The Cult Next Door

Introducing a new series on the Circuit Riders, a Youth With a Mission Discipleship Training School.

There is a coffee shop near my old apartment where the Circuit Riders often gather. I’d been going to that shop for years in the mornings to work and to write, and over time, the number of people my own age and younger I’d seen holding Bible studies and praying together there had skyrocketed. I didn’t think much of it — that’s Orange County for you.

But one early summer Friday morning last spring, I was interrupted as I sat with my latte buried behind my laptop and Bart Ehrman’s Heaven and Hell. The girl at the table next to mine, who must have been only in her early twenties, leaned over. “I noticed your book,” she said. “Are you a Christian?” I told her I was, which is easier to say than to explain. She immediately asked me about my spiritual journey in a more intense fashion than I was prepared for while my caffeine was still kicking in.

To deflect, I asked her if she attended a church nearby. That’s when she told me that she was a member of the Circuit Riders. The Circuit Riders were “by Gen-Z and for Gen-Z,” she told me. Within the next ten minutes, I had been invited to a Monday night weekly service, a Tuesday night Bible study, a Wednesday morning prayer group, a Thursday night prayer group, and an upcoming Circuit Riders-hosted conference that weekend geared specifically for women in ministry. There was something so sweetly sincere about this young woman and how passionate she was about her faith, or at least about the Circuit Riders. They seemed nearly one and the same to her.

My Circuit Rider table-neighbor was met by a friend, another member of the group. As I returned to my book (and here I will confess to eavesdropping, with the defense that our tables were indeed very close together), the girls talked excitedly about the calling they felt from God to be part of the mission of the Circuit Riders.

And yet some guarded hesitation eventually bubbled to the surface. The girls seemed to be coming to the end of their involvement with this group and didn’t know what they would do next. The years that they might have otherwise spent in college were gone. They didn’t have any work experience besides their time as Circuit Riders. They didn’t have any savings, as any money they fundraised went straight back into the group.

But surely pouring their all into the Circuit Riders had been God’s plan — right?

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The Circuit Riders take their name from the Methodist itinerant ministers of the 19th century who rode on horseback across the states to preach on a “circuit” of churches. They are otherwise entirely unaffiliated with Methodism and draw their theology from New Apostolic Reformation-inspired entities. On their website, you’ll find plenty of pop-ups asking for donations (and the slogan “SAVE THE LOST, REVIVE THE SAVED, TRAIN THEM ALL”), but you’ll have to do some digging to find a single name of a leader affiliated with the group.

The Circuit Riders fall under the expansive umbrella of Youth With a Mission (YWAM), founded by missionary Loren Cunningham in 1960. YWAM’s origin story comes with a heavy dose of divine inspiration. In his autobiography Is That Really You, God?, Cunningham recounts a vision of a map he claims God gave him at the age of twenty. The map moved as waves crashed on the shore of every continent. As he looked closer, Cunningham saw that the waves were made up of “kids my age and even younger going out as missionaries.” YWAM describes this vision as a “God-initiated, destiny-defining, foundational covenant from God to birth a new missions movement.”

That new missions movement went fundamentally unchecked. Cunningham, who passed away in 2023, is referred to in his own obituary as the “de-regulator of missions” because he “broke the 1960s missionary paradigm by creating opportunities for youth to serve short-term, interdenominationally, globally and unsalaried.” You can find any number of stories about YWAM and the claims former members have made about the physical, emotional, and spiritual abuse they endured as part of this organization. The best YWAM was able to do when allegations from hundreds of former members surfaced more prominently in 2021 was to assure their members and contributors that every single one of these abuses were one-off instances.

YWAM does not pay any of its staff and encourages staff members to “partner with friends and churches who support their ministry.” To become a YWAM staff member, you must first complete a Discipleship Training School, or DTS, which are offered at hundreds of locations around the world. The Circuit Riders is one such DTS, targeting young participants primarily between the ages of 18 and 22.

