Canberra woman Elizabeth Coleman is no longer afraid to call the high-control religious sect she was born into a cult, and she certainly isn’t afraid to share the truth about the teachings of the group.

“We were terrified of the leaders. They had control over kicking us out of the group, and our whole life is in the group … that’s the thing about belonging to a cult, it’s the culture,” she said.

Having published her autobiography, Cult to Christ, Elizabeth has spent over 20 years of her life sharing her experience surviving the cult and deprogramming from the brainwashing she was subjected to. 

It’s hard to believe that a secret religious cult operates and exists right here in Canberra – and the group is still considered to have one of the more conservative strongholds.

“Well, most people haven’t heard of the group … how can you when it doesn’t have a name?” laughs Elizabeth.

“Ex-members have formally called them the ‘two by twos’, so they can be universally recognised, but they themselves still refuse to give themselves a name. They internally and colloquially call themselves, ‘the way’, ‘the friends’ or ‘the truth’.”

According to Elizabeth, one atrocity that spread its way through the group like a disease is childhood sexual abuse … a not uncommon stain for many religious groups. The ministers of the cult are forced to give up all their possessions, including their homes, and travel around living with other members, which Elizabeth says is where much of the abuse arose.

“There has been lots of episodes of childhood sexual abuse over the years. These families that are having ministers stay in their homes see these people as agents of God who can do no wrong, so even if they had an inkling that something was happening, they had to completely close their mind off and deny it,” she says.

“An overseer from my childhood actually told parents of abused children that if they went to the police, they would be excommunicated. They’ve had to confront it now, though, because ex-members have made noise.”

One of the benefits to having no name, to not being an official religious group, means they can completely deny being an organisation. If taken to court, the group can say they’re not a clergy, they have no ordained ministers, and there’s no paper trail to be found.

“They’re literally a world-wide organisation with a very structured hierarchy, but actually finding the paper trail is very hard. The clergy here in Canberra wouldn’t be subject to Working with Vulnerable People, because officially they’re not a church and you can’t hold them to anything,” Elizabeth says.

“We’ve looked for a legal way around it but it’s just too hard. I don’t know how they could think what they’re doing is right; I think they’re following their own perverted gratifications and the ‘two by twos’ have provided an excellent cover for them.”

Elizabeth says she was never abused, thankfully, but describing her childhood as normal or ‘sheltered’ would be a massive understatement.

“My entire family was part of the Canberra group of the cult. I’m third generation on my father’s side and fourth generation on my mother’s. My grandparents, aunts and uncles, everybody was in the group – I had no family members that were outside it at the time when I was growing up,” she says.

“They controlled what we were allowed to do, how we were allowed to dress, our hobbies and interests … we weren’t even allowed to be involved in sports. Females had to wear long skirts, no makeup, we weren’t allowed to cut our hair or wear jewellery.”

In Elizabeth’s words, the cult denounces church buildings, organisational hierarchy, and accepting offerings like other churches, but they in fact do all these things in secret.

Finding a copy of The Secret Sect by ex-member of the group and Anglican pastor, Doug Parker, was the start of Elizabeth’s undoing. She was 16 at the time, and still to this day has no idea how it just happened to be in their home. Shocking her to her core, Elizabeth felt as though her foundations had just fallen apart.

“I tried to talk to my nana about what I read, and she gave excuses but didn’t deny it, which almost shocked me even more,” Elizabeth says.

“When I tried to talk to anyone about it, especially the leaders, I got pretty cold and aggressive responses – it was clear that nobody wanted me to talk about this and it was a big secret. I felt like I had discovered this huge minefield, and nobody wanted to know about it,” she says.

Questioning the beliefs of the group inevitably displays a lack of faith, so Elizabeth quietly covered up any whisper of disbelief and kept living her life, until her cognitive dissonance became almost unbearable. Then, she met a boy named Dave.

“We were in year 11, and he was a Christian. I walked in on the first day of classes and saw him sitting across the room and I had this thought run across my mind like a chalkboard that said ‘what would you do if someone told you that was the man you were going to marry someday?’ It was like a movie,” Elizabeth smiles.

“I resolved to just never speak to him, because that’s a surefire way to never marry somebody, but I just had this pressing burden over the following nine months … long story short, we became involved with each other, and it was incredibly difficult.”

