FROM FRIDAY, JUNE 14, 1996
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE NETLY NEWS
Once you start an alt.* newsgroup. You can't kill it. Ever.

The Church of Scientology learned that lesson after looking in horror at alt.religion.scientology. In January of 1995, Helena Kobrin, legal counsel for the group, tried to kill the newsgroup, but was halted by various sysadmins who resurrected it. This was one of the first salvos in a long feud between the church and its detractors that gets louder, and more labarynthine, by the day.

Now, a year-and-a-half after the Scientology wars started, a new bottle of wrath is brewing. This involves Calvary Chapel, an organization of about 600 churches worldwide built around the Bible, Pentecostalism and the belief that the world is coming to an end Real Soon Now.

At one point the group had a weekly TV show, daily national radio broadcasts, a radio station, a Bible college and two record companies sending out the message of "Pastor Chuck" Smith, Calvary Chapel's head man.

In the late 1960s, the original Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California was ground zero for the Jesus Movement. The church's numbers skyrocketed as Pastor Chuck opened his doors to thousands of long-haired converts ready to get high on God. Today the main church in Orange County, California alone has about 30,000 people.

Enter Gospel singer George Hillman. This Calvary Chapel member decided he wanted to use Usenet to link members of various local congregations. Last year he created alt.religion.christian.calvary-chapel. Which was a big mistake: Within days, his vision of happy Christian fellowship was distroyed by the reality of newsgroup anarchy as flamers and disgrunted former church members moved into the newsgroup like junkie squatters.

So Hillman posted a list of rules, which were ignored along with his attempts to police the group. "It's our group with our GUIDELINES to keep it on topic and useful to us who are Calvary Chapel members and visitors," he reminded his detractors. Uh, this is Usenet, babe.

The situation got wilder. Accusations began flying, claiming that Pastor Chuck was a dictator and that another minister was abusing his office.

Thinking, perhaps, that there was safety in numbers, Hillman went to the pastor of his local Calvary Chapel in Old Bridge, NJ, Lloyd Pulley. They tried to get some members of their congregation on the newsgroup. But that didn't work either. The congregants couldn't stand the rancorous newsgroup.

Pulley, who broadcasts endless sermons about the coming Apocalypse over WMCA, a religious radio station in New York City, now says the whole thing was a bad idea. "The average person in the church would get chewed up,"

Pulley told The Netly News. "They aren't used to the flame wars. There are people out there who hate the idea of authority, I guess."

So last Tuesday, Hillman decided to destroy his creation. "A large number of CC pastors (including my own) have been very concerned for a long time about the content of this group," he said as he attempted to smother his spiritual infant. "It was started without their approval and now it seems all of CC is on the defensive about this place! My actions were not hasty... I was urged to remove it many months ago and didn't, giving it the benefit of the doubt..."

And thus, to a mocking audience, Hillman pleaded the case for the end of alt.religion.christian.calvary-chapel. "Everyone here needs to be aware that steps have been taken to kill this newsgroup," he said. "Far too many people have been offended, mislead and misrepresented here and that certainly is an issue, however the main reason for this action is because no one that is part of Calvary Chapel feels the need to support a 'public forum.' Calvary's presence should be one more representative of the 'Calvary Style of Ministry.' Of course, his attempt to stifle criticism of Calvary Chapel was no more successful than Helena Kobrin's attempt to kill the Scientology group. Even if you could convince some sympathetic sysadmin to erase a group you created (extremely doubtful), someone else would come along and re-create the group.

So now Hillman is stuck with his own Frankenstein: a newsgroup he created that he can't control. Perhaps it will hurt the sales of his new CD, but it probably won't affect his latest Internet project, a Web-based cyberchurch.

Who knows. In the meantime, Hillman has sworn off Usenet.

"Usenet is not a place I hang out," Hillman confessed to us. "I'm not up to things nor do I care to be. What was done was what we thought was in the best interest of Calvary Chapel." --Rev. Chris Stamper

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