Surviving Gloriavale: Former member Theophila Pratt on life inside closed community

| The Post | Theophila Pratt |

When people find out Theophila Pratt was once a member of Gloriavale they often ask, why did you choose that life? In her new memoir, Unveiled, she explains that living in the isolated community was never a choice, and in this extract, how something as simple as following the All Blacks became a dangerous game.

From a young age, I hated my name. Having a name like Honey in a cult is not fun. While it might not sound like a particularly religious name, I was given it as I was supposed to live up to this verse in the Book of Psalms: ‘How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!’ I was constantly teased and mocked by males just for being called Honey.

This never ended well. When I responded to their teasing, I was blamed for the whole situation because, as a female, I was supposed to be meek and use only sweet words. It’s lucky I didn’t know what swearing was back then because my words would have been far from sweet.

Instead of snapping back, I was supposed to live up to my name and be a quiet, submissive woman. After all, my purpose in life was to obey the leaders, work hard and one day get married and have as many children as the Lord blessed me with. I couldn’t think of anything worse. Whenever I thought about that being my future, I felt sick.

When I was about eleven, one of the older girls jokingly told me that if I changed my name, she’d give me a Moro bar (Moro bars were the best thing in Gloriavale). While the others around us laughed, I thought to myself, I’m going to do that one day.

By the time I reached sixteen, I was over living a lie and trying to keep out of trouble for being myself. I was sick of my friends and me being treated like animals. Being a typical teenager, I wanted to be my own person. When I found a book of quotes from famous people, I started quoting it to people. One of my favourites was from Nelson Mandela: ‘Education is the most powerful weapon, which you can use to change the world.’

Of course, the leaders found out and the book was soon taken from me. When that happened, I decided to find another way to be different. One day, I was chatting to my friends and asked, ‘What if I changed my name?’

Instead of telling me I couldn’t, they straight away asked what I would change it to. I hadn’t really thought about it, but I knew that if I was going to be allowed to change it, I would have to choose a name that meant something. I wanted my name to be something different, and I definitely didn’t want it to be an adjective like everyone else’s. I could never get my head around names like Submissive, Redeemed, Beloved and Humble.

I knew of three other people who were born at Gloriavale who had changed their names, but that was because the leaders had told their parents to do it. I also knew that if I went ahead with my plan, I would be the first person to go to the leaders to ask if I could change my name. What the hell was I getting myself into?

Before I could do anything, I had to find a new name. After a few months of researching in the Bible, I found the name Theophila. It intrigued me. It was different from anyone else in the community, and it meant something biblical.

It took me another couple of weeks to gather the courage to tell my mum I wanted to change my name to Theophila, which means ‘friend of God’ or ‘loved by God’.

When I told her, Mum looked shocked, and I could tell she was thinking, ‘What are you up to now, Honey?’ She told me that, at first, she’d thought Theophila was a boy’s name!

From there, I had to go ask the head of our hostel for permission. He asked me if I’d prayed about it. I told him I had. Then he said that he would go away and think about it and talk to the rest of the leaders.

I was shocked that he hadn’t just given me a flat ‘no’, but then I got nervous because I knew the leaders would be talking about me, so I had to behave until I got their answer.

A couple of weeks later, he came back to me and said that the leaders had decided that I could change my name, but he wanted me to reassure them that I could live up to my new name and be a friend of God. He also said I had to get my father’s permission.

My father was put out at the time and wasn’t living with our family, so I wrote him a letter asking if I could change my name.

Thankfully, he said yes. This surprised me as I was the only one out of his nine children who he had named.

At the next First Day (Sunday) night meeting, I stood up in front of the whole community — about 600 people — was given the microphone and nervously announced my new name. Most people were shocked that I had been allowed to change my name and wanted to know why I’d done it, but it didn’t take long for them to get used to calling me Theophila instead of Honey.

For a short time, people who didn’t like me were sort of nice to me. They’d been told that changing my name marked a real turning point in my life and that I’d accepted being part of the church. The only reason they were pleasant to me was that they thought it would get them into Neville’s good books. Of course, that didn’t last long.

