‘The Perfect Church’: Inside the Religious Sect That Took Over a Midwestern Town

O ne of Jesse Morris’ earliest memories is sitting on his father’s shoulders at the church on Webster Street, in Oregon, Illinois, waiting for his pastor to rise from the dead. 

On an early spring night in 1992, about 75 people were packed under the high vaulted ceiling of the church’s main hall, in abject shock and grief. At the front of the room, Rose Aluli lay in a half-open casket dressed in one of her signature gowns. To the congregation, Rose had been much more than a charismatic preacher. Over the past decade, she had grown their church from a small Bible study into a thriving yet controversial local institution. They call it “The Church of Jesus Christ Forever” or “the Perfect Church.”

Rose had also served as many of the church members’ boss at a local restaurant. A wealthy woman, she loaned money generously — several in the room were in debt to her. Others looked to a self-published book of Rose’s teachings for spiritual guidance. She had served as the officiant at many of their weddings, and had even arranged the marriages of several couples in the audience. Some congregants had completely cut off communication with their own parents or grandparents because their families wouldn’t match their devotion to Rose and the church.

Although Rose had been more than 80 years old, her death was completely unexpected. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Because Rose could not die.

It had been explained to Morris and the other children in the church over and over again. This was essential to their beliefs, separating them from the other Pentecostal churches in surrounding rural Illinois — if you were without sin, you would live forever. Rose was, of course, without sin. It was understood that at some point during the service Rose was supposed to rise from the dead. So they waited.

In the ecstatic revival style of their church services, audience members excitedly stood to speak. Some referenced Lazarus or repeated the biblical phrase, “She is not dead, she is only sleeping.” The church chef played a bluesy version of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the piano. The event went on for hours, attendees watching her corpse, thinking that at any moment she would start breathing again.

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WHEN I VISIT OREGON, ILLINOIS, some 30 years later, and ask locals about Rose’s church, they generally refer to it as “the cult” or “Rose’s cult.” The small congregation, now an estimated 30 people, is as much a part of the fabric of the community as Chief Blackhawk, a nearly 50-foot-tall concrete Native American that stands watch over the town.

Older locals still remember Rose as a prominent businesswoman who, even in her seventies, wore gold stirrup pants, fur-collared jackets, and spiked heels while cruising around town in a pink Cadillac. She ran a bar with her second husband, Al, while raising nine children. In the 1970s, Rose found herself swept up in the Life Message Pentecostal revival movement. After taking command of a Bible study she’d started attending in the neighboring town of Rockford, she set about bringing in new members and establishing her own ideology.

The Perfect Church incorporated the prophecies and glossolalia of the Pentecostal tradition, while warping them into something more radical. Though Rose didn’t rise from the dead at her funeral, members believe she eventually will — before leading the nation to victory in a third world war against the allied forces of China and Japan. The church website describes itself as teaching members how to live completely without sin. 

But according to some former members, living without sin entails abuse and sacrifice. I spoke to three former members who say the popular restaurant the church once operated in its heyday paid its employees subminimum wages, while working them to the bone. In total, 10 former church members I spoke with describe being put through varying degrees of emotional or physical abuse. 

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Most Oregon locals have heard some version of these stories, and there is a simmering tension between the church and the small town they call home. The town has a population of about 4,000 and a conservative, religious bent. This has led to flare-ups between the more traditional locals and the eccentric church in their midst.

For the past 44 years, the church has been engaged in a concerted effort to become a legitimate part of the Oregon community. Church elders are well-known around town, including one who has served on the school board and currently sits on the planning commission. They’re often in the local news for charitable donations, and a plaque celebrating Rose now sits in the center of town. 

