Word of Faith Fellowship

Word of Faith Fellowship is an evangelical church based in Spindale, North Carolina, founded in 1979 by Jane Whaley, a former mathematics teacher, and her husband Sam Whaley. Doctrinally it stands within the broader Word of Faith / Pentecostal-charismatic stream, but it developed distinctive and intense communal practices. It has been the subject of extensive investigative journalism and of accounts by numerous former members, who have described it as a high-control congregation and alleged practices including a loud, aggressive form of group prayer directed at individuals (sometimes called "blasting") intended to expel sin or demons, tight control over members' personal lives, and physical and psychological abuse of adults and children.

A major investigative series by the Associated Press in the 2010s compiled many such accounts and prompted renewed law-enforcement attention, and there have been arrests, prosecutions, and civil suits connected to the church over the years, with varying outcomes; the church has denied wrongdoing and characterized the allegations as distortions of its religious practice. Because much of the record rests on former-member testimony and journalism, and because litigation has produced mixed results, the church remains a contested case. It is discussed in reporting and scholarship as an example of the difficulty of distinguishing protected, if unusual, religious practice from actionable abuse within a living congregation.

Word of Faith Fellowship became a national story in 2017, when the Associated Press published a series based on interviews with dozens of former members of the Spindale, North Carolina congregation. The reporting described blasting, the church's practice of loud, prolonged deliverance prayer aimed at expelling devils, as escalating in accounts of ex members into physical restraint and beating; it also documented how members employed at businesses owned by congregants reported donating unemployment benefits during the recession, which led to guilty pleas by several members for fraud, and how church members held positions in local prosecution and law enforcement that former members said had shielded the congregation from earlier complaints.

A further strand followed the church to Brazil, where affiliated congregations in Franco da Rocha and Sao Joaquim de Bicas sent young Brazilians to Spindale; former participants described confiscated passports and unpaid labour at members' businesses, prompting investigations by Brazilian labour authorities. The church and its founder Jane Whaley have denied all abuse, characterising the accounts as attacks on its worship, and criminal cases over specific assaults produced mixed results, including mistrials. The AP series won journalism awards and the congregation continues, its schools and businesses intact, leaving the fellowship as a standing American test of where the free exercise of vigorous religion ends and coercion begins.