“LORD HUTTON'S FAMOUS CHURCH” - Rev. C.D. Thomson, Canada,
anchoredontherock@nf.sympatico.ca -
(Posted here February 28, 2004 - with permission)
It
appears that it is not only American Christian Fundamentalism, given brand-name
recognition by the likes of John Ashcroft, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell,
which shows the influence of religion on the administration of law and justice
at the highest levels.
On the same day he released
the official report on January 29th which determined that Dr. David
Kelly died of suicide, after presiding over a lengthy inquiry which began last
August into the microbiologist’s death, Lord Brian Hutton was profiled in the
Church of England Newspaper. The article identified him as being a member of
the Anglican congregation at Holy Trinity Brompton.
Aside from St. Paul’s
Cathedral itself, it is doubtful that any Anglican church would be more readily
recognized worldwide. Holy Trinity Brompton is famous for being the birthplace
of “The Alpha Course,” authored by its pastor, The Rev. Nicky Gumbel, a key
figure in “The Holy Laughter Movement”.
Since the late 1990’s, over
5,000 Alpha courses have run annually in the United States, sponsored by
churches of many backgrounds, including Baptist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic,
Salvation Army, Lutheran, Methodist, Assemblies of God, and Episcopal
denominations. About 1,000,000 people in American and Canada have already
participated, while overseas, the material has been translated into several
languages.
It was in the early 1980’s
that Holy Trinity Brompton first achieved notoriety in England, after reports of
people being lifted up in mid-air and supernatually thrown against walls.
These
unusual phenomena occurred during meetings featuring the guest ministry of the late John Wimber, an American specialist in church growth, who founded the
Vineyard Church, an ecumenical mini-denomination headquartered in Anaheim,
California. Wimber refined both his techniques and his theories when he later
taught a controversial course called “Signs and Wonders,” at the prestigious
Fuller Theological Seminary.
The manifestions in
England, controversially ascribed to the Holy Spirit, were enthusiastically
welcomed by Rev. Gumbel as a validation of his church’s new level of spiritual
advancement. Christian authors Rev. John Mumford and Rev. David Pytches
publicized these events. Mumford and his wife Eleanor founded a Vineyard Church
in London, England. It was during this time that Rev. Gumbel developed the
first version of “The Alpha Course” for his own parishioners.
In January 1994, the
Vineyard-affiliated Toronto Airport Church, conveniently located adjacent to
Pearson International Airport, claimed to experience Christian “renewal”. The
same phenomena witnessed at Holy Trinity Brompton were now regarded as ‘a new
thing’ in Canada, with the addition of those in attendance slithering on the
floor like snakes, barking like dogs, and knocking their heads against the
walls. Now, however, visitors from Rev. Gumbel’s congregation, where many
similar supernatural signs and wonders had been witnessed ten years before,
began to travel back and forth to Toronto in order to bring back to Britain the
way to a deeper relationship with God, which they claimed to receive through the
power of a technique which the Airport Church called “soaking prayer”. A kind
of cross-pollination seemed to have occurred.
Thousands of thrill-seekers
flew into Toronto to attend the meetings, and by September 1995, it was
estimated that about 600,000 people, including approximately 20,000 Christian
leaders from virtually every nation in the world, had arrived to “catch the
fire,” as the revival was called. Several television news stories in Canada and
abroad featured the church, capturing on video a characteristic involuntary
abdominal spasm which afflicted many as a souvenir of their experience. That
same year it was reported that 4,000 churches in the U.K. had joined Holy
Trinity Brompton in receiving what was described by its adherents as a
“transferable anointing”: the “The Toronto Blessing”.
Although details of Lord
Hutton’s church attendance cannot be obtained, it is probable the events at Holy
Trinity Brompton are well-known to him. After the death of his wife in 2000,
Hutton married a widow at Holy Trinity Brompton, and the couple today are
well-known at the church in London’s fashionable Belgravia district.
Lord Hutton is past
president of the Northern Ireland Association for Mental Health.
