Church counseled faith, not shots
When Amy Arden joined Eagle Mountain International Church in 1997, her 11-month-old daughter had received all the recommended vaccinations, Arden says.
Her child didn’t get another shot until Arden left the church in 2003.
“There was a belief permeating throughout the church that there is only faith and fear,” Arden said. “If you were afraid of the illness enough to get vaccinated, it showed a lack of faith that God would protect and heal you.”
Members of Eagle Mountain International Church also believed that childhood vaccinations could lead to autism, said Arden, who is 35.
Arden said she was taught by a supervisor at the church’s nursery how to opt out of a Texas law that requires most children to be immunized. She now regrets passing the same lesson on to other parents.
“I didn’t know a single mother who was vaccinating her children,” she said.
Eagle Mountains teachings on health, including disparaging remarks about vaccinations, have been called into question since an outbreak of measles in Texas – an outbreak that state officials tie to the church.
As a Word of Faith church, Eagle Mountain is part of the booming prosperity gospel movement, which holds that God wants to reward believers with riches, health and happiness, if they will just recite certain Scriptures, pray and trust in divine providence.
The church is also part of Kenneth Copeland Ministries, a vast and profitable multimedia ministry led by its namesake, a longtime prosperity preacher and television evangelist. Based in Newark, Texas, a rural community 25 miles north of Fort Worth, Eagle Mountain is co-pastored by Copeland’s daughter, Terri Copeland Pearsons, and son-in-law, George Pearsons.
In the prosperity gospel world, Copeland, 76, and his wife, Gloria, are considered royalty, said Kate Bowler, author of “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel”.“He is a major grandfather of the movement, starting to age out but still incredibly influential,” Bowler said. “They’ve been on the air forever and stayed largely scandal-free. That’s partly why they are so trusted by lots of people.”
According to Kenneth Copeland Ministries, the Copelands’ daily program on the Trinity Broadcasting Network reaches millions of viewers, their magazine more than 500,000 readers.
Recent media coverage of the Copelands hasn’t been as positive.
Twenty-one people in Tarrant County and nearby Denton County have contracted measles during this outbreak, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. The victims include nine children and range from 4 to 44 years old, according to Tarrant County.
Tarrant County epidemiologist Russell Jones said the confirmed cases can be traced back to a person who attended Eagle Mountain International Church after visiting Asia, which has higher rates of measles infections than the United States.
Health officials are not releasing the name of that person or the particular country.
Jones said he doesn’t know exactly how many of the infected people are members of Eagle Mountain. At least 11 of the 21 did not have any measles vaccinations, he said. (Doctors usually recommend two shots.)
“Our concern would be that if you have a pocket of people who associate and think alike, if they don’t believe in immunization there’s going to be some other vulnerable people,” Jones said.
Eagle Mountain Pastor Terri Copeland Pearsons has said that while some people may believe she is against immunizations, that is not true.
“I believe it is wrong to be against vaccinations,” she said in a statement.
Since the measles outbreak, Eagle Mountain has held two free immunization clinics, where about 220 church members received vaccinations, according to Jones, who said the county assisted with the clinics.
Jones said that he is working to ascertain how many of the church’s 1,500 members have still not been immunized.
Eagle Mountain and Kenneth Copeland Ministries disinfected their shared 25-acre campus, including the nursery and day care center, Pearsons said at an August 14 church service titled “Taking Our Stand of Faith Over Measles.” The church also runs schools for children through the sixth grade.
Jones praised the church’s efforts thus far, but other health experts have criticized Pearsons and Copeland.
In an August 15 statement, Copeland Pearsons drew a link between vaccinations and autism, saying, “The concerns we have had are primarily with very young children who have family history of autism and with bundling too many immunizations at one time.”
In 2010, during a broadcast about health, Kenneth Copeland – whose followers consider him a prophet – voiced alarm about the number of shots given to his grandchild.
“All of this stuff they wanted to put into his body,” Copeland said. “Some of it is criminal!”
Copeland was particularly agitated about the Hepatitis B shot.
“In an infant? That’s crazy! That is a shot for sexually transmitted disease!” he said.
“We need to be a whole lot more serious about this and aware, and you don’t take the word of the guy who’s trying to give you the shot about what’s good and what isn’t.”
Dr. Don Colbert, a “divine health” expert who has appeared with Copeland in several broadcasts, then said that the autism rate among children had increased along with the number of childhood vaccinations.
“I have had so many patients bring their children in and they say, you know what, the week after I had that immunization, for MMR – measles, mumps and rubella – my child stopped talking, my child stopped giving me eye contact. He was not alert, he was not coherent. he quit speaking, he quit being the child I had,” Colbert said on the webcast.
Colbert and the Copeland family are wrong about immunizations, said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University.
“It’s painful because these pastors are trusted spiritual leaders who are speaking to people not only in their congregations but also on television,” he said. “They are putting people at risk.”
There is no link between vaccinations and autism, and hepatitis can be passed from mother to child, making the shot necessary and effective, Schaffner said.
Schaffner said that doctors call concerns about bundling immunizations the “pin cushion effect.” It’s a common but unfounded fear, he said.
Most health experts, including the American Pediatric Association and the Tarrant County Public Health Department, agree with Schaffner.
