Fletcher Brothers
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Pastor Fletcher A. Brothers is a fundamentalist preacher and author from Rochester, New York, USA.
[edit] Freedom Village
He is best known as the founder of Freedom Village[1] (FV), an intensive care home for troubled teens operated from a Christian Fundamentalist perspective and founded in Starkey, New York in 1981. The campus building was the site of the defunct Lakemont Academy, a secular boys boarding school. Freedom Village also operates an office in Burlington, Ontario and has many students from Canada.
Patterned somewhat after the reform homes established by Lester Roloff, FV uses a physical discipline similar to the Roloff Homes and other Fundamentalist recruit training programs. Representatives of FV have been invited to speak at public schools in the USA and Canada.
Parents are only allowed to visit their children on a prearranged basis after three months, and students are asked to commit to remain in the program for one year. In addition all mail incoming and outgoing is read by a staff member. Children are required to write one letter a week to their family. No letters from former friends are given to the children. Phone calls are limited to one a week made in the presence of a staff member.
The intake process is the interview process where children individually meet with a staff member who will ask several questions regarding their application to Freedom Village. While information about past criminal history, drug use, etc., are factored into the decision to accept a child, the primary criteria for acceptance is a stated willingness to cooperate with the rules and guidelines of the program.
During all meals, chapel sessions, school and church sessions the teenagers are segregated by gender. Dating is only allowed among program students once they have obtained a certain privilege level, and with staff approval.
Freedom Village abides by very restrictive standards of personal dress and conduct. Young people are to wear proper fitting, modest apparel. Pastor Brothers also preaches against secular music and has been outspoken against "Christian rock" as well.
Like Roloff, Brothers has preached on radio, and indeed uses radio as a recruiting tool. FV produces the daily 30-minute "Victory Today" radio show, featuring his preaching and occasional interviews of FV staff or students. Often Brothers' preaching is a thinly veiled support for the Republican Party.[citation needed] His theological outlook is generally informed by an apocalyptic form of fundamentalism which considers the imminent return of Christ as within his own lifetime, a view that is common in fundamentalism, despite the fact that many of its protagonists are now dead. Like Hal Lindsey and others, his eschatological perspective is based on the Biblically discredited view of the Rapture. Brothers' radio program often exhibits clear evidence of an "off the cuff" approach that painfully indicates little preparation or careful thought. He disdains any serious scholarship as "liberal" thus protecting him from having to give serious effort to understanding other "non-American, non-Republican, non-modern" theological views.
[edit] References
- ^ Robertson, Michael James (2006). Conquerors for Christ. Xulon Press. p. 173. ISBN 9781600345036. http://books.google.com/books?id=eZUvgQxzboAC&pg=PA173. Retrieved 9 October 2010.
