Come Alive! New Testament Church

Come Alive! New Testament Church

Medford, New Jersey
October 14, 2007

I chose this church for one reason: it had been in the news a few years ago, and I was very curious about the pastor and the congregation.

The story that had made national headlines in 2004 was horrifying. (A compilation of stories on this case that ran in The New York Times can be found here.) A homeowner in Collingswood, New Jersey investigated noises in his yard at 3 am, and found someone foraging for food in his garbage can. Not an animal – it was a small boy. The man brought the boy inside his house and called the police, who took the boy to the police station and gave him a stuffed animal for comfort. The boy said that his name was Bruce, but he didn’t know his last name or where he lived.

At 8 a.m. Raymond Jackson called the police station to report that his son was missing. Police were shocked to discover that Bruce was a 19-year-old man. By noon authorities had removed six other children – three boys and three girls, all adopted except for one girl who was a foster child, from the house the Jacksons were renting next to the neighbor whose garbage can had been disturbed in the middle of the night. The girls were healthy; but all four boys – Bruce and his three younger brothers – were horrifically emaciated and undersized. Bruce, age 19, weighed 45 pounds and stood 48 inches tall. Keith, age 14, was the same height as Bruce, but weighed only 40 pounds. Tyrone, age 10, was 28 pounds and 38 inches tall. Michael, age 9, weighed 22 pounds and was 37 inches tall. All the boys had blackened, rotting teeth.

Details began to emerge. Some neighbors said they had never seen the boys, and didn’t realize there were young boys in the house. One neighbor reported that he had seen the two older boys out in the yard, clipping the grass with hand shears “for days.” He assumed that they were about ten years old. The boys had the job of taking the trash cans to the street, and the neighbor noticed that they had to stop several times to catch their breath every time they performed this chore. He assumed that social workers were monitoring the situation. Like everyone else, he also assumed the boys were much, much younger than they actually were.

The children were home-schooled, but New Jersey does not require proof that home-schooled children are receiving an education, and in fact there was no evidence of any education. The boys had never seen a doctor or dentist during the years they lived with the Jacksons. There were locks on the kitchen doors to keep them away from food. The boys claimed that their diet consisted mostly of pancake batter, uncooked cereal, and raw potatoes. Sometimes they went so long without food that when they were given something to eat, they were unable to keep it down. They gnawed on wallboard and windowsills to quench their hunger. They said that they had been beaten with brooms and belts, and were not allowed to bathe.

Of course, the New Jersey Department of Human Services and the Division of Youth and Family Services, which had been supposedly monitoring the boys’ welfare, came under withering scrutiny for their handling of this case.

In their defense, the Jacksons claimed that all four boys suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and eating disorders, including a disorder that makes a person regurgitate food into his mouth and chew it. Because of these problems, they had to lock up all food in the house and keep it from the boys.

Doctors conducted tests and found no evidence of any such ailments. In fact, as soon as the boys were removed from the Jacksons’ home and placed into other foster homes, they made remarkable recoveries, with nothing more than normal diet and vitamins. The cause of the boys’ shocking condition was found to be intentional starvation.

The next development in the case, though, was a big surprise to local churchgoers. The Jacksons were members of a church, the whole family attended services regularly, and the church rallied around them after the story broke. The pastor of Come Alive! New Testament Church, Rev. Harry Thomas, helped raise the $20,000 cash needed to make bail for Vanessa and Raymond Jackson, and the parents received a standing ovation from the congregation when they returned to church on Sunday after being freed from jail. The church donated more than $10,000 to pay the family’s overdue electricity bill and back rent. Come Alive! started a website, savethejacksons.org, with testimonials about the “saintly” Jacksons and how well they had cared for the four boys. In fact, the family fed the homeless on Camden streets and near the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia. They sat in the front row at church, and the boys sang gospel songs on stage.

The Jackson case was so extreme that it was brought before the Human Resources Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, so that committee members could examine whether there are enough checks to ensure the safety of children who receive federal money while in the care of child welfare agencies. (The Jacksons received about $28,000 annually from the state to cover the costs of raising the children.) At that hearing, Pastor Thomas accused Bruce Jackson, the boy found rummaging in the garbage, of lying about conditions in the house. He questioned the weight gains the boys had made after being removed from the house, asking “Did they have shoes on when they were weighed?” (Bruce gained 18 pounds in the month after he was taken from the Jackson home; Pastor Thomas must know of some rather enormous shoes.)

Members of the subcommittee publicly scolded Pastor Thomas for his comments.

Pastor Thomas did not back down. He later testified at the trial in which Vanessa Jackson was sentenced to seven years in prison for starving the boys (her husband died before the case came to trial), “I’ve known these people as very loving people, people who have a heart for children and they have a heart for God.”

Whaaaaaaat???