Neither Eagle Mountain International Church nor Kenneth Copeland Ministries responded to repeated requests for comment.
In a joint statement on Wednesday, the church and ministry said that they believe in, and advocate the use of, medical professionals.
“If an individual is faced with a situation that requires medical attention, that person should seek out the appropriate medical professional and follow their instructions using wisdom,” the statement said.
After the measles outbreak, Copeland said that he “inquired of the Lord as to what he would say regarding these vaccinations,” according to a statement posted on the church’s website on August 15.
The pastor said that God told him to “pray over it,” and then to “take advantage of what I have provided for you in Jesus’ name.”
When Copeland announces a change, it’s often after he has claimed to receive a new divine revelation, said former members of the church.
“Kenneth would always come up with a new prophecy to match what’s going on,” said one former church member, who wished to remain anonymous in order to maintain business ties with the church.
In this case, Copeland’s new revelation – and the church’s recent statements – represent a big shift in church policy, said the former members.
Amy Arden attended and worked at the church, including in its nursery, for six years, first as a volunteer, then as paid staff from 2000 to 2003.
Arden said she now deeply regrets teaching other parents how to access the Texas immunization exemption forms. But she and another former church employee described a closed spiritual world in which doubts are kept quiet and leaders’ words are rarely questioned.
“This was Kenneth Copeland’s ministry, and we did nothing that he did not approve of,” Arden said. “It’s hard to believe that hundreds of his children in his church were not getting vaccinated and he didn’t know about it. If he was pro-vaccination, we would have vaccinated our children.”
Arden recalled a 2002 lecture to church employees in which they were told that every part of Eagle Mountain International Church and Kenneth Copeland ministries must reflect the founder’s vision.
Arden said she was fired from Kenneth Copeland Ministries in 2003 for disagreeing with the church’s willingness to take donations from the mentally ill, including institutionalized patients.
She later cooperated with a U.S. Senate investigation into Copeland’s and other prosperity preachers’ finances. The church was not penalized, but Sen. Chuck Grassley’s 2011 report raised questions about the pastors’ use of church-owned luxury items like private jets. The Copelands and Eagle Mountain called the investigation an attack on Word of Faith pastors.
Another former church member and Kenneth Copeland Ministries employee who volunteered in the nursery corroborated Arden’s account.
“Being vaccinated was like working against your faith,” said the former church member. “You were trusting a disease’s power to infect you over God’s ability to protect you.”
Neither Arden nor the other former church member recalled hearing the Copelands or Pearsons preach against vaccinations, however. Nor did the Copelands counsel their flock to reject medical treatment for serious ailments, they said.
More often, the prosperity pastors would preach that faith is the best preventive measure and that some ailments can and should be prayed away, the church members recalled.
That’s a common belief among Pentecostals, said Bowler, the historian and Duke Divinity School professor. According to a 2006 Pew Study, 62% of American Pentecostals say they have witnessed divine healings.
Many Christian traditions teach that God can heal believers, Bowler said. What separates preachers like the Copelands is that they believe Jesus died not only to save humanity from sin but also from sickness.
“When Jesus bore away our sins, he also bore away our diseases,” Gloria Copeland has said in sermons about spiritual healing.
The Copelands also teach that they have unlocked the formula – a combination of words and Scriptures – to guide believers from optimistic faith to tangible results.
“The places they look for those results are their bodies and their wallets,” Bowler said.
In many ways, the Copelands are the spiritual successors to last century’s revival preachers, Bowler said, trading traveling tent meetings for lucrative television ministries.
Kenneth Copeland learned at the feet of prosperity gospel founders Kenneth Hagin and Oral Roberts. Copeland calls Roberts, who believed that God had anointed his right hand with healing power, his “spiritual father.”
The Copelands have since created their own unique brand of theology, emphasizing that the spoken word – a Word of Faith – can turn prayers into reality. Kenneth Copeland teaches that simply uttering the words “I’m sick” can lead to illness, and that proclaiming yourself well can likewise lead to health.
“Our health, our wealth and our place in eternity is in our mouths. Everything about us has been, and will be, determined by the words we speak,” Copeland has said.
Arden said that church members were taught to repeat certain Bible passages, almost like a magic spell, to ward off disease.
“There were healing Scriptures we had to recite over and over again, and eventually, whatever you say will come to pass.”
The Copelands don’t claim to be healers, though they teach that believers who sow “seeds of faith” – sometimes through donations – can see miraculous results.
One account on the ministry’s website says that a Dutch boy was cured of autism after his mother attended Gloria Copeland’s healing school and watched Eagle Mountain church services online.
Arden recalled donating $400 – all she had in her savings account at the time – to the church when her daughter had a serious ear malady.
“I was a broke, single mother earning $7.50 an hour, so that was a fortune to me.”
Her daughter required four surgeries before she was healed, Arden said.
Now a financial analyst in New York City, Arden said she keeps her distance from organized religion, but understands what draws certain kinds of Christians to churches like Eagle Mountain.
“About 90% of the people were just like me,” she said. “They needed hope, and they needed to believe that there was something bigger than themselves that would guide and protect them and keep the whole crush of life from pressing down on them.”
By Daniel Burke