Born in Ulster in 1931,
Lord Hutton took a first in jurisprudence in 1953 at Balliol College,
Oxford,
then returned to Northern Ireland to continue his studies at Queen’s College,
Belfast. He was called to the Northern Ireland Bar in 1954, becoming Junior
Jounsel to the Attorney General in Belfast in 1969, a QC (Northern Ireland) in
1970, and a Senior Crown Counsel in Ulster from 1973-79. He was a member of the
joint law enforcement commission of 1974. He was appointed Judge of the High
Court of Justice (Northern Ireland), 1979-88; Lord Chief Justice of Northern
Ireland, 1988-97; and Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, 1997-2004. In 1997, he became
a Law Lord. Following the Hutton Inquiry, he announced his official retirement.
Britain has been condemned
internationally for human rights abuses in Northern Ireland during the years of
Lord Hutton’s career as both government prosecutor and member of the judiciary,
a period known as ‘The Troubles’. It was an era of shocking violence, and the
British authorities used torture as an interrogation tool. In 1978, Hutton
represented the British Government before the European Court of Human Rights,
defending it against a ruling that it abused and maltreated detainees.
Lord Hutton represented
British soldiers at the Widgery Inquiry. It was in April 1972 that the former
brigadier Lord Widgery published his now notorious report into the killing of 14
unarmed civil rights demonstrators by British paratroopers in Northern Ireland
three months earlier, on what became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Lord Widgery
cleared the soldiers of blame, insisting, in defiance of a mass of evidence,
that they had only opened fire after coming under attack. The Widgery Report was
so widely seen as a flagrant establishment whitewash, and continues to be such a
focus of nationalist anger, that a quarter of a century later Tony Blair felt
compelled to set up another “Bloody Sunday” inquiry under Lord Saville.
Hutton again became
headline news in connection with the 1999 “Pinochet Affair”. Another senior
judge, Lord Hoffman, had contributed to the decision to arrest and extradite the
notorious former dictator of Chile during his visit to Britain.
As a Law Lord,
Hutton led a right-wing attack on Lord Hoffman, on the excuse that Hoffman’s
links to the human rights group Amnesty International invalidated Pinochet’s
arrest. If Lord Hoffman’s ruling were not overturned, Lord Hutton said, “Public
confidence in the integrity of the administration of justice would be shaken.”
More recently in 2002,
Hutton was one of four Law Lords who participated in the ruling that David
Shayler, the former MI5 agent, should be denied his application to use as his
defence that he had been acting in ‘the public interest’ by revealing secrets.
Shayler was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act after passing documents in
1997 to the newspaper “Mail On Sunday,” exposing the fact that the British
Security Service had investigated Labour Party ministers Jack Straw, Harriet
Harmon, and Peter Mandelson for political reasons. He was sentenced to six
months in jail.
Adding to the many
questions about Lord Hutton’s past performance is the conjecture that he is a
Freemason. In 1997, Tony Blair’s election manifesto promised that his
government would compile a register of Freemasons in public life. In February
1998 Blair’s new government (in a policy issued by then Home Secretary Jack
Straw) required all new appointments to the judiciary, police, legally qualified
staff of the Crown Prosecution Service, and probation and prison services, to
declare membership in Masonic organizations. Existing government employees in
those categories were encouraged to voluntarily announce such membership. Few
have come forward.
If Lord Hutton is indeed a
Mason(1), he is still not legally required to make a public admission of the fact,
and he has made no statement on the subject to date.
Masonic affiliations are
said to be common amongst Ulster’s judiciary. Hutton’s successor as Lord Chief
Justice of Northern Ireland in 1997, Sir Robert Carswell, has been
investigated
as a possible Freemason and member of the related semi-masonic Orange Order. On
January 13, 1997, the following exchange took place in the House of Commons, one
year prior to the requirement for public disclosure of Masonic affiliations:
Mr. McNamara: To ask the
Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor’s Department, if the next Lord Chief
Justice of Northern Ireland is or has been a member of (a) the Masonic Order,
(b) the Orange Order and (c) other societies membership of which must be
declared. [10545]
Mr. Streeter: Judicial
appointments are made on professional and personal merit. The Lord Chancellor
does not require candidates for, or holders of, judicial office to declare
membership of any lawful organisation.