After Rose’s death, her husband, Kale Aluli — who had served as Rose’s assistant pastor since the church’s founding in 1981 — took over. They’d been married for just about a year before she died, when Kale (pronounced Kah-lay) was in his forties and Rose was 80. Kale is a big personality, the son of Hawaiian music legend Irmgard Farden Aluli; he produces musicals and children’s books about church lore. Many also allege he is a master manipulator who orchestrated a more extreme culture of abuse in the church. Kale and other senior members of the church declined to be interviewed for this story.

I’ve talked to more than 25 former church members and Oregon locals to dig into the relationship between this bizarre church and the town where it has spent decades trying to find its place. 

FROM THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS a contingent of Oregon that viewed Kale and Rose’s budding church with suspicion. Throughout the 1980s, they became the subject of a series of critical newspaper articles. “I was like the boogeyman for [them],” Betsy Burkhard Floski, the journalist who wrote those stories, tells me.

In one of these articles, a 1987 Rockford Register Star feature headlined “Oregon Asks: Cult or Church?” Floski interviewed former members who accused the church of arranging their marriages, isolating them from their families, physically abusing children, and worshipping Rose as a deity. (Rose denied accusations of physical abuse. In response to the claim of arranged marriages, Kale told the paper, “In every case, there was some affection prior.”) Around this time, Maxson Manor, the local restaurant run by the church, took out an ad in the same paper. “Despite the rumors, Maxson Manor is still serving divine food in a heavenly atmosphere with angelic service,” the ad read, next to an image of a cherubic child. Below, it said cryptically, “We have discontinued Devils Food Cake.”

For a time, the town took the abuse rumors seriously. Church leadership had hoped to invest their funds to develop a hotel named after Rose, but the plans were scuttled amid the accusations. Business dipped at Maxson Manor, with some patrons boycotting the restaurant.

While Rose was generally liked around town, some were less trusting of her assistant Kale. Once, at a wedding Rose officiated, Kale wept and waved his arms up and down — though the bride and groom had never met him before — while the crowd of Oregon locals looked at one another in confusion. Another local man remembers hosting a garage sale at his house, and finding that Kale, wearing a zoot suit and a fedora, had wandered into their laundry room and was digging through his family’s dirty clothes.

George Hampilos, who served as the church attorney during this period, remembers some incidents of vandalism directed at the church. “Usually, it’s someone who is xenophobic, or has their own strong religious beliefs that conflict with them,” he says. “But on the other hand, they’ve been welcomed by civic leaders, by politicians, by other people in the community who have said ‘live and let live.’”

Despite the bad press, the church restaurant — an impressive Tudor-style mansion famous for its orange rolls, live big-band music, and hospitality — remained a local landmark. In 1985, Rose received an award from the Oregon Chamber of Commerce for her management. The church eventually used the restaurant profits to buy a riverboat, which was used for popular dinner cruises along the Rock River. Both establishments were also hotbeds of alleged labor abuse, with multiple members claiming they were coerced into working brutal hours for less than minimum wage. 

At this time, there was a clear hierarchy in church leadership, with Rose and Kale at the top, followed by Rose’s daughter, Carol Maust, and Carol’s husband, Michael. The group was known to the congregation as “the four winds.” Maxson’s head chef, Steven Ingersoll, was at the bottom of this pyramid. During his eight years as a member, his whole life was dictated by the church. He says he worked 14- to 16-hour days at the restaurant, six or seven days a week, for subminimum wages. His marriage to another church member was arranged by Kale. His children were often made to live at other church members’ houses — former members say this was a relatively common practice in the church — and his connection to them was limited. His parents weren’t allowed to talk to him because they didn’t join the church.

This way of living took a toll on Ingersoll. “I remember one Sunday, I was exhausted,” he tells me. “I was down in the basement of the restaurant. We had this huge freezer … and this voice came into my head that said, ‘Steven, all you have to do is crawl in and close the door.’”

