That’s correct: Doug Phillips’ lectures, sermons, articles and interviews are disappearing. Naturally, whatever was on Vision Forum’s websites (both of them) is missing. But they are being removed from the website of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches (NCFIC) (which organization he founded).
In one sense I can understand why he would be an embarrassment to the family integrated church movement. On the other hand, regardless of his fault in practice, if what he believed was true and he spoke well on the topic, why not keep the lectures up?
It is not as though he has to be plastered on the first page of the website. Why not be able to look him up in the search section? That’s all I was trying to do in finding his original lectures from the NCFIC’s 2009 Sufficiency of Scripture Conference.
Now, it makes sense that the organization he founded, promoted and expanded over the years would be tempted to downplay his persona—even to the point of expunging his lectures and articles from their website. But I do not understand why other independent organizations, that, say, interviewed him, would excise him from their repertoire of podcasts?
Generations Radio, part of Christian Home Educators of Colorado, removed various podcast interviews with Doug Philips from sermonaudio.com, including one with much useful information about the NCFIC and Phillips’ (and the hosts’) view on the revivalistic powers of homeschooling and family integrated churches:
“Home educators, almost by definition, have turned their heart to their children [Mal. 4] . . . So there’s been a revival that’s taking place in the heart of these homeschool families. And this revival works itself out to the local church . . . our prayer: every Christian in the world is in a family integrated church. And there should be nothing but that, but you know what that is going to lead to? That’s going to lead to people homeschooling! . . .”
(Fortunately, I take good notes).
The excising in the case of this particular interview are precise: not only is the Generations Radio podcast missing (June 12, 2006), a little-known blog post favorably referencing the original interview is missing a the NCFIC website (January 21, 2009). But God is good: the Internet Archive has both webpages in memory (here and here).
Why are these sources of Phillips’ beliefs and practices being removed?
In the old days, when an otherwise upstanding minister goes off the deep end, his books were still accessible (thus, informative and maybe even helpful). In this case, they could be helpful for the upcoming trial. But in a digital age, information control is much easier to pull off.
Are there things that he wrote or said that are an embarrassment?
Perhaps Phillips asked (or told) them to remove the material?
I do not know. That is why I am asking. The comment section is open for those in the know.
Doug Phillips is persona non grata with everyone but perhaps his own immediate family. He’s most especially so with his closest personal pastor friends. Men like Kevin Swanson (Generations Radio) and Scott Brown (NCFIC) rode his coat tails and rose to fame with him, at least until he decided to jump off a cliff. At that point they got off his coat tails. Swanson, Brown, et al are embarrassed and ashamed beyond measure of the accolades they heaped on Phillips for so many years, as they are of the accolades he heaped on them. Their shame isn’t so much merely because he had an “affair with the nanny” (as the story goes), but the horrifically grotesque and perverse nature of his sex acts with her. This will all come out in in open court in her lawsuit against him, as it’s already come out in depositions. But he’ll first have to obtain new legal counsel. His attorney recently quit the case.
For the sake of maintaining their own reputations Swanson and Brown are doing everything they can to flush their former ties with Phillips down the memory hole lest anyone call to mind that they were close personal friends and allies with a fraud and a sexual deviant. The only person who deserves some credit in this is Pastor Joe Morecraft who, when he was informed of Phillips’ sexual deviancies, flew to San Antonio to confront Phillips at his front door with the testimony he’d personally received. “Doug, is it true that you did __________________ with your nanny?” Phillips had an opportunity to repent then and there. Instead he justified himself, as though anyone could ever explain away something so grotesque.
Phillips promised the nanny that he’d marry her, and that he’d be free to do so because, “Beall won’t live much longer.” I’ll leave it to your imagination to determine how he knew his wife wouldn’t live much longer.
Lastly, I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret. Doug Phillips is not the founder of the NCFIC. He quite literally stole it from Eric Wallace, as he stole and plagiarized just about everything he ever claimed credit for. Doug Phillips never had an original thought in his head, and those who did have the original thoughts, and who spearheaded movements like family integrated church, never got the credit for it. Phillips stole their works, and in several cases even threatened them with legal action if they didn’t just hand it over voluntarily. He then placed other men in charge of those organizations that he knew he could control. Perhaps the most brazen example of this is “Raising The Allosaur.”
Swanson, Brown, and many others have so much to be humiliated and ashamed for in not just seeking benefit from their close professional relationship with Phillips, but for even defending him when he started being accused years ago for his frauds. It isn’t a mere matter of “guilt by association.” In reality they aided and abetted one of the biggest frauds in the church in many years.
Jeffery, You write as though you have first hand knowledge. Do you? I ask because your comment about Eric Wallace and the NCFIC.
1. I have scoured the the NCFIC website from the wayback machine. Phillips was there from the beginning and a speaker at their first conferences.
2. I have spoken with Eric Wallace. He wrote his book but never endorsed the NCFIC and actually fled from it (you can read the interview here).
I do agree that his former friends are eager to flee any association with him. But from my perspective, as one who opposes the radical homeschooling and family integrated church version these men promote, I am more interested in their recantation of his public beliefs.
If you have evidence of leaders defending his Allosaur scam, I’d like to know. I do think people who defended this scoundrel ought to be humble enough to admit they were hoodwinked. If a politician was caught defending such a man (let alone scrubbing their servers of all reference of him!), the conservative electorate would want their head. Somehow, when Christians do this Christians suddenly lower their standards.
I was unaware that you’d interviewed Eric Wallace. Excellent article and I quite agree with your conclusions.
Sorry that I didn’t communicate my point more clearly. To reiterate, “Doug Phillips never had an original thought in his head, and those who did have the original thoughts, and who spearheaded movements like family integrated church, never got the credit for it.” That’s exactly how he treated Eric Wallace, Joe Taylor (re the allosaurus) and many others whose names and businesses/ministries I’m not at liberty to disclose (and yes, I do have first-hand information). Doug Phillips profited off the backs of many men, and a few women, without ever giving them credit or the benefit of the financial rewards their labors merited. He’s ruined many lives financially and brought horrific levels of health-destroying stress and anxiety to many godly people whose only fault was that they naively believed him to be a trustworthy brother in Christ.
In your interview-article it’s apparent that Phillips tarnished the good name of Eric Wallace by taking his very modest and moderate ideas and turned them into the radical legalism that is the NCFIC. Churches have been systematically infiltrated, stolen and split by NCFIC cadres. Though church takeovers and church splitting may not be an official written NCFIC policy, Doug Phillips and Scott Brown were long aware that it was going on and they never did anything to dissuade it.
Tragically there are those who continue to associate the foundation that Eric laid with what the NCFIC became when, in reality, the two are very different. I pray that Eric can recover his good name and, I believe, in time that will happen.