Theophila Pratt, named Honey Faithful at birth, was born and raised in a fundamentalist Christian community named Gloriavale.
Established in 1969 by Neville Cooper, also known as Hopeful Christian, an Australian evangelist, Gloriavale is a secluded community located on the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand.
Despite enduring accusations of sexual and physical abuse, as well as labor exploitation over the years, the community remains operational to this day, even following Cooper’s passing from cancer in 2018.
Theo, during her teenage years, found herself questioning the authoritarian and oppressive setting in which she resided, where a select group of men wielded total authority.
At 18, having been utterly sheltered from the outside world, and with no knowledge of how society operated, she was forced to leave the community and was dropped at a bus stop and left to fend for herself. This is the shaky start of her freedom…
On Monday, February 29, 2016, I stepped on a bus for the first time in my 18 years of life. My brother and my mother had dropped me at the bus stop in the main street of Greymouth. I didn’t even know what a bus stop was. I knew that the outside existed, but I didn’t know the extent of the outside.
I heard my mother’s last words to me as I left everything I’d ever known. Before I got on the bus, she said sadly, ‘The decision you’ve made has damned your soul to hell for eternity.’
My brother said, ‘My kids will never hear your name again.’
For the first 18 years of my life, I lived at Gloriavale – New Zealand’s most secretive cult
That was it. The bus was there, so I got on. As the bus pulled away, I thought, ‘It has finally happened.’
It was a four-hour bus ride to Christchurch Airport, so I had plenty of time to go over everything that had happened in the last three days and come to the realisation that the decision I had just made would affect me for the rest of my life.
I started thinking about where I was going. I was anxious about the airport and how I was going to manage it. I felt okay as we were going through the countryside across Arthur’s Pass, but I didn’t have a clue where I was once we hit Christchurch.
When we stopped at the airport, I just sat there thinking, ‘Well, what do I do now?’
It was bizarre. I was trying to carry the heavy suitcase and I didn’t really know where I was going. I knew Auckland must have been in New Zealand because I knew Mum was born in New Zealand, but I didn’t have a clue what it was or where it was. I didn’t even know that it was a city.
We hadn’t been taught anything about the geography of New Zealand, probably because if we knew more about the country we’d want to go and see it for ourselves.
When I got off the bus, I stood there looking around, not knowing where to go next with my giant 100-year-old suitcase.
As I struggled through the doors into the airport, a man came up behind me and offered me a trolley, then he put my suitcase on it for me. I stood there in shock that a man would help a woman without being asked and without there being any strings attached. Just helping because he genuinely wanted to help was something I had never experienced before from a man.
Life at Gloriavale with my mum and my sisters (pictured) was all I knew until I was 18 years old. When I left, I was completely overwhelmed by the outside world
Once inside, I went up to the help desk and explained my situation. From there, they assisted me through security and then someone helped me get to the correct gate.
Once on the plane, I ended up sitting next to a woman and her baby. The baby cried most of the way, but somehow it was a gift in disguise as it helped to distract me from what I had just done – and the journey I was about to go on.
At the same time, seeing this baby made what I had just done hit home to me. I was struck by the reality that I didn’t know if I’d ever see my nephews and nieces again and the fact that they probably wouldn’t have a clue I ever existed.
Once again, I remembered what my brother had said at the bus stop earlier that morning: ‘My children will never hear your name again.’
I’d hardly ever been in a car, so being on a plane was wild. I was just relieved that I didn’t get any airsickness. I used to get badly carsick. Just going to Greymouth, I’d vomit the whole way there and back because being in a car was so unfamiliar.
After a delay and about an hour and a half in the air, the plane landed. Greymouth had always seemed big to me with its one set of traffic lights, so nothing had prepared me for Auckland.
Once on the ground, I managed to collect my luggage, but I couldn’t find Keitha [a friend of my mother’s] and her husband Alex anywhere. I kept a tight hold of their business cards, looking for people that looked like them.
I was standing in the middle of Auckland Airport wondering what I was going to do if they didn’t turn up. I started to think they weren’t going to come because they didn’t want the challenge of having an ex-Gloriavale teenager to look after.
When I left Gloriavale, I’d never been on a bus or been inside a shopping mall
I had no phone and not a clue as to where I really was. When I’d left the community, I was given $200. Up until that point, the most money I had ever seen was $5. I thought I was rich, but it didn’t take me long to know that $200 wasn’t much at all.
What seemed like hours later, but was probably only a few minutes, I managed to spot Alex in the distance.
On the way home from the airport, Alex and Keitha stopped in at Pak ‘n’ Save at Sylvia Park, a supermarket in one of the biggest shopping malls in New Zealand. I’d never set foot in a mall before.
As we wheeled the trolley around the supermarket, they kept asking me what I wanted. I had no clue how to even choose what I wanted. I’d never had someone ask me, ‘What do you feel like for dinner?’
It was a few weeks before Easter, so there were loads of Easter eggs, bunnies and various other Easter-themed foods and decorations.
