Pastor trains junior pastors martial arts to discipline wayward congregates

A church leader who broke away from pastor Pastor Robert Gumbura's RMG Independent End Time Message has been accused of sexually abusing congregates, engineering forced marriages and asking his junior pastors to acquire martial arts skills so that they can discipline the wayward among his flock.

The accusations are contained in a dossier that some members of the church have prepared for onward transmission to church representative groups and the police.

The church leader appears to have instilled so much fear among his congregates as most of his victims begged this paper to be "careful" with this story as "he is well connected."

Although repeated efforts to get a comment from the church leader proved fruitless last week, his church members accused him of pursuing a doctrine of fear but said they had decided to come out after "sensing that he is not untouchable after all as his close friend Gumbura is in trouble."

"All he does is instil fear in us," said one church member who spoke on condition of anonymity. Some of us are still going to his church because we are scared that he will send gangs to beat us up if we decide to join other churches. Some years back some of the church's junior pastors were arrested on assault charges after they disrupted a crusade that was being held by another church and started beating some officials of that church whom they accused of ‘stealing' members from him.

"It's scary  … we hope the authorities will help us now that we have decided to report these things."
In one of his sermons, a recording of which is in possession of this paper, the founder says those who go against him will be committed into the hands of Satan.

The church leader made the threat soon after he forced a woman to apologise for taking issue with the way the church had organised another wife for her husband.

"She must repent if she wants us to keep her here. We are not yet at that stage where we should put her to the devil, she should repent from the sins that we think she has committed.

"We hope that spirit in her is not anointing others and that they will also repent, for the Bible says he that sinneth rebuke before all so that others may also fear," the founder can be heard saying in the clip.

Although some church members accused the police of failing to deal with cases reported against this church leader, national police spokesperson Chief Superintendent Paul Nyathi refuted this, saying:

"Yes we hear these stories of pastors abusing congregants and we urge members of the public to report such cases to the police so that we can act on them. We can only act when a report has been made.

"If an offence has been committed, the public should be able to come and report, and then we make inquiries."