The Cult Next Door: Faith's Story
"They told me I needed to pray and repent. Then, they stepped outside the room, locked the door, and guarded it until they decided I was done repenting.”
“Before I joined the Circuit Riders, I was in love with reading my Bible and praying. I felt so connected to God,” Faith1 told me. “The Circuit Riders made my faith completely disappear.”
Faith was eighteen years old when she joined a Circuit Riders Discipleship Training School (DTS) in January of 2021, an evangelistic training program under the umbrella of Youth With A Mission (YWAM). “I went to a church camp the summer before my senior year of high school and made a friend there who told me she was joining the Circuit Riders,” she said. “After she joined, she kept blowing up my phone telling me that I needed to join too. I thought it sounded like a good adventure. But the Circuit Riders turned out to be the complete opposite of what I thought they were.”
Faith remembers interviewing for a spot in the Circuit Riders vividly. “The girl who interviewed me asked me a lot of really personal questions,” she told me. “She started out by asking me what had brought me to God. I gave her a short and sweet answer about how I had been in a helpless place in my life after experiencing some trauma when my church stepped in to change my life for the better. But she kept digging to get at the details of my story. What are you holding back? she kept asking me.”
On Faith’s flight across the country to meet the Circuit Riders in Huntington Beach, California, she was seated next to an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department. “I was shaking,” she said. “He could tell that I was scared and asked me what I was doing going to Los Angeles all alone. I told him I was joining a group of missionaries. He gave me his card and told me if I ever needed anything, to use it.”
Faith had never been so far from home by herself before. “As soon I got off the plane, I went straight to the bathroom and started sobbing,” she confessed. “I felt like I’d made a huge mistake. I called my mom and told her I wanted to come home. She encouraged me to keep going, which I know she blames herself for now after everything that happened next.”
Some Circuit Riders staff members picked Faith and another student up from LAX. Together, they drove down the 405 into Orange County. Faith was assigned to the same living situation as Elise, in which thirteen students and three “house moms” (staff members in their twenties) shared a two-bedroom house. Most of the students slept in the living room.
Faith and Elise had been texting before their arrival, thanks to a Circuit Riders group chat, and they immediately clicked once meeting in person. “I was relieved to see Elise there,” Faith said. “That first night in the house, we had a ‘family dinner.’ The house moms could tell that I had been crying, and they kept pushing me to talk. I told them I was a little homesick, that I was very close to my family and it was hard to be away from them. Then I burst into tears at the table, in front of everyone. They all just stared at me.”
Classes started the next day. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Circuit Riders held their classes outside in local parks. From the start of the lecture portion of this DTS, Faith was uncomfortable with what she described to me as the “worship” given to Brian Brennt, the co-founder of the Circuit Riders who led the group alongside members of his family. “The Circuit Riders staff always said to read your Bible, but they were way more into the books that Brian wrote,” she told me. Brennt’s books, including the Freedom Manual, are the core curriculum of the Circuit Riders. “I really did like Brian and he was very kind to me, but I felt like we were all praising a man instead of God,” she said.
Expectations in the Circuit Riders were high. “From the very first class, I felt like everyone had to be perfect all the time and that there was no room for mistakes,” Faith told me. “It was frowned upon to ever slip up. [Staff members] were constantly telling me to repent of so many things — my thoughts, my beliefs, my actions.”
Faith paused during our phone call to apologize that she might cry as we spoke, but that she wanted to get through her story. “I remember mentioning casually to my house moms that I was thinking of getting the Covid-19 vaccine once it was available,” she said. “My dad wasn’t well, and I wanted to make sure he was safe. The house moms freaked out and immediately took me into their room. They told me I needed to pray and repent. Then, they stepped outside the room, locked the door, and guarded it until they decided I was done repenting.”
This became a regular occurrence. “The house moms locked me in their room whenever they thought I needed to repent of something,” Faith told me. One example: she watched a rom-com with Elise in their house’s living room, To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. “The house moms didn’t like the movie because there was a reference to a girl losing her virginity,” she said. “Once Elise had left the house, they locked me in their room and told me I had to repent.”
During the second week of Circuit Riders training, one of Faith’s housemates and friends decided to leave the program. “It broke my heart when she left,” Faith said. “All the staff members talked so badly about her once she was gone. They told us that she was one of the ‘fallen ones,’ and that we had to pray for her because she was going to make bad choices now that she was outside of the Circuit Riders.”
Faith soldiered on, not wishing to become a ‘fallen one’ herself, despite feeling increasing discomfort with the program. “When I was driving in Elise’s car to class and we got into a car accident, the house moms wouldn’t let us take a break from our classes to rest,” she said. “When I would get my personal groceries for the week, the house moms would tell me that God had told them I needed to donate a certain amount of money to the rest of the group to pay for their groceries too. One night, when went out to dinner, the house moms told us that we were all going to tip our waitress what God said to give her. They told one girl God wanted her to give twenty dollars, another girl fifty, and then told me that God said I had to give the waitress a hundred dollars. I did, even though I couldn’t afford to, because I was scared.”
Faith made it nearly to the end of the lecture portion of the Circuit Riders DTS. A few weeks before its conclusion, her grandfather passed away. She told staff members that she needed to leave for a few days to attend his funeral. “They were hesitant, but eventually they let me go,” she said.
Faith’s parents picked her up at the airport. “I felt so safe being with them, the safest I had felt after the past two and a half months,” she told me. “I told my parents I didn’t want to go back to the Circuit Riders. But I didn’t tell them the full extent of what was happening there. They thought I had been thriving. They were supportive of my decision to leave, but since I already had a round trip ticket back to California, we decided I should return just to pick up my things and they’d arrange my flight home.”
