I find it fascinating to know that my “Leander Revival” item of years back continues to reverberate a bit.  Maybe this shouldn’t be all that surprising.  It is a reference point for new generations of peoples who have to deal with the self-imagined Messiah Prophet Revivalist — a revival that tends to extend to hearing distance from wherever he happens to be yapping his mouth.

The Leander Revival is a chronology of messages left on the Internet from 1998 and 1999 which describe the impact of a take-over of a Pentacostal Church in the small town of Leander, Texas by a controlling and divisive Hellfire preacher by the name of Ken Jones.  Jones came in to purify and cleanse the congregation and expose the members of its sins.  His doctrine was, more or less, that Ken Jones was without sin and thus if you follow him you will find new joys in the biblical story of Jesus’s “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” entreaty.

The church has, from what I gather, long moved on past this blip in its history.  I have received emails expressing a desire to explain what “really happened” in Leander and with Jones, or to clarify something, but I have never received any follow-ups.  I guess my standing offer is in place — if there’s some statement or other someone wants to add to the page, and I would not know what to ask, I do desire to de-personalize its effect from its final product in its formative effects on the self-imagined Messiah Prophet Revivalist.  It appears that Ken Jones grabbed ahold of his high school drama student protege by stressing over his sense of guilt in being purified of sin, and then back-sliding into the sin of onanism, which strikes me as a good mechanism of control if you’re tapping a teenager.

He made himself a permanent presence at one university in the northwest, and later a less permanent presence at, I believe, UCLA — jarring the typical pattern of the itenerant campus preacher.  Meantime, he has gone from church organization and sect to sect and church organization, looking for a home stressing biblical prophecy, lining himself up behind various charismatic figures of religious esoterica in order to — in short order in his mind — outgun them all.  He sooner or later wears out his welcome, as he casts everyone out to Hell.  It is clear that in his mind, he is attempting to replicate (or continue) the “Leander Revival”, and on his website is a list of key prophetic moments of the past few centuries in route to glorious Armegeddon which appear to have a bunch from standard texts of the true believer Apocalypse seeker — but then includes the more obscure and personalized one started by Ken Jones in Leander in 1998.

It was curious to note that he was an enthusiastic and active supporter of Ron Paul’s presidential bid, the subtext and occasional text of his many youtube videos coming back to “The Government took my kids away from me — and gave them to my Jezebel ex-wife.”  And, too, put him in prison.  I see now renewed attention from more current people who have dealt with him — a blog is following the sordid details of his current happenings — and on youtube now there is a cell phone diatribe from him where he plots to kidnap his kids and take them — free them, he believes — to some magical spot in the Hills where they cannot be touched by the Law.  So he has some warrants for his arrest, and you see his one way ticket back to prison, whenever he can poke his face out.

The curious thing about this, the one thing I wonder, is that I simply do not know who else where else he touched anyone’s life.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 27th, 2011 at 2:56 pm and is filed under On the Ground, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.