Members describe the time after Rose’s 1992 death as a “great sifting,” in which about half the congregation left the church. Rose’s daughter Carol had always distrusted Kale, and she became even more skeptical of him after he married Rose in 1991. She viewed the marriage as predatory, a scheme to gain access to Rose’s extensive estate. Their conflict over Rose’s will exploded into a 10-year legal battle that saw the church win some of its tithe money that Rose had stashed in her bedroom and part of an island property she owned, but lose its riverboat and Maxson Manor, which burned to the ground exactly one year to the day after Rose died. 

In a small town, the fire was huge news. Much of Oregon gathered on the other side of the river to watch the blaze. Insurance investigators ruled that the fire was an accident, though the timing does raise some questions. “Coincidence or Destiny?” a post on the church website asks. 

Once Rose had died, and the restaurant was gone, Oregon’s interest in the church dimmed. Newspapers stopped writing about it. But for those who remained members, things got more bizarre.

GROWING UP, MORRIS SAW HIS PASTOR Kale as nothing short of the voice of God. “When he said ‘jump,’ you don’t just jump,” Morris says. “You fly.”

Morris remembers being required to tape a phrase to the inside of his Bible: No other goal in life, but to become a perfect son. The mantra encapsulated the ideology of his church and his pastor. If they behaved perfectly and became completely sinless, then they could live forever, and according to the evolved teachings of the church, Rose would finally be raised from the dead, too. 

“As soon as Rose died, life became very harsh and demanding.”

Jesse Morris, former member

In the quest for perfection, Kale arranged challenges intended to push the church to achieve higher levels of spirituality. Morris remembers the rules being ambiguous and entirely at Kale’s discretion. They mostly involved prayer and good behavior. First, the congregation was asked to remove the root of sin. Then they needed to achieve the Melchizedek Priesthood. Then came something called “The Dive.” Kale was usually first to reach the next level. Morris was usually last. 

Kale was always a little harder on Morris and his family than the rest of the church, and Morris suspected it was because Kale had previously been married to his mom, Candy. Kale and Candy had wed in the late 1970s and moved from Hawaii to Candy’s hometown in Illinois, where they attended Rose’s Bible study. On the day they met, Kale says, Rose cured a lingering headache. Kale and Candy divorced in the early 1980s, and after the death of Rose’s husband in 1990, Kale and Rose married. (Candy, who is still a church member, denies the assertion that her family was treated more harshly by the church.)

As Morris grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s, the church was made up of a handful of remaining families including Rylands, Morrises, Rinaldos, and Alulis. “I vaguely remember there being some level of joy and happiness before,” he says. “As soon as Rose died, life became very harsh and demanding.” Under Kale’s leadership, the church focused on the end-times, frequently reading from the Book of Revelation, former members say. They emphasized fasting, and former members recall being put on absurd diets — one says he was forced to eat only oatmeal for weeks at a time. 

In school, Morris and the rest of the dozen or so children growing up in the church were known as “the cult kids.” Some church punishments seem designed to increase their social ostracization — in a Facebook post, one former member describes being made to cut her hair off and wear the same ill-fitting Hawaiian dress to school every day. Another, Anthony Rinaldo, says Kale made him get a reverse mohawk, with one strip shaved through the center of his head, as punishment for getting bad grades. 

“It was like us versus the world,” says Isaac Ryland, a former member. Morris adds, “We were like, ‘If only you guys knew how important our church was. If only you knew that I was a chosen person in the world, to be perfect and welcome you guys into heaven.’”

MORRIS SAYS HIS LIFE BECAME A WHIRLWIND of punishments and abuse, as he was passed around to live with different members at the whims of church leadership. At one house, he says, he was forced to sleep in his underwear on a basement floor and eat an entire tray of fudge as punishment for breaking a fast. He ate until he vomited, he says, and was then forced to eat his own vomit. At another house, a church member brandished a knife and threatened to cut off Morris’ penis after they discovered what they believed to be proof that he had been masturbating. Sometimes Morris was made to sit on the floor and eat out of a dog bowl, or pick his food out of a trash can. Five other former church members backed up parts of Morris’ accounts, or have shared stories of similar abuses. 

