

where people lived in the community,

and he was allowed back into our hostel.

And that created a problem.

[peaceful music playing]

♪

The bottom line is it wasn't handled well.

And we would have been better off

if we had reported him to the police

and just let the police do their thing.

I'm just-- like a lot of the other people

here at the moment, we're trying to pick up pieces.

And we're trying to make the best of a bad thing.

And moving on, I might add, with a great determination

that these things are not going to happen again.

- He destroyed our family's reputation.

Absolutely tarred our family's name.

I just couldn't see a way out of it for a couple of years.

But I knew that for me to be in the right place with God,

that I needed to forgive him.

- I want to hold him. - Very carefully.

I believe that through Christ,

we can overcome our weaknesses.

And so that's why I pray for him.

And praying for him

disables hate in me for him.

[soft suspenseful music]

♪

- They were-- I hate those things.

[laughs]

- Yeah, they were going to interview our children.

This is the police.

They set up counseling huts for counselors to come.

And--but there was far more damage done by the counseling

than otherwise.

The thing was that you're a victim,

completely opposite to our faith

where circumstances can happen in your life,

but those are things that you can, in Christ, overcome.

[somber music]

♪

- I remember after I'd come back from a conversation

with some police officers,

wanted to find out what I knew and what had happened to me.

I came home feeling dirty

from reliving it all.

And I looked at my children and I remember thinking,

no.

I never want my children to go through this.

♪

- OK, sit up at the table.

Can you reach? Yeah?

[soft somber music]

The only thing that led them to believe

that I was sexually abused was because of the nightmares

and because a six-year-old shouldn't know

what penetration feels like.

[sighs]

I didn't really get therapy for it because I--

I feel like I just handled it on my own.

And...

I mean, that's not to say that I don't have issues.

I probably do.

And one of them is, um,

I sort of feel like everyone should handle their

trauma like I did.

Just get over it and move on.

But, yeah. [sighs]

♪

- For a lot of people in Gloriavale,

the police investigations were shocking.

Some of those people, it took them away from their beliefs,

and they could no longer live there.

I guess I'd fit into that category.

[sighs]

Um--[chuckles]

Yeah, I'm just--

- I had an amazing childhood.

My wife had an amazing childhood.

- Well, Dove, you're going to become part

of the body of Jesus Christ.

- Growing up, we always felt loved.

- Hallelujah! - Hallelujah!

- Hallelujah!

- In my life, I didn't see abuse growing up

the way that they describe it.

Somehow-- yeah, somehow, I didn't.

I never got abused as a girl.

And it seems like a lot of the abuse

was done by people that actually didn't have the heart.

They weren't really one of us and then they left.

And then the abuse came out and Gloriavale gets the blame.

♪

- Under the spotlight.

Gloriavale leader Howard Temple

making a rare public appearance

before the Royal Commission of Inquiry.

- Mr. Temple,

you must have been aware that things were happening

in your community

before Mr. Christian got sent to prison.

- When I read those briefs of evidence,

I saw how those people could be so hurt,

because they experienced that.

But I hadn't.

I had not experienced that.

- Do you accept there has been intergenerational sexual abuse

in your community?

- What changes have been made in terms of how abuse

allegations are handled now?

[tense music]

- As independent trustees who do not live at Gloriavale,

we've helped the community understand

that sometimes there are conflicts

between legal position, moral position,

and spiritual position.

[players shouting]

At the end of the day, the bottom line is

you have to comply with the legal obligations,

even if they conflict with your moral code

or your spiritual understanding.

And they've acknowledged that, they've accepted it.

And certainly now, if there's any wrongdoing,

any ill*gal activity in Gloriavale,

that will be reported to the appropriate authorities.

- Our confidence is in God.

- It's very frustrating

because Gloriavale is held to a much higher standard

than anywhere else.

Put that on a level footing,

nobody can actually guarantee the safety

of anyone anywhere.

♪

I can guarantee

that if abuse comes to light,

it won't be covered, it won't ignored.

To guarantee the safety of the children in Gloriavale,

no one can.

♪

- ♪ Our Father who art in Heaven ♪

♪

[laughter]

- ♪ In Earth as it is in Heaven ♪

♪ Forever

♪ Hallelujah

- Growing up, you have a vision,

the projection your family is going to go in.

all: ♪ Ooh, single girl

- When you're getting married,

you talk about that with your spouse.

And I felt like we were on the same page.

We wanted to raise our children in Gloriavale

and wanted our children to have the same life.

- This song is about love.

- Then as the years went by-- [sighs]

Gideon more and more started talking about

the things he didn't like about Gloriavale.

- When I did start saying

or mentioning about leaving Gloriavale,

she was % against it.

- I said, no, I'm not ready to go yet.

And so he was like, fine, we won't go

'cause I don't want to break up the family.

And I was like, well,

I don't want to break up the family, either.

[rooster crowing]

- Dad, she's too fast for you.

- [grunts] I can't reach her.

Hello, Rosie. Here we go.

Should we let Rosie out for a run?

- Yeah. Oh!

[laughs] - There she goes.

I think because I was just going through so much already,

everything we've talked about that I was going through,

then deciding, well, maybe we should leave.

Wow, one trauma after another.

Do you know that's where black jelly beans come from?

[laughter]

That's what one of my brothers told me.

[laughter] - Who are your brothers?

- Oh, Moses, Josiah.

- She likes her mummy.

- In my heart, I felt like we needed to go

because I didn't want him to be making any more trouble

for Gloriavale.

But I asked God to just let me die because I--

I didn't want to have to make that decision.

[sighs]

But then the next day,

I found out I was pregnant with my fourth baby.