She texted Circuit Riders staff to let them know that she was leaving the program as soon as she could return to get her belongings. They replied to tell her they’d discuss this upon her return. “I was so nervous to go back,” she told me. “I cried the whole plane ride there.” One of her house moms, whom Faith identified as a girl in her mid-twenties named Logan, picked her up at LAX. They rode in complete silence back to Huntington Beach. It was Easter morning.
When Faith arrived back at the house, it was quiet. The rest of the students were at an Easter church service. Logan and the two other house moms brought her to their room. “They told me that the devil was telling me I wanted to go home, and I shouldn’t listen to the devil,” Faith said. “I told the house moms that this wasn’t coming from the devil, this was from me — I needed to be home with my family. But they told me I didn’t need my family. They said the Circuit Riders were my family.”
Then, the three Circuit Riders began to pray. “They prayed over me, saying ‘I’m so sorry, Lord, but she won’t repent, so we’re going to repent for her.’ I was so scared. I just wanted to go home and be with my family,” Faith told me. Suddenly, two of the house moms left the room, leaving Faith alone with Logan. “You need to fast this week,” Logan told her. “We’ll let you tell us what you want to do on Friday, but until then, you need to fast and pray over whether God is calling you to stay with the Circuit Riders.”
“Logan got up and turned on worship music, blaring one particular song on repeat,” Faith told me. “I can’t remember the name of the song now — I think I blocked it out. She told me to pray, left the room, and locked me inside. I was all alone and I was so scared.”
Faith can’t remember how long she was left in the room, listening to the same worship song play again and again. “Eventually, Logan came back in,” she said. “She told me that she and the other house moms had thrown away all of the groceries I had bought with my own money to make it easier for me to fast. For the rest of that week, from Sunday until Friday, I wasn’t allowed to eat.”
What the Circuit Riders staff members didn’t know was that Faith was on a medication that had to be taken with food. “I hid my medication from them right from the start, because I knew their thoughts on mental health medication,” she said. “The Circuit Riders taught that Jesus could heal any mental health issue, so we shouldn’t take medication.”
A few weeks earlier, members of the Circuit Riders had prayed over Faith’s self-harm scars. They wanted Faith to tell the group that her scars had disappeared after they prayed. “I hate lying,” she said. “I told them, I still have my scars, why do you want me to say that they’re gone? Because they will be, they said.”
Since Faith needed to stay on her medication, even if she couldn’t take it with food, she got progressively sicker throughout the week. She began to throw up repeatedly. “At one point, I managed to get out of the house and walk to a gas station, where I bought a protein bar,” she told me. “I took one bite before I realized one of the house moms had followed me there. She took the bar from me and threw it away.”
Thursday night of that week was the last night before “tour” started — the outreach portion of the Circuit Riders DTS, in which these students would finally ride the circuit of high schools and colleges at which they were slated to hold events and get a chance to put their evangelistic training into action. “Our house had a big dinner that night to celebrate the end of classes,” Faith told me. “While everyone ate, Logan brought me a small bowl of cold chicken broth. I took a few sips before Logan told me that was enough and took my bowl away. The house moms told the rest of my housemates that fasting was my choice. Not even my friend Elise knew what was going on until after it was all over.”
Finally, Friday morning arrived. Faith called her parents, sobbing. She had felt too scared to call them sooner during the week, with the watchful eyes of the house moms on her. She told them she didn’t think the Circuit Riders were going to let her leave. Her parents told her they would come get her themselves.
That morning, the three house moms and another Circuit Riders staff member sat Faith down and asked her what God was leading her to do. “I told them nothing had changed, and that I needed to go home,” she said. “I told them I’d prayed and done everything they’d asked. I was so scared that they were going to tell me I couldn’t leave. I felt like I was being held hostage. But they said I could go, which felt too easy for the hell they put me through. My parents got me a plane ticket for early the next morning.”
The Circuit Riders deemed Faith’s fast complete. “The house moms were so mad that I was leaving in less than a day,” she told me. “But they finally let me eat. I spent the whole day getting sick again and again because my stomach wasn’t used to food.”
That afternoon, Faith finally told Elise everything that had happened — the times she had been locked in the house moms’ room, the repentance she had been forced to perform, the food deprivation she had endured. “Elise looked at me and said, Faith, I’m not the only one? You’ve been going through things too? We were finally able to say out loud to each other what we both knew: this was a cult.”
Once she left the Circuit Riders, Faith used the card of the police officer she had met on her plane trip to California and called him. “I told him what had happened, and he said he’d had a gut feeling about it all,” she said.
Since returning home, Faith has been diagnosed with PTSD. “I do still believe in God, but I get panic attacks now,” she told me. “I tried to go back to my old church when I got home, but as soon as I got there, they started playing the worship song that was blaring in the house moms’ room when they locked me in on Easter Sunday. I began to panic and I had to leave. I haven’t been able to go back since.”
I asked her why she thought the Circuit Riders were so intent on keeping her in the program, trying so desperately to prevent her from leaving. “I ask myself that every single day,” Faith replied. “Maybe they didn’t want me to spread the truth about what they had done.”
Faith is a pseudonym, as this former Circuit Riders member has asked for her name not to be used for fear of retaliation from the group.
This is horrifying! And yet very familiar. Similar things were done to young people at the IBLP training centers with Bill Gothard. 😭
Sadly, these “house moms” who did these things were also just brainwashed kids. They’d probably been through the same program and same treatment and were passing on the abuse they’d experienced.
The fact that churches are supporting these types of programs without looking into them is devastating to me. The abuse that happens in the name of Jesus is evil.
What an evil thing they did to her.