One of Morris’ peers says Kale once made him cover his face and shoulders in dog feces as punishment for lying, because “that’s how foul I stink to God.” Another says she was forced to slap herself if she misbehaved. When something bad happened, like an injury or the death of a family member, members were told it had happened because they had sinned, according to two former members who requested not to be identified due to fear of retaliation. 

Kale exerted control over the members’ careers, who they could spend time with, and their romantic partners. Even minor decisions had to be run up the church’s chain of command, say former members. Congregants say they were required to pay a minimum of 10 percent of their income in tithes. As a teenager, former member Anthony Rinaldo remembers dropping off two envelopes of cash each week from his lifeguarding job — one to cover his 10 percent tithe and another strongly encouraged donation to the church building fund. (The church describes these tithes as voluntary.)

Members recall Kale conducting church business in an office where he sat on a throne covered in rabbit fur, next to a giant picture of Rose. He was erratic, says another member, “some days very loving and kind and vibrant, jubilant and full of energy and other days … screaming, controlling, degrading.” If kids fell out of line, Kale saddled them with prophecies of dark and disturbing futures. One girl posted on social media that she was told that when she was 14, she was destined to have a lesbian lover who she would break up with before dying by suicide. When he was 15, Morris says Kale told him that if he didn’t change his ways, he was destined to sexually assault a mentally disabled girl. (The church didn’t respond to requests to comment about these allegations.)

By 2005, at age 18, Morris says the punishments had become so extreme that he started to fear for his life. He tried to run away, taking items from the house he had been made to live in and buying a bus ticket to California. But his host family caught him, he says, and made him sign a document admitting to stealing from them. If he ever tried to leave the church again, they said they’d turn him in to the police.

So Morris lashed out, sneaking out and breaking into homes, cars, and schools. “I remember

thinking, ‘If I get caught and I go to prison, prison is better than this,’” he says. That year, Morris was caught and sentenced on a burglary charge. 

When he was released three years later, despite having confided in some friends and even his mother about the alleged abuses he’d suffered, he rejoined the church that was all he knew. He moved back to his mom’s house and spent his Wednesday nights and weekends at the church in Oregon, where he was subject to constant interrogation. In late 2008, he says, he called Kale and told him he didn’t want to go to the church that weekend. He says Kale gave him an ultimatum — he would come to church or Kale would call his mom and tell her to kick him out of her house. Morris drove to his mom’s house, packed his bags and left. This time, it stuck. 

THE PERFECT CHURCH IS about a 15-minute walk from an Oregon downtown that looks so much like a quintessential American small town that it was featured in the 2021 streaming holiday movie Lacy’s Christmas Do-Over, in which a career-driven business woman finds herself trapped in a small town, reliving the same day over and over. But there is a weirdness not too far underneath that surface, and not just from the presence of the church.

During my brief visit, I hear of at least four buildings that may be haunted, including the Conover Square Mall, a center of local commerce. At one possibly haunted bar, the Sledgehammer, the owners show me videos of bottles mysteriously falling off the shelves. Former mayor Mike Arians takes me through the darker elements of the town, which he believes may be the result of ancient Native American burial mounds around this section of the Rock River. For a town of only 4,000 people, Oregon has seen an outsize number of shocking murders, including an 111-man firing squad that extrajudicially executed a gang of accused bandits in 1841, and a state’s attorney who killed his son and shot his wife and a police officer before killing himself. 

Arians tells me I’m going to run into some walls if I start looking into Kale’s church. “You dig too deep around here and they don’t like it,” he says. While some locals are excited to gossip about the church, others are much more tight-lipped. When I ask one woman about the church, she responds, “I know absolutely nothing about them,” in a tone that implies she at least knows something about them.

