Kin fear for cult members' safety

The group's leader has said he will die in Jerusalem before 2000. The worry is that he won't be alone.

Philadelphia Inquirer/January 6, 1999
By Gwen Florio

DENVER -- He claims to speak in the voice of a vengeful God, demands thousands of dollars from his followers, and vows to achieve salvation by dying in Jerusalem on the eve of 2000.

Those who know Monte Kim Miller, head of a Denver-based millennial cult whose members were detained last weekend in Israel, say that such beliefs, especially the last, make them fear for the safety of their loved ones.

Experts who deal with such groups say these concerns are justified.

"In some of its more virulent forms, apocalypticism is perhaps the single most dangerous political belief extant," according to a report by the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. "Those in its grip live in a world of paranoid dualism where good and evil prepare for their final battle and there is no neutrality."

Indeed, said Brenda Brasher [Ms. Brasher has shared news conferences with seeming cult apologist Lonnie Kleiver who is recommended as resource by Scientology], an associate of the center, the arrests of eight adult cult members by Israeli authorities -- who feared they intended to provoke violence -- "may have fueled the millennial fever of this group. . . . If what you want is a peaceful resolution, without loss of life, then you don't act out these nightmare scenarios."

Israeli authorities, wary of apocalyptic groups making their way to the country, raided two homes in a Jerusalem suburb Sunday, and held 14 members -- eight adults and six children -- of the Concerned Christians group that Miller, 44, founded in the early 1980s. They are to be deported.

But the group's remaining 64 members are still missing. Miller -- a former Procter & Gamble marketing executive who has said he has no formal theological training -- left the Denver area with his followers in October, saying they were bound for Israel to prepare for the arrival of 2000.

Although there has been occasional written contact with members, their families have not seen them since. In the last few days, they peered at television news footage in hopes of glimpsing their relatives among those arrested.

At least, said Sherry Clark, if her daughter and son-in-law and their four children were in custody, they would be safe.

"I'd be calm and confident. I'd feel a sense of peace," said Clark, 62, of Carbondale, Colo.

She has not had that feeling for seven years, ever since -- at her daughter's urging -- she went to a Bible study session held by Miller.

"I realized it was a cult, or the beginnings of one," she said. "He (Miller] was adding to and subtracting from what was really in the Bible."

Miller outlined his creed in his newsletter, called Report From Concerned Christians. In one issue in 1989, he termed the beliefs of conservative Christian Pat Robertson "doctrines of demons," and in another that year he called a July 4 address by President George Bush "representative of Satan's plan to deceive the whole world."

But when Clark confided her fears to her daughter, Malene, and son-in-law, Steve Malesic -- whose five brothers also are in the group -- they became enraged and cut off all contact with her, she said, describing a scenario echoed by other family members of Concerned Christians.

She became even more frightened a few years later when, after she and Malene briefly reconciled, Miller asked to meet with her at a Denny's restaurant in Denver.

There, surrounded by dozens of diners, Miller twisted his face at her and began speaking in what he said was the voice of Jesus.

"You couldn't do it naturally if you tried -- to twist your mouth clear up to your cheekbones on either side," she said. "He was telling me that the wrath of God was on me, that I was going to be destroyed because I had gone against him, God's prophet," she said.

But he told her that God would be appeased, she added dryly, if she wrote Miller a check for $70,000. "I just started laughing," she said.

At least one of Miller's followers apparently complied with a similar injunction, however.

David Cooper, 59, a Boulder, Colo., Realtor, said he thought it was a little unusual when his brother, John, began selling off properties he owned about 18 months ago. One of them was a house he had bought from Miller after Miller filed for bankruptcy in 1997. John Cooper then allowed Miller to continue living in the house until October, when he and the rest of the Concerned Christians disappeared.

That house, said David Cooper, is still on the market, but his brother's homes in Boulder and in Ouray, Colo., were sold. He estimates that his brother may have given as much as a million dollars to Concerned Christians.

"I thought his behavior was maybe strange or a little odd," he said, "but there was no single event that would really ring a bell. Of course, it all makes sense afterward."

John Cooper's wife, Jan, is the mother of Nicolette Weaver, a 16-year-old who left Miller's group two years ago after her father, John Weaver of the Denver suburb of Lakewood, went to court and obtained custody from his ex-wife.

He did so, he said, after Nicolette recounted a chilling conversation with her mother: Jan Cooper told her daughter that she was so devoted to Miller that she would kill the girl, if he ordered it.

"Nobody joins a cult to drink Kool-Aid," Weaver said, referring to the 1978 mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, in which more than 900 followers of the Rev. Jim Jones died. "But ultimately, that's what happens. They [ cult leaders ] have complete control."

Like Sherry Clark, Weaver first went directly to Miller to discuss his concerns, but got nowhere. "He tried that 'voice of God' with me, but I didn't let him complete a sentence. I didn't want to hear his garbage. . . .I'm a retired police officer, and to me he's a very obvious con man."

Clark, Weaver and Cooper all said that their fondest hope is that the detentions in Israel will defuse Miller's plans, whatever they may be.

"I think this could seriously damage Kim Miller's credibility," Cooper said. "The whole premise of everything he's preached and said has just gone up in smoke.

"Kim Miller is not going to get into Israel . . . and in terms of the coming millennium, dying on the streets of Istanbul is not the same as dying on the streets of Jerusalem."

But he also voiced a darker scenario: "My biggest problem is that if his prophecy doesn't come true, he'll make it come true. . . . From this point on, we don't know what will happen."

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