The Ministry of Defence has
also been associated with a high degree of Masonic involvement. Best-selling
British historian Anthony Beevor was reportedly told by a leading Freemason in
1991 that all thirteen members of the Army Management Board were Masons. The
Board comprises a mix of politicians and top Army officers. It exercises
authority over all forms of appointments, ranking, and promotion in the British
Army.
The Hutton Inquiry formally
received into evidence information about a police action called “Operation
Mason.” This was the name assigned by the Thames Valley Police (TVP) to a
project described on a listing as: “TVP Tactical Support Major Incident Policy
Book.” The interesting aspect to this document is the time noted for
commencement of police activity, namely 1430 (2:30 p.m.) on July 17, 2003, the
date of Dr. Kelly’s disappearance. This appears to be one hour before Dr. Kelly
reportedly left his house for his daily afternoon walk. The record closes at
930 (9:30 a.m.) on July 18, 2003, close to the time when Dr. Kelly’s body was
discovered in the woods. The actual contents of this “policy book” have not
been made public
Links between American and
British intelligence services and church groups have been investigated by
journalists Anton Chaitkin and the late Jim Keith. Mr. Keith documented the
Naval Intelligence background of Jim Jones prior to the Jonestown tragedy in
Guyana, which has been called a CIA mind-control program ‘gone wrong’. Mr.
Chaitkin has explored the infiltration of the Pentecostal Movement in America
and South Africa by British intelligence, going back to the beginning of the 20th
century. Christian apologists Tim and Barbara Aho have researched the Christian
affiliations of death squad groups in Central America and have identified
intelligence operatives involved in these covert operations going back over 30
years.
It has been conjectured
that the reason for this activity in Latin America was to enable U.S., British,
and Israeli intelligence agencies to study and then fine-tune techniques for
effective national destabilization work, using new religious movements
particularly of the “signs and wonders” type.
Widely publicized in the
1980’s, for example, were the massacres in Guatemala of thousands of indigenous
civilians of Mayan ancestry. During the previous decade a protracted civil war
had been funded by the CIA and the United Fruit Company. A successful military
coup in 1982 installed Gen. Efrain Rios Montt as President. Montt was an early
Christian convert when the Church of the Word (“El Verbo”) was planted in
Guatemala by California missionaries of an organization which became known as
Gospel Outreach, who came to supply humanitarian aid to the country following
the devastating 1976 earthquake.
Montt directed a Leadership
Training School of 1,000 members as an elder in Verbo
Ministries. Upon his taking
power, he was supported throughout the 1980’s by Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell,
Jimmy Swaggart, and Loren Cunningham of Youth With A Mission.
In June 1982, Amnesty
International issued a report entitled: “Massive Extrajudicial Execution in Rural Areas
Under the Government of General Efrain Rios Montt,” detailing a “partial
listing of massacres,” totalling more than sixty. More than a thousand Mayan
communities were abandoned or destroyed, and it is estimated that tens of
thousands died in brutal genocidal sweeps conducted by Montt’s army. According
to the Covert Action Bulletin, the State of Israel provided substantial
financial aid to Guatemala between 1977 and 1986, and Israeli intelligence
recruited members to assist agents in espionage and torture from Gen. Montt’s
Verbo Church, which had grown to represent 250 congregations across the
countryside.
The most well-known
contemporary proponent of both “church growth” and the “Third Wave Wovement,”
now embraced by evangelicals and charismatics alike as a genuine visitation of
the Holy Spirit in the modern age, is C. Peter Wagner, a former friend and
colleague of the late John Wimber at California’s Fuller Theological Seminary.