A month went by and the leaders told me they weren’t going to let me change my name legally. However, I kept asking them every day until finally they said I could do the official paperwork to change it. Eventually, a Justice of the Peace came out to the community and witnessed my parents’ signatures and Fervent sent the paperwork off to be processed.

Around this time, a lot of people were leaving and moving to Timaru. Most of my friends were second or third-generation descendants of Neville Cooper. Possibly because my parents were raised on the outside, I think I had more questions about their lives and their families on the outside. Something had to be better. I didn’t know what, but I was willing to take the risk.

Six months after I changed my name, my brother Elijah, who was the youngest of the four boys, left Gloriavale and I finally got to experience what it was like to have the hate of the community directed towards my family.

One day, I was on my way to lunch when I heard that the leaders had told my brother he had to go. I rushed home to see what was happening. Elijah was there, packing his bags.

We were not allowed to show our sadness in front of anyone who was leaving or had left. Instead, we gave him quick goodbye hugs before he hopped in the van and was transported away by two of the leaders.

Once he was gone, I climbed up onto his bunk and under his blankets, then cried myself to sleep. Another person who I could be myself around was gone, and the rest of my family didn’t understand me.

Gloriavale is very secluded, so I think people imagine that it is a place with high fences and security cameras preventing people from going there. When I lived there, it didn’t have any of those things so people could just drive up to the property. They didn’t have security cameras on the road in, but Neville would sit down on the driveway a lot of the time watching who was coming and going. The men working on the farm would also radio up if they saw anyone coming in.

At night, there were night watchmen on duty. Two men would be rostered on year round, but lots of people would leave from November until February, so there would be more of them then. If anyone was seen coming up to the complex, the watchmen would stay rostered on just to make sure they didn’t come back. They’d be out there from 9pm until at least 3am every night and sometimes even longer.

There was a bridge across the river outlet to the lake, and just across it is the gate to the community. The nightwatchmen would sit on the bridge in their car. If they caught anyone trying to leave, they would stop them and grill them about who was waiting to pick them up.

People would come in from the outside to help people get out. It was a really hard thing for anyone to organise, but they managed to do it all the time. As life was awfully hard and most days we felt like we were living in hell (even though that was the place we were most scared of going), somehow my friends and I seemed to find little things that gave us something to live for.

In 2015, like much of the rest of the country, I obsessively followed the All Blacks’ Rugby World Cup campaign in England — and this was despite (or because of) the fact that competitive sports, especially rugby, were hated by Neville and therefore banned at Gloriavale. Maybe it was because Neville was Australian and the Aussie rugby teams were often beaten by the All Blacks; who knows? What I did know was that if any rugby balls made it into Gloriavale, they would be popped and then immediately burnt. This prompted us to want to know why, so we found a way to listen to All Blacks games.

There was a dumping ground where there were old cars that the community would use for parts. Sometimes they’d still have their radios. Some of the boys used to go and get them, and we’d go with them. We learnt how to attach the wires to a battery and get the radios going.

We’d listen to ‘worldly’ music and rugby games. When I listened to the rugby, I didn’t have a clue what was going on. I only knew about the game from listening to the radio, and I just knew that I wanted the All Blacks to win. I was making cheese during the 2015 All Blacks World Cup campaign.

Because the games were being played in Europe, they’d often be on early in the morning. After each game, I would record in code who was playing and who’d won the game and let the people who wanted to know what the results were. If I missed a game, my friend would come to the window of the cheese room and tell me who had won.

Another thing we used to do for fun was make up fake newspaper headlines for things that had happened in Gloriavale. For example, ‘Girl gets shunned and put out for six months for standing up for herself’ and ‘Another Gloriavale teenager kicked out and dropped on the side of the road’.

I would tell people around me these made-up titles and make them think they were real. The community got paranoid, believing the headlines were real and thinking someone had betrayed the church by going to the media.

I think I did this because I wished the world outside of Gloriavale and the government would know the truth of what was really happening every day to New Zealand citizens within the community.