Over the course of several decades, it seems the church reached an uneasy truce with Oregon. After Rose’s death, Kale made efforts to reclaim her legacy. He and senior member Rick Ryland made appearances at community events and became respectable figures around town. Ryland joined the school board, then the planning commission. The church spread members’ tithe money to various charities throughout town.

Instead of writing exposés about the controversial church, the local newspapers of the 2000s and 2010s were more likely to uncritically print the church’s own writings. When the church made a $5,000 donation to a local charity in 2013, the local paper published a news article written by Ryland, quoting Kale extensively. “We hope this offering during the Christmas season provides food to the needy and settles the truth about our beloved founder,” Kale says in the story. 

While reporting on the church in the 1980s, Floski tells me some locals wanted her to leave the church alone. “They just didn’t like the publicity. Maybe they were selling houses. Maybe they owned a restaurant,” Floski says. “We don’t want you to do a story that makes Oregon look bad.” For nearly 30 years, the town had basically embraced the idea of shutting up about the church. By 2017, the early allegations had been so quieted that Kale was the keynote speaker at a major Oregon community event. 

ON A COLD VETERANS’ DAY IN 2017, a crowd of locals gathered alongside the Rock River for the dedication of what might be the second-largest stationary American flag in the country.

The 30-by-60-foot flag of steel siding covered much of the south wall of the Conover Square Mall. Beside it, a freshly painted line of red, white, and blue lettering read: Jesus says: I am the way, the truth and the life, the Alpha and the Omega. We stand for one nation under God, indivisible. On the other end of the wall, a grid of plaques celebrated the project’s donors. One read: “Rev. Rose M. Aluli Memorial.” Another commemorated the “Greatest Anonymous Donor Ever.”

Two years before the flag unveiling, a nonprofit group called Hands On Oregon was formed to install the flag and repair the deteriorating wall. The group was led by church member Rick Ryland, who was the 2017 ceremony’s emcee. 

The process of fixing the wall was strange and miraculous. Hands On Oregon kept receiving anonymous donations — first $15,000, then $25,000, $50,000, and $75,000. Every time they seemed poised to run out of money, in came another anonymous check. Each was accompanied by an article in the local paper, where Ryland expressed his shock and gratitude. Of the $185,000 donated, $160,000 came from this timely anonymous donor. Ryland says he still does not know who the donor was but insists they were not affiliated with the church.

It became common speculation in Oregon that these unnamed donations came from another man onstage that day: Kale, then in his sixties and sitting behind the podium grinning broadly, wearing a slim-cut blue suit with a military-style beret atop his bald head. After brief remarks from Ryland and other local figures, it was his turn to speak.

Kale stepped up to the podium, hugged Rick, and adjusted the microphone. While all the other speakers had some connection to the event, Kale ostensibly had little to do with the mall or veterans. But when he began talking, it quickly became clear this was his show. 

“Even though it’s cold, and the heavens above us are freezing, it still rings within our hearts,” Kale began, with a grandiosity that stood in sharp contrast to the brief, self-effacing speeches that preceded his. “O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain. For purple mountains majesties above our fruited plains.”

Everything about the speech seemed slightly off-kilter. His vocabulary was often archaic; he rambled from point to point in long, run-on sentences; and he sometimes emphasized phrases by modulating his voice into a deep growl. 

Something suddenly felt off about the entire event. “I was under the impression that it was for the veterans,” says Jennifer Griegle, an Oregon local who was there. “It turned out to be an hour of him talking.” By the time Kale was done, the crowd, originally about 50 people, had thinned out.

Toward the end of the event, organizers played a recorded rendition of “God Bless America,” and even during the song, Kale was the center of attention. Microphone still in hand, he sang along, reaching toward the sky and adding improvised riffs. The audience cautiously followed his lead, standing and singing. For a brief moment, it was as if this wild-eyed Hawaiian pastor was leading the town of Oregon in a revival service.