The ‘two by twos’ strongly condition their members to be vehemently opposed to other Christians, and in Elizabeth’s youth, she heard the ideology that other churches were “of the devil”. The history behind this belief stems back to the cult’s founder, William Irvine, who said all other established clergies were going to hell, and only through contact with him and his line of leaders, will you know the true way to salvation.

“He was seen as more of a threat, too, because he was Christian and he could influence me with the devilish Christian church,” Elizabeth smiles.  

“Dave and I have been married now for 25 years.”

By the time she officially left, Elizabeth was 19 and was “so mentally and emotionally at the end of myself”.

“Sitting on the fence for too long and trying to live in two worlds just doesn’t work and I had to either cut Dave loose and go back into the group, or I had to leave … and I realised I couldn’t stay,” she says.

“I had opened the door too wide; I’d gone too far and I had too many questions. I could never just go back inside and shut the door.”

So, Elizabeth took a leap of faith off the fence, and plummeted into deep post-traumatic stress. She recalls for the first six months, she was “not in a great way” and her parents, particularly her mother, didn’t take her leaving lightly.

Eventually, she was seen as a lost cause, and the nasty attempts from within the group to separate Dave and Elizabeth ceased.

One of the many reinforced beliefs from within the cult was that if you left, you would die.

“We were told so many stories by the leaders in their preaching that those who left, a week later you’d be standing by their grave because they’d been in a car accident or something terrible had happened to them,” Elizabeth says.

“When I did leave, my mother was completely beside herself … she cried and cried and cried and kept saying ‘something terrible is going to happen to you, something terrible is going to happen to you’.

“So then of course, when I left, I felt like something terrible was going to happen to me. I had an awful pain in the gut of my stomach that I couldn’t get rid of. The trauma was really terrible.”

For a long time, there was a fear in the back of Elizabeth’s mind that questioned whether she was wrong, and they were actually right. After confiding in someone about these thoughts, they suggested she get in touch with someone else who had survived a cult as she had – and that was the beginning of her healing.

“I suddenly didn’t feel like I was the only person in the world who had come out of this cult. It sounds so silly now to honestly think this group of people are the only ‘one true people’ in the world, but that’s what belonging to a cult is,” Elizabeth smiles, shaking her head.

“You become so closed in and there’s so many barriers stopping you and they erect all those barriers to stop you from leaving the group. And it’s just that – they honestly believe it. They’re zealous for what they believe.”

She says writing her book saved her from the horrible grip her post-traumatic stress had on her life and released “the monster under the bed”.

“For anyone in the cult or another high-control group, my advice would be you have to think for yourself,” Elizabeth says.

Today she works at a Christian School and is very involved in her local church but prefers not to assign herself to a specific religious denomination.

Her entire immediate family has now left the group, which she says has made life “so much easier”. When Elizabeth originally decided to diverge, it was as though she’d “dropped off the edge of the world”.

“My mother was ex-communicated 18 months after I left for starting to ask too many questions. My father took another six years to leave but he left and my brothers in the meantime had both left,” Elizabeth says.

“It makes it easier to have immediate family who are out because if you have family still in there, it’s always the elephant in the room because you’re an outsider now, and you’ll never be part of the group or the culture again.”

How do you know if you’ve come across the Canberra ‘two by twos’?  

If you’re a Canberran you might be now wondering if you’ve ever unknowingly met people from within the group. Here’s some identifying factors of the cult with no name:

• The leaders are called the ‘workers’ and the lay members are called the ‘friends’.
• Any public form of advertisements or letterbox pamphlets will be very vague with no form of identification – they will generally say ‘You are invited to Bible talks’ or ‘Come and learn about the teachings of Jesus’.
• They will take no public offerings.
• Those attending the meeting will be conservatively dressed; the men will be in trousers, shirts and ties, and the women will be in long skirts or dresses, will most likely have their hair worn in a bun, and will be wearing no makeup or jewellery.
• They will tell you they have ‘no name’ or are ‘non-denominational’.
• If pressed, they will also tell you they have no headquarters or buildings.
• They would never admit to their true historical origins expect to say they only follow the Bible.

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