In order to attend a “Circuit Riders Experience,” which are offered twice a year for six months each in Huntington Beach, California, participants who are accepted into the program must (as of May 2025) fundraise an initial $7900 to cover the cost of their training, which includes housing. To cover the costs of food, flights, and any other personal spending to live on for the six-month duration of the training, the Circuit Riders estimates that participants in the program will need to raise at least an additional $6000. Participants are not permitted to hold outside employment. The Circuit Riders Experience is all-encompassing.

The training offered by the Circuit Riders is broken down into two phases: lectures and outreach. The group promises to help develop the innate gifts and talents of participants as content creators, musicians, and preachers to support the organization’s large social media presence, band, and evangelistic tours. The first three months of the program are dedicated to training sessions. Then, newly-trained Circuit Riders are sent out on the road to evangelize to students at high schools and colleges.

If you are a prospective Circuit Rider wondering what you can expect from the program, this is the answer provided to you:

Each week will consist of training sessions, worship and prayer, outreach, and project hours. This Experience is different than attending a normal [YWAM] training program. The CR Experience carries an intentional schedule that flows seamlessly with our established CR community. All of us throw in to serve and are flexible as needs arise. Our expectation is that during this experience you will set aside any extra-curricular trips and engage wholeheartedly to seek God with the Circuit Rider community here in Huntington Beach for the full experience.

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The origin story of the Circuit Riders is hard to precisely pin down. Co-founded by pastor Brian Brennt and YWAM’s Andy Byrd, the first Circuit Rider training took place at YWAM’s Kona campus in 2011, as far as I can tell. Now based in Orange County, the Circuit Riders maintain a relationship with the Kona campus, sending middle and high school students to Hawaii on mini-Circuit Riders Experiences over the summers.

On their website, which is fairly bare of anything more theological than a short statement of faith, there is a list of “cultures,” which “set us apart as ones who truly love Jesus.”

When I first began to poke around to see what I could find about the Circuit Riders, it was this list that piqued both my curiosity and the concern. I suppose, for instance, that it’s innocuous enough to wish to be a radical servant. But pairing the notion of being a radical servant with the goal of being unoffendable raised in my mind an immediate scarlet-red flag.

Imagine being an eighteen-year-old welcomed into a new, exciting community. You’ve just graduated high school and perhaps have put off college for your chance to do something you think will be even more meaningful with your life. That community then becomes your entire life. You live with members of the community, you spend every day together, you’ve embarked on a grand mission together. Crucially, you’re told to surrender yourself to serve the group. If you find yourself “offended” by something, you’re reminded that you simply aren’t embodying the love of Jesus. Moreover, you’re told that being an unoffendable servant sets you apart as one who truly loves Jesus (the implication, of course, being that you love Jesus more than those other Christians who aren’t on your level).

I started to seek out anyone I could find who had been involved with the Circuit Riders. I scoured subreddits, listened to sermons preached by members of the group, interviewed former participants, and got my hands on the training materials that the program uses for the lecture portion of its school.

That led me to the Freedom Manual.

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The Freedom Manual, written by founder Brian Brennt and another pastor named Mike Riches in 2007, is used to teach budding Circuit Riders in the class that kicks off the lecture portion of this DTS: the Freedom Class.

The manual opens:

Even though we know all the promises of Scripture are true, it easy to lose focus and become weighed down with cares, defeat, past hurts, hopelessness, and other areas of sin that keep us in bondage. These hindrances steal our intimacy with Christ and the joy of our salvation. Freedom is about being released to love and serve Jesus wholeheartedly.

Put simply, the Freedom Class is about becoming more like Jesus and reflecting His love and power to everyone around us.

Relatively standard for a vaguely evangelical group, right? Of course a young Christian passionate enough to give up their plans for the start of their adult life and raise almost $14,000 in service of being trained as an effective evangelist would wish to become more like Christ. However, the Freedom Manual has a specific “hindrance” in mind that the students of this course must overcome: strongholds.

What exactly is a stronghold?

A stronghold is made up of sin expressed in a person’s thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, philosophies, actions, and values that oppose the truth of God. Strongholds are a “launching pad” for enemy influence in our lives.