What is not widely known is
Wagner’s extensive missionary background in Bolivia from 1954 to 1970. A CIABASE report on Bolivia states: “Between October 1966-68 Amnesty International
reported between 3,000 and 8,000 people killed by death squads.” Bolivia was
also used as a resettlement location for Southeast Asian refugees who fought for
the CIA before and during the Viet Nam War.
A blueprint for American
policy in Latin America was published in 1980 by the Council for Inter-American
Security (CIS), originally titled: “Inter-American Relations, Shield of the New
Order and Sword of the U.S. Ascent to World Power.” This paper, which became
known as the “Santa Fe Document” was analyzed by Burn Fouchereau in his book
“The Sect Mafia,” in which he stated that the report set forth plans to create
religious sects on a worldwide scale, with a mission to corrupt the collective
conscience of Christians to willingly accept a free market agenda for the
financial advantage of global corporations. According to this strategy,
evangelical organizations such as Rios Montt’s Church of the Word would be used
as fronts for the CIA to “take charge of the initiative of ideological struggle”
through religious phenomena, i.e. psychological warfare operations for
inculcating the desired ideology, and that Christian groups resisting this
influence would be neutralized through ‘divide and conquer’ programs. “The
experience acquired in Viet Nam, thanks to the work done in population control, was exported to
Latin America, and particularly to Guatemala, by numerous agents of A.I.D., and
of other U.S. services. Certain sects were created by psychological warfare
specialists and entrusted with control of the political forum and control of
conscience.”
Pastor John Arnott of the
Toronto Airport Church has revealed that it was a visit to Argentina in late
1993, to visit Claudio Freidzon, pastor of King of Kings Church in a suburb of
Buenos Aires, which refreshed him spiritually and brought his ministry into new
level of anointing. This, he claims, led directly to the “Toronto Blessing”
phenomena which began in January 1994. At the time, Arnott was affiliated with
John Wimber and the Vineyard Church in California. The Argentine sect, the
Divine Universal Church, has been identified by Professor J. Garcia-Ruiz of the
Department of Ethnology and Anthropology at the University of Paris as another
beneficiary of the largesse of Pat Robertson, as well as having received funds
from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and from Worldvision.
The murderous upheaval in
Northern Ireland which took place in the 1970’s occurred simultanously [sic]
with the havoc
wrought in Central America. It is to be hoped that other researchers will have success
in probing intelligence links to Christian figures either on the Protestant or
Catholic side of the conflict. It should be born in mind that members of the
priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church would be highly susceptible targets of
blackmail in situations where pedophile activity had been detected. This sort
of blackmail is widely used to recruit undercover staff for clandestine
operations.
Infiltration of churches and
parachurch organizations goes back at least as far as World War II. According
to the “Torbitt document” (by William Torbitt, pseud., in discussing the
conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy), it is stated that J. Edgar
Hoover’s friend and agent, Carl McIntire, a Fundamentalist pastor from
Collingwood, New Jersey, organized an espionage and intelligence unit under the
cover name “American Council of Christian Churches” (ACCC), which placed
operatives posing as ministers and missionaries throughout the United States and
most Latin American countries. Albert Osborne, alias John Howard Bowen, alias
J. H. Owen, under the personal direction of J. Edgar Hoover from 1943 to 1964,
described himself as an itinerant preacher, member of the First Baptist Church
of Laredo, Texas, and missionary for ACCC, while supervising a team of highly
trained professional marksmen based in Mexico and used by espionage agencies of
the U.S. and other countries all over the world for political assassinations.
During those years Mr. Osborne was believed to operate a charitable school for
25 to 30 boys in Pueblo, Mexico.
As American Secretary for the
Foreign Relations Department of the ACCC, noted Christian author and teacher Dr.
Francis Schaeffer took several European trips during the war years 1942-45, and
then moved with his family to Switzerland in 1948. Schaeffer founded a
Christian resource and retreat center named L’Abri outside of Lausanne in 1955,
which attracted visitors from all over the world, reaching its peak of
popularity in the volatile 1960’s and 1970’s.
