Vol. 9, No. 3, 1992

Articles on Other Religious Topics

Baptist minister Donald Sills, the immediate past President and current board member of Family Entertainment Network (FEN) has been linked to past financial ties with several cults.

Reports indicate that Rev. Sills has been used to give credibility to several groups with direct ties to Mormonism, Rev. Moon's Unification Church, and the controversial Bible Speaks church.

In December of 1987 major newspapers throughout the US carried a Knight-Ridder story linking Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church to the American Freedom Coalition (AFC), publisher of the monthly Religious Freedom Alert, headed by Donald Sills as president and Robert Grant as chairman.

In 1989 U.S. News & World Report announced that Rev. Moon was attempting to infiltrate Christian circles by setting up or directly funding several right-wing political organizations that mask their ties to Moon including the American Freedom Coalition (27 March 1989 p. 27).

AFC down-played links to Moon and assembled an executive committee of a number of well-known Christians including Paul Crouch of TBN, Ben Armstrong of the National Religious Broadcasters and evangelists James Robinson and Rex Humbard (Christian Research Journal Summer 1988).

Other Christian leaders left the organization when its ties to the Unification Church became known including Tim LaHaye and D. James Kennedy (Ibid).

The article in *IU.S. News*R reported that AFC was an attempt by Moon to covertly infiltrate Christian churches calling AFC, "the Unification Church's latest political venture, spawned by Moon's chief lieutenant, South Korean former military attache Col. Bo Hi Pak."

Pak "boasted last year to conservative activist David Finzer: `We are going to make it so that no one can run for office in the United States without our permission.'"

CAUSA

Sills is also reported to have spoken in the past at a number of functions of CAUSA, a Unification Church-funded anticommunism organization (Christian Research Journal).

Sills visited Rev. Moon while he was in prison for tax evasion and has publicly attacked the secular Cult Awareness Network and other groups that deal with cults.

Denounces Cult Ministries

"Sills appeared May 3 [1988] on Crouch's `Praise the Lord' show on TBN and denounced the secular Cult Awareness Network (CAN). From there Sills went on the AFC's radio network hosted by Grant and sharply criticized CAN and cult watchers in general" (Ibid).

The Bible Speaks Church

Sills even did a stint as "the public affairs spokesman for the Greater Grace World Outreach-- formerly The Bible Speaks, a controversial group a federal jude recently ordered to return $6.6 million in contributions it swindled form a former member" (Ibid).

The Freeman Institute

In a telephone interview, Ed. Decker said he first met Sills when Sills was working with the well-known Mormon speaker W. Cleon Skousen, formerly with the FBI for 16 years and founder of the National Center for Constitutional Studies (previously the Freeman Institute).

Decker said Sills was helping Skousen gain access to evangelical churches in the area.