These strongholds, clearly identified as sin taken root in a person’s life, must be “dismantled.” Brennt and Riches instruct their young pupils:

The primary purpose for dismantling strongholds is so that we can experience His love in a deeper way. In the Freedom Class, we do go after sin patterns and strongholds. The main reason for this is to remove any obstacles that separate us from God.

Through its talk of strongholds, the Freedom Manual offers what so many charismatic-adjacent movements provide to their followers: the promise that you can become a super-Christian of sorts. Take, for example, the way in which such movements often frame baptism. Baptism by water is necessary but not sufficient, a charismatic church might teach; baptism by the Holy Spirit evidenced by speaking in tongues is what sets you apart as one truly committed to God. If you can’t quite get there, then you must just not love God enough.

In much the same way, Brennt and Riches frame the breaking of these strongholds. They promise that by dismantling these patterns of sin, students in search of freedom can experience the love of God in a deeper way (the implication once again being that by following the way of the Circuit Riders, these students can experience the love of God in a deeper way than other Christians).

As the authors put it:

Freedom comes when you stand firmly behind our commander, Jesus Christ, in full allegiance to Him. The more you radically obey all that He asks of you, the faster strongholds are demolished and joy is released in your life.

Here, obedience comes with a promise. Obey, serve, and dismantle your sinful strongholds, and you’ll receive the kind of joy other Christians can only dream about.

Brennt and Riches waste no time in outlining the specifics of those strongholds, providing students with a list of sins from which they are to break free. The Freedom Manual offers students the chart below, which identifies sinful identities and contrasts them with what a life free of such strongholds can look like:

Being “victimized,” “filled with self-hatred,” “depressed,” and “unable to trust” are all identities explicitly labeled sinful, created by “the enemy.” Their opposites — for instance, the opposite of being “depressed and sorrowful” is being a “person of contagious joy” — are directly tied to repenting of such sin and simply obeying God.

The Freedom Manual then breaks the progression of a stronghold down into three steps: the injustice at the root of the stronghold, the lie told in response to that injustice, and the behavior that then stems from that lie. Take, for instance, the first case in the chart below.

If a student has experienced abuse (which the Freedom Manual, I suppose in its defense, notes is not their fault), that is the injustice at the “root” of their stronghold. The “lie” itself is the fear they experience in response to that abuse. The “behavior” resulting from that stronghold — an attempt to exert control — is the sin itself.

Perhaps intellectually, a student of the Freedom Class could separate the “injustice” they suffered from the “sin” they now engage in. But the emotional lines are blurry, and the Freedom Manual does not make much of an effort to draw a distinction:

We react to injustice primarily in anger, bitterness, unforgivingness, withdrawal, or other sin patterns. Simply put, an injustice provokes the construction of strongholds.

Many times we assume that because we were wronged, we have the right to take offense and to retaliate in word, action, or bitterness. This is not the heart of Christ, and even in Christian ministry it is inevitable that all of us will be affected by overt injustice.

Students are primed to expect two key realities from their early training in the Circuit Riders: they will experience injustice and they must remain unoffendable. They are told that their reaction to any injustice they might face could plunge them into a sin so strong that they will need to be broken out of a pattern that might otherwise drag them into a downward spiral. Better to be safely unoffendable.

The Freedom Manual goes on to specify all kinds of supposedly sinful behaviors stemming from these strongholds, everything from independence to disobedience to hatred of authority to depression to anorexia to distrust to anxiety to self-harm to suicide. Brennt and Riches elaborate on how these behaviors build upon each other:

These are examples of the progression of sin the enemy wants to start.

Passive: Passivity, insecurity, inferiority, apathy, depression, condemnation, victimization, hopelessness, self-hatred, etc., that eventually lead to suicide.

Aggressive: Rebellion, jealousy, pride, control, superiority, competition, criticism, hostility, bitterness, anger, rage, etc., that eventually lead to murder.

