The Jesus Christians have had a long history of being falsely accused and defamed in the media. We have been falsely accused of kidnapping people, coercing people into donating kidneys, human trafficking, and even organ trafficking. Every single time that the authorities have investigated, they have concluded that the accusations were totally false.

Of course, the media hardly ever reports that our names have been cleared. They just go quiet until someone else comes along making an even more outrageous claim against us. And the sensational headlines and accompanying false accusations remain online for people to use in perpetuating the lies.

Rarely has a journalist had the courage to tell the story as it is. Instead, the best they can do is to insinuate that we are guilty of all the lies without coming right out and telling the lies themselves. They do this by using biased terminology, distoring the facts, and omitting important details. They often do this when they have all the evidence right in front of them that the accusations are clearly fabricated.

Such is the case with the article published by The Guardian on the 28th of November, 2023. It was written by Australian journalist Elle Hardy and was meant to deal with the Kenyan Senate Ad-Hoc Committee’s comments about supposed links between The Jesus Christians and the Shakahola Massacre, and it includes a lot of half-truths and distortions that seem to have been approved by The Guardian editors, even after they had been alerted as to the defamatory nature of those distortions.

The Good

To Elle's credit, she sent us a list of questions about the Kenyan Senate committee report before publishing her article. She apparently made some changes, based on our responses to those questions.

However, she was given clear, strong evidence that refuted the lies that had been told about us by the Kenyan Senate Ad-Hoc Committee but she chose only to say that the committee "found" their accusations to be true (which even the committee did not claim), and that we ourselves only "alleged" that what the committee reported was not accurate. Wrong. We gave evidence that it was not accurate, but that evidence was shoved aside.

In her list of questions and warnings about what she was going to say, Elle Hardy made no reference to the false accusations about such things as kidnapping that she king-hit us with in her article. We were given no opportunity to respond, before she dumped on us.

All of this is in stark contrast to several points of the MEAA Journalist Code of Ethics, including the very first point, which states:



One specific "good" part of Elle Hardy's reporting is that she appeared to take seriously our specific objection to use of the word "cult" in reference to ourselves. The Guardian article called us only "an Australian Christian group". But on closer examination, it appears that it was only an editor in the newsroom who made that change, for in Elle Hardy's X account, she says it this way:



Another "good" thing that Elle Hardy did was to include a link to our video on the Senate committee report, as well as links to a couple of other videos on our channel. This at least gives people a chance to hear our side... if they are prepared to go looking. But the busy public is notoriously disinclined to do their own research, and so more than 99% of those who read her report are left only with the impression Elle wanted to give them about us, and she paints the picture so as to insinuate we are guilty when all the evidence shows otherwise.

The Bad

The lead-in to the article under the headline states:



The opening two paragraphs of Elle Hardy's report go on to say:



Quite apart from the committee not even being able to spell the names correctly for me and my wife, they did not announce a "finding" with regard to us. They mentioned only that they had been given some information (anonymously, no less), and they thought the claims should be investigated. We provided Elle Hardy with clear and strong evidence that the committee merely re-published a defamatory paragraph from a blogger cum journalist, named Simon Mwangi Muthiora. We did far more than "deny" the claims. We totally refuted them, but Elle Hardy and The Guardian refused to publish the evidence.

The Senate Ad-Hoc Committee has only recommended that the matter be investigated with a view to expel and bar from Kenya. The authorities have not yet done an investigation, much less come to any conclusion on the matter. We clearly demonstrated that the misinformation used to justify such a recommendation came from an unreliable source, who had no evidence to support it.

Regarding "links" with Paul Mackenzie, Elle jumps between a member of one group speaking to members of another group, and claims that Dave and Cherry McKay had personal links with Paul Mackenzie. Yes, there was a brief and very irrelevant link between members of the two groups, but no, there was no link between the founders of one group and the leader of the other (not in person, nor through the internet, by phone, or any other means), especially not to the point that Jesus Christian leaders influenced the Good News International leader to do the things he did.