The British connection to
efforts to develop an ersatz spiritual base for the growing manipulation of societies
goes back to the work of Col. Sir Vivian Gabriel, a British Air Commission
attaché in
Washington during World War II, who established a group called International Christian
Leadership. In the 1960’s, the president of International Christian Leadership’s British branch
was Ernest Williams, who was both a member of the directing staff of the British
Admiralty and a member of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on
Evangelism. He worked closely with Harald Bredesen, a British intelligence
operative who went on to personally mentor Pat Robertson in the United States.
In 1978 an important global
meeting at Canterbury was held under Queen Elizabeth’s Archbishop Donald Coggan, for
the purpose of launching a crusade to spread the practice of Charismatic “Gifts
of the Spirit” around the world under the guidance of the Anglican Church.
Leading a group of American Charismatics who attended the meeting was Gen. Ralph
E. Haines, Jr., the former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army 1967-8. Haines
had been in charge of a counterinsurgency military takeover program called
“Operation Garden Plot,” prepared in the event black ghetto riots and anti-war
demonstrations required the implementation of martial law in America. No longer
on active duty, Gen. Haines had been in close association with Harald Bredesen
since 1971.
Another British group active
in Charismatic fellowships, particularly in African war zones, is Christian
Solidarity International (CSI), headed by Baroness Caroline Cox, whose reports
from the Sudan have led many in the American government to contemplate military
action in that country.
When faulty intelligence
regarding chemical ‘weapons of mass destruction’ prompted President Clinton to
bomb a Sudanese aspirin factory a few years ago, the embarrassing mistake only
mildly dampened the enthusiasm of the clique supporting such a venture.
Profiled in the Pentecostal U.S. magazine “Charisma” in August 1997, Baroness
Cox said that she and many CSI board members enjoy “the sort of robust and very
expressive forms of worship” at the “charismatic end of the church spectrum.”
It may be significant that
John Wimber of the Vineyard, a group whose name became synonymous with very
expressive forms of worship, held the first meeting of the small church where he
first assumed the position of pastor in a rented Masonic hall. An original
member of his congregation has recalled that he told the people repeatedly that
he was interested in their activities as “an experiment”. By 1980, at a
historic Mother’s Day service in Anaheim, California, Wimber’s brand of ‘power
evangelism’ was characterized by uncontrollable shaking, people collapsing in
the aisles, and “drunkenness in the Spirit”. Many years later the Holy Laughter
Movement was popularized by evangelist Rodney Howard-Browne, known as “God’s
Bartender.”
It may also be significant
that a Vineyard Church, located in an upscale mall near Columbine High School,
allegedly had a very active outreach to youth in the area, prior to the
tragic
shootings on campus which garnered worldwide attention. Researchers have faced
a tangled assortment of eyewitness accounts plainly irreconciliable [sic] with
official findings. The term “cover-up” was used recently in a meeting held for
parents of the deceased teens, which presented masses of previously withheld
evidence.
The missing link in this
far-reaching story is the scientific data which would explain what forms of hypnotism and
suggestion have been utilized in all these events, and surely such effects could have been
enhanced in recent years by remote electrical stimulation of the brain, as well
as by designer drugs distributed by intelligence agencies since the 1960’s, both
for human experimentation and for financial gain. Counterfeit expressions of
Christian worship and joy can fool many, as the high ratings of televangelists
prove. But this is now the stuff of deliberate social engineering, turning
human beings into guinea pigs whose lives are cheap.
Those of us in
non-compromised Christian work have weathered criticism for many years regarding the paradox between
Christian love, as displayed in the New Testament, and centuries of bloodshed down
to modern times, with countless crimes against humanity committed in the name of
God. But many realize today that the source of the ongoing carnage has always been in
the political arena, using religion as a shield, or a scapegoat.
Most recently, investigations
into the history of violence in Northern Ireland have revealed instances of
covert operations undertaken by British intelligence, for which both Protestant
and Catholic factions have taken the blame. And yet the terrible killings in
Northern Ireland have been used over and over again to attempt to deny any
legitimate value to Christian faith and practice Perhaps this was regarded by
the perpetrators as a desirable plus.