To help their pupils attack strongholds, Brennt and Riches provide strategies. As the theoretical turns practical, the authors’ relatively half-hearted attempt to separate the “injustices” students might have endured from the “sin” they now engage in is no longer anywhere to be found.

First, they advise praying what they refer to as the “four R’s”:

• Repent of your sin, whether it’s “rebellion, alcohol abuse, or a feeling of shame”

• Receive God’s forgiveness

• Rebuke the enemy’s hold on you

• Replace all lies with God’s truth

Once repentance has been made, the Freedom Manual provides worksheets to help students dive more deeply into the core relationships in their lives around which strongholds may have formed — fathers, mothers, siblings. Young Circuit Riders are presented with a checklist of sins that person may have committed against them, anything from neglect to alcohol abuse to adultery to physical, emotional, or sexual abuse.

The next step in the process of breaking down the stronghold? Pray the following prayer and repent of your sin.

After identifying the sins of your father — up to and including physical and sexual abuse — you are required to not only forgive him but also to ask forgiveness for your sin of failing to forgive your father, whatever it is he has done to you. Once you have repented of your sin, you are instructed to pray a prayer of blessing on this person. You are to bless him with healing from his shame, declaring your love for him.

By breaking down their strongholds, these newly-minted Circuit Riders are able to wield the freedom they have received in order to presumably lead others to the same kind of freedom. Yet again, obedience in dismantling strongholds comes with a promise dangled before these young group members like a carrot on a stick.

When we pray and declare something in faith and conviction, a spiritual transaction occurs. Just as there are business transactions that can affect our earthly lives, so there are spiritual transactions that do the same. When we speak forth a declaration in Christ’s authority that is based on God’s truth, powerful spiritual transactions occur.

The language of the Circuit Riders turns, or perhaps simply fundamentally is, capitalistic. If you do something for God, God will do something for you. If you dismantle your stronghold, you will be free. If you have enough faith, you’ll know the love of God. If you repent of your sin, you will be healed. If your sin persists — if you are still depressed or anxious or suspicious of an authority figure — then you must not have consumed Christ.

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In a 2020 sermon entitled “History of the Circuit Riders,” Derek Mack casts the vision for the group of Gen-Zers. Identified on the Circuit Riders’ website as a “speaker, evangelist, and leader in the Circuit Rider community,” Mack admonishes the group that their calling is a matter of deadly seriousness. They must hold fast to the culture they are creating lest they end up like today’s Methodists (a bastion of liberal progressiveness, according to Mack). Mack then tells his audience of modern day Circuit Riders that most of the historical Circuit Riders died before the age of thirty-three (he does not cite anything to support this, but a quick Google search tells me that historians estimate about half of the Circuit Riders did indeed die young thanks to their grueling lifestyle).

“No one’s died in our Circuit Riders yet. Maybe we’re doing something wrong,” Mack quips.

In the coming weeks, I will be sharing some stories of former members of the Circuit Riders on this platform. Some have chosen to share their real names. Others have chosen to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. I am honored that they’ve trusted me enough to share experiences that range from the bizarre to the painful to the abusive.

I am not sharing these stories because I believe that missional work is necessarily or by nature “bad,” whatever that would exactly mean. There are writers and journalists far more qualified than I who have dug deeply into the state of the modern missionary complex. This is not a reflection on the nature of that work.

I am sharing these stories because the former members I have spoken to have labeled their time in the Circuit Riders as akin to being in a cult. They have described experiences so concerning that I believe their stories warrant light and air. I know how easy it is to get swept up in a wave of fundamentalism that makes promises it can’t keep. Twice a year, new Circuit Riders arrive down the street from one of my favorite coffee shops to learn how to dismantle their strongholds. Their sizable social media presence reaches hundreds of thousands of people as young and impressionable as I was when I fell for a different type of fundamentalism.

I hope some of them might find that there is another path.

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If you or someone you know has an experience with the Circuit Riders that you would like to share with me, I would love to speak with you. You can reach me in the comments of this newsletter or via elena.c.trueba@gmail.com.