LEAVING Gloriavale

When she was 18, Theophila Pratt was banished from the cult she had been trying to escape her whole life. It meant leaving behind everything she knew and learning how to survive – and thrive – on her own in Auckland. Now, she's written a book in the hope of helping others leave

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On Monday, 29 February, 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 in town. 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.”

That was it. The bus was there, so I got on. As it pulled away, I thought, “It has finally happened.” It was a four-hour trip to the 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 didn't choose the cult life; the cult life chose me.” I first wrote those words in 2018, when I'd been living outside of Gloriavale - an isolated Christian cult on the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island - for two years.

When people found out where I'd grown up, they always had questions about my life in Gloriavale. “Why did you join a cult?” they'd ask. “Why did you choose that life?”

I didn’t choose to join a cult. I didn’t choose that life. The people who started Gloriavale chose that life. Some of them left the community when it turned into a cult - and by that I mean a group with a dangerously fanatical ideology - but some of them chose to remain there.

Me, though? That life chose me. I was born into it. My parents both entered Gloriavale when they were young - only 17. They didn't fall in love and decide to marry. Instead, their marriage was arranged by the chureh’s first leader, Neville Cooper, who had arrived in New Zealand from Australia in 1967 to preach and share the Gospel.