2 Men, 1 Haircut

The man who wed Kanye & Kim sits down with the disgraced former leader of Arise church.

Hi,

“What I love about New Zealanders is that sometimes you use these expressions that as Americans we have no idea what those things mean!"

I am watching a 30-something year old American ramble on about how different New Zealanders are to Americans. It’s his podcast, and this man is doing a reverse Flightless Bird.

“I love all your down under expressions! Once Were Warriors, brother!” he giggles, referencing the iconic New Zealand film about poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence and generational trauma.

“Heeheehee” offers his guest, a New Zealander with a very similar haircut… but in ginger.

“I imagine that many who are watching know who you are and what you’ve done,” says the brown haired man to the ginger haired man.

“For 20 years, you planted a church from nothing — that really became a hallmark church of the nation of New Zealand...”

The man with the podcast is Rich Wilkerson Jr., pastor of “Vous” Church in Miami, Florida. He also presided over the marriage of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian in 2014.

The guy he’s interviewing is John Cameron, the disgraced founder of Arise church. I spent a year in 2022 documenting abuse and chaos within Arise church, starting with this piece on April 13.

That led to an external report being commissioned, which the church then attempted to block, before Webworm leaked it. We figured it was fair that the 545 people who came forward got to say their bit.

In May that year, John Cameron and his brother Brent resigned. Arise Church — always incredibly classy — left the person it hired to investigate them with over $20,000 in legal bills.

Ever since, I periodically check in on what John’s up to, a sort of disgraced-pastor-whack-a-mole. He tried to restart his career in New Zealand (Webworm was in attendance) but ended up dipping away to Australia.

And this week, he was on Rich Wilkerson Jr.’s podcast. At nearly two hours long, it was a daunting listen — but I soldiered on, and at 53 minutes in, Rich asks John about what had happened at Arise.

It was a very long question — so I’ve hacked it back a bit:

“In 2022, the whole thing shifted for you. You are all in the media, your church is having all sorts of things being said about it, there’s articles happening, there’s all sorts of claims about who you are as a leader, and stuff start to fall apart, that you have to take a leave of absence and ultimately you have to leave Arise. You’re so gracious and kind and not a victim, but what can we talk about in terms of maybe what you learned from that experience? What happened in all of that? How does one reconcile with all of what took place, maybe just from your vantage point? What happened in a nutshell?”

What follows is exactly what you’d expect: An incredible amount of ick.

Two men incapable of any sort of honest self-reflection.

John mostly talks about how hard it all was on him.

“Essentially for [my wife] Jillian and I, we ended up exited from what was our life story. And so then we’re suddenly in this place where, you know, we have no jobs, we have no income, we’re going to move to a new city….”

Rich Wilkerson Jr. does what you expect, and makes sure victims are painted as merely people with “their own perception”.

“I think the media begins to criticize. They find different people have different experiences. And everyone gets to have their own experience, their own perception. But there was no moral failure with John Cameron.”

John reveals that on the plane to Australia, he considered using his sales skills in another area.

“Honestly, sitting on the plane, I was like, man, I might just do real estate or something.”

He ended up sticking with the church thing — apparently now acting as a kind of crisis counselor to other churches doing shitty things to people.

“Suddenly pastors started reaching out and saying, you know, they’ve got a few hundred people in the church, and they’ve got a situation that feels like the end of the world for them. And then I just sat down, just out of the kindness of my heart, in a cafe with a pen and paper and book and just went “Okay, let’s do this.” And suddenly the churches started growing…”

The main thing that stood out to me is that John Cameron has developed a system to ignore basically any criticism that ever comes his way.

“Like, if I’ve learned anything in the last two years, it would take so much to ever get me, ever again in my life, to give one moment to a negative emotion. If I step off the pulpit and I doubt my performance, that thought is gone in a moment. If I walk into a room and I feel rejected, that thought is gone in a moment. I don’t give any way to any thought.”

“I don’t give any way to any thought.”

Genius.

I stopped listening, and browsed through the YouTube comments. One caught my eye.

I informed Ingrid that I was not possessed by Beelzebub; that it was something much more boring: journalism.

But of course in this particular breed of Christianity, it’s all a spiritual war. Any accusation must be an attack from Satan. Any trial a test of the will to endure. And if you go down or suffer in any way — well, that’s martyrdom.

It’s to be celebrated.

David.

PS: See you in the comments, or if you have a tip-off I am always reachable in confidence at davidfarrier@protonmail.com