- They keep nice and warm. And she's still got--

- But it had been said that women who left

with their husbands were forsaking God.

So Granddad Howard read through the Bible.

And then he stood up in the next Sunday meeting,

and he said, look, we've had it.

We've got it wrong.

- It's Mommy and Zipporah.

- He said, wives,

if you want to go with your husbands,

you can.

So that gave her comfort

in the fact that she wouldn't be lost,

she wouldn't be damned because she left because of her family.

That was a significant point.

The leaders said that it's OK.

- Right, let's go.

- [babbling indistinctly] - So then we left.

[chuckles softly and sniffles]

both: ♪ In a little bag, she covered ♪

- In Gloriavale, there's a really strong support system.

If you're struggling with your kids,

if you need help cooking your food,

there'll be someone there to help.

And you're not going to be alone in a house by yourself

with children feeling like you're going mental.

[laughs]

Yeah, we're going to get some milk.

- Yeah, let's get milk!

- Fill it up from the dairy.

I remember crying myself to sleep

nearly every single night because I was so lonely.

And I missed my friends and I missed my family.

And...

yeah, that was just really hard.

[somber ambient music]

I was feeling bad because I should be coping and, um--

♪

Yeah. [sighs] Sorry.

[sniffles]

Yeah.

♪

- I left Gloriavale when I was .

And it took me a little while to figure out

that I might not be damned because they said I was damned.

Like, I thought I was fat, too.

[laughing] But it turns out I'm not.

♪

- Dad, what about this one?

- Yeah, it's a perfect rock.

I did hold resentment against Gloriavale.

But now after a number of years,

I have much more respect

for the lifestyle that I grew up in.

♪

- [chuckles]

When one of your children leaves,

to me, it's worse than a death.

Because they've stepped away

from the opportunity for eternal life.

- Arm's back.

And go!

Hi-yah!

Oh, that was a pretty good throw.

Their system was so strict back then that

they couldn't even call me up and say they loved me.

- Now.

♪

- I struggled with the thought

of not being a part of my family

and not accepted as even existing anymore.

I think I could have carried it on,

being bitter against Gloriavale.

But things happen that we just have to move past.

- It can be a place of restoration.

OK, kids, let's go.

And that's always a hope.

♪

And there's offspring.

In my case, the grandchildren that are out there.

♪

- You're good hanging on?

[indistinct chatter]

- Every time I see Dad, he smiles,

and I can feel, you know,

love from my father.

[indistinct chatter]

I would say as a whole, this has changed for Gloriavale,

that when they leave now,

they're not necessarily told that

they're going to eternal damnation

because they've made this decision.

[peaceful music]

- I don't know what's going on day-to-day at the moment.

I know they are an embattled organization

who are trying to cover up and hide away from their past.

And I honestly don't believe

that these sort of horses can change their spots.

[pensive music]

♪

- All I can say is that

the policies we have in place and the determination we have

is the best thing we have to put an end to it.

It's--what else can we do?

- Time for them runs out in

when I get a fixture on my sl*very trial,

'cause they won't survive that.

And they know it.

I take the view that they are

just trying to wait out the storm and hope we go away.

It's not going to happen, but that's what they're hoping for.

- There's airbrushing.

There's let's put on a good performance

so that they stop asking us to do things.

Because the people in Gloriavale

have been so resistant to change, the government,

the legal system, and the general public

is losing patience with them.

- In fairness to Gloriavale,

they have apologized for the sexual abuse

that has occurred on their watch.

They have said that they have policies in place

to uphold standards for child protection.

But I do think that the only real way

to ensure children, especially, are safe at Gloriavale

is to not have Gloriavale.

[tense music]

♪

- The trial of the head of Gloriavale

began today in Greymouth, with Howard Temple

facing charges of indecent as*ault.

- Gloriavale's Overseeing Shepherd

denies every charge against him.

- How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?

- Not guilty.

- While the girls would stand close to the defendant

and serve him his drink or food,

the defendant would take the opportunity

to touch a complainant's body.

- Inadvertent or accidental touching of bottoms

may well have occurred

as Mr. Temple's arm went around the waist of the complainant.

- An unwanted hug with nothing more?

I'm really struggling to see that as an indecent as*ault.

He's a creepy granddad who's a bit more touchy-feely

than he ought to be.

[tense music]

- People are calling for it to be torn apart.

Others are saying everyone has a right

to live how they choose.

But I think that Gloriavale will come to its natural end

as more stories are told, as people leave,

depending on how the court cases go as well.

- Gloriavale leader Howard Temple

has pleaded guilty to indecent as*ault

on a dramatic third day of his judge-alone trial

at the Greymouth District Court.

- How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?

- Guilty.

- The -year-old had earlier pleaded not guilty

to counts of sexual offending.

But today, Temple changed his plea to guilty

on of the charges dating from to .

[tense music]

- Have we been facing incredibly confronting issues?

Yes, we have.

But when we face these new challenges,

then we adapt to meet that.

But we won't change our faith and our convictions

about the truth of what God's called us to in His word.

♪

- As long as they keep believing

that their beliefs are the only way to believe the Bible,

it won't change.

Nothing will change the way it needs to.

♪

- The question, you know, is Gloriavale--

should be destroyed or Gloriavale shouldn't be?

And my answer to that one is let the law handle the law.

But when you go out to deliberately destroy something

just because you don't like a belief of someone,

I don't have to like your belief, right?

I don't have to agree with you.

I don't have to agree with your lifestyle.

But am I going to stand and play God?

No.

Otherwise, I just become another version of Gloriavale.

[peaceful ambient music]

♪