Seeing all the Easter stuff was bizarre. I wasn’t sure why there were chocolate bunnies and chickens everywhere. I certainly didn’t link the whole thing to Jesus at all. We didn’t learn about Easter at Gloriavale because it was seen as a pagan tradition.
That night, Keitha asked me how long I was staying for.
I had to tell Keitha and Alex that I wasn’t just visiting them for a holiday, and that my family had cut me off and there was no way I was going back to Gloriavale. They took the news in their stride, said I could stay with them for as long as I needed to and then set about helping me navigate building my own life in Auckland.
I tried a can of Coke for the first time that night. I decided I didn’t like it, but I didn’t tell Alex and Keitha that. Trying to be polite, I kept drinking Coke from the fridge and they kept buying it thinking I liked it! Eventually, I plucked up the courage to tell them the truth, but it took a while.
On my first full day in Auckland, Keitha took me to a Spark telecoms store to buy me my first phone. I was so excited about finally getting one. All I remember about it is that it had a white back and cost $100. To me this piece of technology was more than a phone; it was about to open up a whole world of social media, YouTube, music and the internet.
Having got it all set up, I rang my friends who had left Gloriavale before me and we talked for hours. Within the first couple of days I had used my month’s worth of minutes.
The next big thing I needed to do was set up a bank account for myself. At Gloriavale, I didn’t even know what a bank account was let alone have access to one. In order to open an account, I needed to have some photo identification.
Of course, I didn’t have a driver’s licence or a passport, so I had to go off and get a photo taken then apply for an 18+ card. While I waited for that to come, I made an appointment to speak to someone at Work and Income New Zealand (WINZ) in Ōtāhuhu.
I was relieved that Keitha was with me, as I had only ever heard bad things about WINZ. Sitting there, waiting for my name to be called, I was surrounded by young girls with babies, people with ankle bracelets on and old men. I wondered where I had come to, but I knew that in order to survive in the real world, I had to start somewhere as I pretty much had no clothes, underwear, shoes or toiletries.
My name was called and I anxiously went over to where a man was waiting at his desk. I tried to explain to him that I had left a cult with nothing, but he just kept asking where my family was and why I couldn’t contact my parents.
At this point, Keitha took over, doing most of the talking as I didn’t know how to even have a conversation with a stranger let alone answer all these questions. I was still trying to get my head around the names for the days of the week and months of the year.
I ended up getting a $100 voucher to go to the Warehouse and buy some essentials. I was very excited about going – and not just because I’d be able to buy things for myself there. The Warehouse was a place that Neville said was evil and no one from Gloriavale was ever allowed to set foot in one of their stores.
In 2009, Neville had decided that people from Gloriavale were no longer going to buy anything from the Warehouse. The reason was that the local Greymouth Warehouse had stocked copies of Sins of the Father, the book his son Phil Cooper had written with Fleur Beale, which exposed a lot of Gloriavale’s dark secrets.
Neville decided the best way to stop people in Gloriavale from reading the book was to make the Warehouse out to be the worst place in the world. I couldn’t wait to finally go into one to see what it was all about.
Shopping for myself was a new experience. I had no idea what to buy with my $100. There were so many decisions to make. Buying a new bra for the first time was so exciting. I had only ever been given one brand-new bra in my life and it had been chosen for me.
My next purchase was ankle socks, which were a complete no-no in Gloriavale. I had spent my teenage years trying to make my long socks into ankle socks because we thought ankle socks were so cool.
After that, I decided to buy some black underwear because I’d grown up being told it was only for married women. Apparently, married men in Gloriavale love their wives in black underwear.
My next shopping expedition was one I never would have imagined when I was still in Gloriavale. When my brother Elijah found out I had left and was in Auckland, he flew up to spend a weekend with me. The first thing he did was take me shopping at Sylvia Park.
He took me into a clothing shop called Crossroads and got me trying on jeans. At that point, I didn’t know if I wanted to wear jeans, as I still thought it was ‘worldly and evil’ for women to wear them. I think because it was a man telling me what to do, I went along with it.
I ended up walking out of the shop wearing a pair of white three-quarter jeans and a black T-shirt (single women in Gloriavale were never allowed to wear black). It was one of the most empowering experiences of my life.
That weekend, Elijah and I took the train from Sylvia Park into Britomart and caught the ferry to Waiheke Island. It was in the peak of summer. I was wearing my jeans and my new brown boots. I had been given some bikinis to wear at the beach on Waiheke, but I was nervous about how to wear them.
At Oneroa, I looked around me at the packed beach, watching other girls and women wearing bikinis. I put the bikini top on but wasn’t quite ready to wear the bottoms.
The next morning, I woke up with blisters all over my back and my face was completely red. My skin was not used to the sun at all, and this was my introduction to sunburn…
This is an edited extract from Unveiled: A Story of Surviving Gloriavale by Theophila Pratt, Bateman Books, RRP $39.95, available at Booktopia
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