The Cult Next Door: Bri & Arielle's Story

“If I can help save someone else’s little sister, then I can do something good in the world.”

A brief content warning: this piece discusses suicide.

When I first began looking into the Circuit Riders — a YWAM-affiliated Discipleship Training School targeting young people who wish to be missionaries, which you can join for just $14,000 — I came across a Reddit thread of people discussing their experiences with this group. One user in particular stood out to me because she too was looking for answers. But her search was far more pointed and personal than mine was, because her search was on behalf of a family member.

When I first spoke with Bri last summer, she was direct: her little sister, Arielle, had died by suicide in March of 2024 after several years of involvement with the Circuit Riders. “I want to shine a light on this group,” she told me. “If I can help save someone else’s little sister, then I can do something good in the world.”

Bri first learned about the Circuit Riders when Arielle was approached by the group on her college campus in Salisbury, Maryland. The Circuit Riders divide their six-month training school into two portions: a lecture portion, which takes place in southern California, and an outreach portion, in which staff members and trainees travel to evangelize at high schools and universities around the country. When Arielle met the Circuit Riders, she was just about to graduate with her bachelor’s degree in psychology. “My sister had struggled in her teenage years with depression and mental health issues,” Bri told me. “She was in treatment and on medication, but I know that she continued to feel like an outcast, like she didn’t belong. I’m sure the Circuit Riders looked very appealing to her because they seemed like a way out — they told her Jesus would cure her of her depression, and she was convinced that this was true.”

Bri’s impression of the Circuit Riders’ appeal to her sister is borne out by the materials created and used by the group to train their members. In one of the primary texts written by the group’s founder, Brian Brennt, depression is explicitly labeled as a sinful identity from which Christians must break free in order to truly live into their identities as followers of Christ. (You can read more about the background and beliefs of the Circuit Riders in my first deep-dive into the group here). Other former members I spoke to like Faith confirmed that the Circuit Riders as a group disapproved of medication for mental health concerns, causing Faith to hide her own prescription from the group out of fear.

“I was wary of the Circuit Riders, but my parents just wanted Arielle to be happy,” Bri told me. Her family funded Arielle’s tuition and the new graduate moved to Huntington Beach, CA in order to start her training. After completing the training school, Arielle became a Circuit Riders staff member. This required her to continue to fundraise and rely on family support, as students and staff members alike are discouraged from holding any outside employment.

“Over the years, I saw Arielle change,” Bri said. “She became a totally different person and I felt like there was a wedge between us. It seemed like the Circuit Riders were extremely rigid in the rules that they followed, and Arielle had to abide by those rules. I told my family that I was concerned that Arielle seemed a little disconnected from reality, but Arielle insisted she was happy. She told us that she wasn’t depressed anymore because Jesus had saved her. I think she was experiencing so much cognitive dissonance; deep down, she must have known that her depression wasn’t cured, but the people she was surrounded by were sharing these animated testimonies of how God had healed them of all sorts of mental health issues. It worked until it didn’t.”

In the years that she was with the Circuit Riders, Arielle returned home only sparingly. “We barely saw her,” Bri told me. “She would come home for Christmas and then she would come home for a week or so in the summer to visit, but she never came home for any other holidays or occasions. When my father got remarried, he initially planned to have the wedding in the spring. But Arielle insisted that that she couldn’t come home for any other time except for her designated week in the summer. I was frustrated and didn’t understand why at the time, but I know now that she was living in a very restrictive environment.”

After over half a decade with the Circuit Riders, Arielle transitioned in late 2023 to a new project in the network of churches and organizations associated with the group and other New Apostolic Reformation (NAR)-inspired entities. Just as she had lived with other Circuit Riders staff members in California, she now lived with members of a new group: the Zion Dance Project, affiliated with Upper Room Dallas, which in turn has a relationship with staff members of the Circuit Riders (the NAR world tends to be extremely, if informally, interconnected). A few months later, she died by suicide. One of the last searches on Arielle’s phone was how to leave all of her money to Upper Room Dallas. Also on Arielle’s phone was a video of a speaker at a Circuit Riders event telling the audience that issues of mental health weren’t “real,” but were simply all in the mind.

“I don’t know what Arielle was doing on a daily basis, although I do know she was still going out and doing missionary work,” Bri told me. “I also know that God was the answer to everything for Arielle, which meant that she had no other kind of resilience. The relationships she had could only go so deep, because talking to her felt like talking to someone who had been brainwashed. Every time we saw her, every conversation was so superficial. I never knew how she was really feeling. As a licensed social worker, I tried to make her feel as comfortable as I possibly could so that I could be an outlet for her. But I think that because her mental illness went untreated for all the years that she was a member of the Circuit Riders, she simply reached a breaking point.”

After Arielle passed, her family received some of her personal effects, including her journal. “In this journal, she wrote to God every single day, almost obsessively,” Bri told me. “She wrote about how badly she wanted to be with Jesus. I know that the Circuit Riders believe that if you die by suicide, you don’t go to heaven. But Arielle wrote that was a risk she was willing to take. When another staff member posted a tribute to Arielle after her passing on social media, the comments were flooded with other Circuit Riders saying that she wasn’t in heaven.”

Despite the fact that Arielle had been a staff member with the Circuit Riders for years, Bri and her family never received any official outreach after Arielle’s death from the group. The most they heard were some condolences from a few staff members who had known Arielle. “There was a memorial held over Zoom for Arielle, which some Circuit Riders attended,” Bri told me. “I could only listen to so much of what they said, because every memory these people had of my sister was so surface-level. Some of them weren’t even pronouncing her name correctly. These people whom she had been with for so long did not seem to have had any real connection with her at all. One girl even reached out and asked if she could come and share her testimony with our family. The last thing I wanted was for my sister’s death to become just another evangelization opportunity for these people.”

After Arielle’s death, Bri connected with two former Circuit Riders students who had known her sister: Elise, who was mentored by Arielle, and Elise’s friend Faith. “They told me how spiritually and emotionally abusive their experience with the Circuit Riders had been,” Bri said. “They had to get permission to leave the group in order to visit their homes — Faith was locked in a room and questioned about her desire to leave. It’s really hard to face that my sister could have been abused and in turn abused others as a part of this cult.”

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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.