On Sunday, Lord Brian
Hutton will likely be found sitting in church at Holy Trinity
Brompton. It is
to be remembered with what poignant solemnity he began the Hutton Inquiry by
calling for a respectful minute of silence, in memory of the dead Dr. David
Kelly. However, better Lord Hutton had remained silent, than to have committed
himself publicly in releasing a final report which bears so little resemblance
to the true circumstances of Dr. Kelly’s final moments of life on this earth.
“And there shall be, like
people, like priest…” (Hosea 4:9).
Given his background as an
advocate for mental health, civil rights, and law and order, Lord Hutton is
probably regarded by his fellow parishioners as a credit to Holy Trinity
Brompton and their renowned pastor, The Rev. Nicky Gumbel.
And both Vineyard
and Toronto Blessing groups have made several trips over the past decade to Lord
Hutton’s native Ulster, with the stated goal of seeking peace and bringing
Christian Renewal to Northern Ireland
We do not know how
effective those ministry teams have been, nor what they were really sent to
achieve. But we can speculate that the overall end result of the many efforts
to extend covert political control, using ‘religious experiences’ as a tool and
a mask, will ultimately fulfill the words of the Apostle Paul, who spoke of “the
unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the
truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong
delusion, that they shall believe a lie” (2nd Thess. 2:10-11).
Dr. David
Kelly
The time is coming, I
believe, when each one of us will inevitably come to the place where we will
have to search our consciences, to answer two questions posed long ago in the
Gospels, where Jesus asked:
“Shall not God avenge his
own elect, which cry day and night unto him?... Nevertheless when the Son of man
cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:17-18).
Sources:
Jim Keith, “Mass Control:
Engineering Human Consciousness” (IllumiNet Press, 1999)
These
unusual phenomena occurred during meetings featuring the guest ministry of the late John Wimber, an American specialist in church growth, who founded the
Vineyard Church, an ecumenical mini-denomination headquartered in Anaheim,
California. Wimber refined both his techniques and his theories when he later
taught a controversial course called “Signs and Wonders,” at the prestigious
Fuller Theological Seminary.
Oxford,
then returned to Northern Ireland to continue his studies at Queen’s College,
Belfast. He was called to the Northern Ireland Bar in 1954, becoming Junior
Jounsel to the Attorney General in Belfast in 1969, a QC (Northern Ireland) in
1970, and a Senior Crown Counsel in Ulster from 1973-79. He was a member of the
joint law enforcement commission of 1974. He was appointed Judge of the High
Court of Justice (Northern Ireland), 1979-88; Lord Chief Justice of Northern
Ireland, 1988-97; and Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, 1997-2004. In 1997, he became
a Law Lord. Following the Hutton Inquiry, he announced his official retirement.
As a Law Lord,
Hutton led a right-wing attack on Lord Hoffman, on the excuse that Hoffman’s
links to the human rights group Amnesty International invalidated Pinochet’s
arrest. If Lord Hoffman’s ruling were not overturned, Lord Hutton said, “Public
confidence in the integrity of the administration of justice would be shaken.”
investigated
as a possible Freemason and member of the related semi-masonic Orange Order. On
January 13, 1997, the following exchange took place in the House of Commons, one
year prior to the requirement for public disclosure of Masonic affiliations:
Brompton. It is
to be remembered with what poignant solemnity he began the Hutton Inquiry by
calling for a respectful minute of silence, in memory of the dead Dr. David
Kelly. However, better Lord Hutton had remained silent, than to have committed
himself publicly in releasing a final report which bears so little resemblance
to the true circumstances of Dr. Kelly’s final moments of life on this earth.
And both Vineyard
and Toronto Blessing groups have made several trips over the past decade to Lord
Hutton’s native Ulster, with the stated goal of seeking peace and bringing
Christian Renewal to Northern Ireland