FIVE YEARS LATER, THE TENUOUS TRUCE between the town and the Perfect Church came to an abrupt end. In March 2022, a local Facebook page ignited a firestorm that threatened to tear the town apart. The man instigating the drama was Gary Shrimpster — a trucker and local Facebook-page moderator who has established himself as one of the Perfect Church’s greatest enemies. “I’m very involved in my church,” Shrimpster tells me. “But this is just wacko stuff.”

“I’m very involved in my church. But this is just wacko stuff.”

Gary Shrimpster, Oregon, Illinois, resident

A transplant to Oregon from nearby Machesney Park, he first learned about Kale’s church while organizing local churches in opposition to a new weed dispensary in 2019. He heard the rumor that Perfect Church might be a cult, so he asked about them in a local Facebook group. But his post was quickly removed, he says.

The alleged censorship prompted him to create a new group, “What’s Up Ogle County,” where he frequently posted about the church. Church leadership took notice, and arranged a conference call with him, where they tried to explain their beliefs. The meeting quickly went south. “Kale was threatening and talking down to me, and to be quite honest, talking down to me really ticks me off,” Shrimpster says. At some point, Shrimpster called Kale “Mr. Sinless,” and Kale told him that God was going to strike him dead. “I’m still here,” Shrimpster jokes. 

The call lit a fire under Shrimpster’s ego. He kept posting, and some former members joined him. The resulting controversy is referred to by some in Oregon as “the Facebook Debacle.” Over three months, there was a new development every few days. Soon, the whole town was following the saga. “That was my soap opera for weeks,” says Jennifer Grygiel. What’s Up Ogle County became the most active Facebook group in the area, with 22,800 members.

Allegations that had been whispers and rumors for decades were finally being aired in public. Jesse Morris, Anthony Rinaldo, and several other members added their stories of psychological and physical abuse. Shrimpster looked into the funding for the Conover Square wall project. Unverified rumors spread that the church was stockpiling weapons at a ranch on the edge of town. The outcry triggered a police investigation into the church, the results of which the Ogle County group eagerly awaited. 

In April 2022, the church issued its official response on Shrimpster’s Facebook page, an attempt to salvage some of their hard-won legitimacy. “We own our own property, pay our taxes, and make our mortgage payments,” the statement reads. “Many of our members have volunteered to help the city of Oregon. We have donated money to the referenda committee that ended with a favorable vote to assist the school district. We have contributed thousands of dollars to various local nonprofits, among them Village of Progress, Lifeline, and Hands On Oregon. As a Church, we have provided thousands of hours of labor for several important projects to enhance the city. The record speaks for itself.”

The church also published a collection of testimonials from current members, 22 in total, each about a page long. Many are written in a similarly formal style and rely on frequent rhetorical questions. “Would I change anything about the way I grew up? Only my mistakes, my sins,” states one younger member. Another: “Was it always easy? No. But I have never lived in bondage.” Members have written about experiencing moments of weakness — reading novels for fun instead of studying; drinking; or, as one writes, “chasing every whim of flesh” — before returning to the church. Other entries discuss feeling ostracized and persecuted by the Oregon community. 

The most common theme in these testimonials is pointing to personal success as evidence that the Perfect Church church had not been a cult. “God has blessed my career with senior level positions in various companies supporting some of the largest consumer goods companies in the world,” one reads. 

DESPITE KALE’S PROPHECIES, Morris hasn’t gone back to prison. More than 15 years later, he’s happily married with a good job.

As the generation of kids who grew up in the church got older, more and more slipped away. Today, those former members continue to grapple with their experiences there. In our interviews, many apologize for swearing, considered a major sin in the church. Some seem to make a point of dropping swears in our conversations. Several remember negative prophecies Kale made about them and take pride in having avoided them. While some have ended up in more traditional churches, others eschew religion altogether. Almost all have moved out of Oregon.

