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Staff writer Bill Schackner contributed to this report.
The Catholic Student Center secretary told Sister Bernadette Young that a distraught man wanted to see her because his daughter had joined a Protestant church. Sister Bernadette planned to tell him to be happy that the girl attended any church while at the University of Pittsburgh.
But when he poured out his story of a bright, loving girl who had stopped spending time with her family, quit her sorority and neglected her studies to devote all her time to her new church, a warning bell rang for Sister Bernadette.
This wasn't an ordinary Protestant church, she said, but the Greater Pittsburgh branch of the International Churches of Christ, also known as the Boston Movement or the Boston Church of Christ. The group is considered so aggressive and authoritarian in its practices that other evangelical Protestant groups have labeled it "aberrational" and "abusive." It has been repudiated by the mainstream Churches of Christ, a 1.6 million-member body from which it grew.
International Churches of Christ leaders respond that they are the victims of jealous persecution by church groups that no longer teach the true faith and resent them for doing so.
When recruiting new members, the International Churches of Christ "are aggressive to the point of being obnoxious," said Ronald Enroth, a sociologist at Westmont College in California, who gave the group a chapter in his book "Recovering from Churches that Abuse."
Former members say: "The pressures to conform to the group were so great that they couldn't possibly measure up to the expectations or stand up to the constant scrutiny of their lives. They were constantly accountable to someone, and felt as if they were in a spiritual straitjacket," he said.
According to the American Family Foundation, which monitors some religious groups, the International Churches of Christ has been barred from recruiting or denied status as a student organization at at least 22 U.S. college campuses, mostly over violation of campus policies or accusations of harassment.
The group began in 1979 with 30 people in a house church outside Boston. It now claims 133,000 members in 97 nations, despite an admitted dropout rate of 66 percent.
The Pittsburgh chapter is 2 years old. Last year, leaders...