Elle Hardy started with a quote from the Committee report when she wrote:


Here at least Elle is quoting a tweet that one of our members made in which he used the phrase "a church in Kenya that we had links to". The only "link" that we had to them was a mutual concern about the Kenyan "Huduma Card", and the fact that one of our members preached at Mackenzie's church in Nairobi, in May of 2019. That's it. No other link.

Before writing her report, Elle asked us for a copy of the article referred to on AVID's Twitter account. We sent it to her. In that article, we were very critical of Mackenzie's beliefs, specifically his bizarre teaching in relation to the rapture and salvation. Yet Elle makes no mention of what the article said. We believe Mackenzie's teaching about the rapture significantly contributed to the deaths at Shakahola. We took the article down because conflicting information was coming out in the media, and we decided to wait until more information became available. It seems that Elle Hardy wanted to give the impression that the article was supportive of Mackenzie and that it was taken down because we wanted to hide our support. She knew personally that this was not the case, but went so far as to hide her knowledge of what was in the article.

(NOTE: The Guardian has since added a paragraph explaining that the article that was removed from our site dealt with how we differed from Mackenzie's teachings on prophecy.)

Elle says that we "flatly rejected the report's finding". But there is nothing in the report stating that they actually "found" anything. Neither Dave nor Cherry Mckay have ever had any contact with Paul Mackenzie, and the only "links" any Jesus Christian had with his church was that we supported his right to reject the Huduma Card, and one of our members preached at his church in May, 2019, something we have never denied.

Elle Hardy went on to say that the Senate Ad-Hoc Committee claimed that our member preached anti-government sentiments and that the Huduma card was the mark of the beast. But she had access to the sermon, and she could see that he did neither. Yet she failed to point that out.

Elle Hardy refers to the video we have posted in response to the Senate committee report, saying:



Elle Hardy says that our video refers to "allegedly inaccurate stories in the Kenyan media". She has seen clear proof that the information the Committee presented in their report was demonstrably false and irrefutably connected to a defamatory Kenyan blog post, but she uses the word "allegedly" without any attempt to state the evidence as presented in the video.

She then proceeded to give information about what apparently happened at Shakahola. However, even here, it seems she has carefully curated information and worded it in such a way as to connect it somehow to the Jesus Christians, which seems to be thrust of her article.

The Ugly

After detailing some of the things that Paul Mackenzie and his group apparently did in Shakahola, Elle Hardy returns to the Jesus Christians under the heading: "Long history of controversy". In this section we see how Elle purposefully omits important details and only concentrates on the points that she thinks could bear some resemblance to things that happened at Shakahola, or that makes the Jesus Christians sound crazy and/or dangerous.

She starts by saying:



First, A Voice in the Desert is a YouTube channel, not the new name of the Jesus Christians. And while it is true that we have done things that have attracted media attention (like a public demonstration in which we burned money as a statement against greed), the "wading through sewers in India" and "whipping trials of members" are distorted descriptions of serious and significant events which have been taken out of very important contexts.

Elle Hardy falsely stated that we conduct "whipping trials of members", adding that we encourage members to "subject themselves to extreme trials." This was stated after mentioning (without further explanation) that Mackenzie conducted some kind of mock trials before apparently having people beaten to death.

Like with the false charges of abduction, she made no effort to verify such a claim with us before she published it. No Jesus Christian member has ever been subjected to a "mock trial" against themselves. We did, however, do a public demonstration in which some of us (Dave and Cherry McKay in particular) symbolically took on the punishment for crimes people outside the group had committed against us. But Elle chose to omit the context, thus giving the impression that we whip people in our community as some kind of punishment against them.

With regard to Elle Hardy's comment about us "wading through sewers", she failed to state that it was a prelude to a project we carried out to transform that sewer into an oasis, with a medical clinic, a volleyball court, a library, accommodation for medical staff, and a children's playground (including a huge tree-house and pirate ship, and a flying fox between them). She also failed to mention that "Australian of the Year", Ian Kiernan visited the project, and complimented us, along with the Australian Ambassador; and that the finished project was officially opened by the Deputy High Commissioner of the U.K., in Chennai, India.