Isaac Ryland, Rick Ryland’s son, reached his breaking point when he says he was required by the church to put his college education on hold and move to Hawaii to work for a church-affiliated construction company. Putting in 60 to 80 hours a week for what amounted to about $5 an hour, he helped build a home for the church lawyer George Hampilos. (Hampilos says he was not involved in setting rates of compensation for workers on the project.) After several months of work, Isaac says, the church requested that he continue for longer than he expected, then called him selfish when he pushed back. Years later, he feels conflicted about speaking out against the church. “My parents are genuinely happy,” he says. “It’s like ‘ignorance is bliss.’ Do I really want to attack something that means so much to them? Then there’s the other side where people like Jesse, those guys were genuinely abused.”

In January 2024, I meet with Rick Ryland; his wife, Laurie; Kale’s daughter and church pastor Roselani Aluli-James; assistant pastor Jackie Jacobs; and church elder Bob James at a private room in a bakery downtown. Jackie and Roselani do most of the talking. They insist on recording our conversation while forbidding me from recording it myself, because they are concerned about artificial intelligence being used to alter their voices. When I decline those terms, they ask who sent me. At one point, I mention that Ryland might be able to help me understand the church history, because he was “the scribe,” a phrase I’d heard used by a former church member. They react sharply to that term, as if it were proof of an ulterior motive on my part, and Ryland tells me the meeting is over. 

I reach out to Kale afterward, who texts me, “Please know that I am quite concerned on how you approached the Church leadership in Oregon. They informed me soon after you left the village bakery. I’m willing to — at least — receive your call. I will honor that part … Please ACKNOWLEDGE.” He then sends me a cryptic image of what appears to be an oil painting of two plums. When I reach him by phone, he makes the same request for a one-sided recording, then declines to answer any questions unless I visit him in person in Illinois or Hawaii. When I send the church a detailed list of questions, they respond with the two-page statement they posted on their website during the Facebook debacle.

It reads, in part: “While some of these individuals themselves experienced public shame of false accusations and humiliation at school in their youth, they now look to use that same hate-filled rhetoric and unbridled gossip to attack not only our Church, but individuals, families, businesses, and children who comprise the Church of Jesus Christ Forever…. These and other ex-members are now advancing exaggerations and outright lies. As a church we have tried to help some of our ex-members; unfortunately, we had to part ways.”

ON WHAT’S UP OGLE COUNTY, MORE THAN two years after the height of the Facebook controversy, the near-constant barrage of church posts has let up — there’s now only one every couple of months. Shrimpster is focused on riling people up about other issues.

The Oregon Police Department investigative report released in late May 2022 ultimately didn’t amount to much. Most of the abuse alleged had happened more than a decade ago, beyond statutes of limitations. Some incidents occurred beyond the police department’s geographical jurisdiction. Other allegations, while horrifying, are not necessarily illegal. There is no law against creating an environment where children are made to believe that disobeying their pastor’s wishes will cause horrible prophecies to come true. The partially redacted report shows police speaking to several former members who recount their abuse allegations, but it does not appear that police ever interviewed Kale or any current members of the church. I have also spoken with several former Perfect Church members who shared additional stories of abuse and were not interviewed by the police. (A police spokesperson sent me the statement: “The Oregon Police Department at the time did a complete investigation into any and all allegations that were reported.” They did not say whether they had specifically investigated the rumor of stockpiled weapons.)

As I research the church during my visit, I see in a local paper that it has made another donation. In a photo, Kale smiles front and center behind an oversize check for $4,500. But there are fewer members of the church living in town these days. Inspired by a prophecy, many are splitting their time between Oregon and Kauai, Hawaii.

When we meet in downtown Oregon, Floski tells me it’s easier for people in small towns to reinvent themselves than it might appear. “People who don’t live in small towns think people in small towns have really long memories. And they do in the sense that ‘his great grandfather ran the garage that my uncle, seven times removed, took his car to.’ But they don’t hold long grudges,” she says. “People just move on.”

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