The article in The Guardian continues:



This might seem like a minor theological point in a different setting, but, because Mackenzie taught his followers that they needed to urgently obtain salvation through fasting to death before a so-called rapture took place, Elle has given a significant and damning false impression. We believe, like most Christian denominations, that salvation is equally important with or without the return of Jesus.

She went on:



It is also true that a group of teen-aged members of our community "set off" to walk across the Nullarbor in 1985, i.e. International Youth Year. But Elle Hardy failed to add that they totally succeeded as well, and that a full front-page photo with the headline "At the End of God's Long Road" won the coveted "News Photo of the Year" award. By leaving all such information out of the claim, she gives the impression that the walk ended badly, or that it was a 'stunt' that never occurred. Her aim seems to be that of trying to use half-truths as "evidence" to support her negative narrative, instead of reporting on the most significant facts, letting the real evidence lead the story.

As for "the group's practice of donating their kidneys to strangers", some members of our community have, freely and altruistically, chosen to donate a kidney. It has never been any kind of "group practice" in the sense of it being a requirement. In fact, most Jesus Christian members have not donated a kidney. However, it is significant that this reference is juxtaposed on the Guardian site with a link to an article about the ludicrous claim that organs were removed from Shakahola victims, presumably for sale on the Black Market, even though that lie had already been debunked by the authorities.

Elle Hardy wrote:



Elle Hardy limits her statement about what happened in 2005 in such a way as to give the impression that Jesus Christians bribed police to get Roland Gianstefani released from jail in Kenya on abduction charges. The most important point of the story is that Roland was falsely accused, and not found guilty of any offence. The "bribe" was more correctly extortion, as the court had already ruled (after pressure from international authorities) that Roland should be released on bail (which we paid), but corrupt jailers extorted money from his wife before they would honour the court's decision. The international pressure revolved around the fact that Roland had been detained illegally, without charge. Roland was not found guilty of anything. There was absolutely no evidence of any offence committed by him or any other Jesus Christian. We strongly suspect that the father of one of our adult members bribed police to get Roland arrested in the first place. But Elle Hardy has included none of this in her report, despite having all the information available. By doing so, she recklessly misrepresented what actually happened.

(NOTE: The Guardian has since added a sentence stating: "The charges were later dropped".)

Back to Elle Hardy:



This is a statement that is technically true but which also lacks the greater context and most important details. The Jesus Christians had been falsely accused of kidnapping Bobby Kelly, despite the fact that he had come to travel with us with permission from his legal guardian. The Gianstefani's refused to reveal his whereabouts at a time when Bobby himself did not want to be found because he had been unfairly made a ward of the state and feared he would be forcibly deprogrammed. Once he was found and told the authorities what had really happened, all kidnapping allegations were immediately dropped and the contempt of court jail sentences were immediately suspended.



By "largely underground", Elle simply refers to a time when most of the Jesus Christians stopped using the Jesus Christian name and website and started separate internet ministries until they started working closer together again in 2016. It is unclear what significance Elle Hardy gives to this, though it appears to be an attempt to suggest that something sinister happened during that "underground" period. The fact is that throughout that “underground” decade, we kept in touch with our families and friends (just as we continue to do so now).

It is a shame that Elle Hardy was so biased and not willing to report on the most important parts of the story and to highlight the verifiable and strong evidence we have given to show that the information the Senate Ad-Hoc Committee used to recommend an investigation with a view to expel and bar us from Kenya is demonstrably false.

On another note, Elle Hardy had actually contacted us in March of 2023 claiming that she was doing a piece on people involved in "cult deprogramming" and was interested in an interview with us after seeing Tara's Story on our YouTube channel. We suspected then that she was not being totally upfront with us about her motivations, and she never did get back to us with her questions on the topic. Her article in The Guardian leaves no doubt in our minds as to her true intentions at that time, and her apparent proclivity to deceive.