Known for her big blonde hair and aversion to cellulite, the founder of the Remnant Fellowship Church in Brentwood died Saturday when the Cessna owned by her production company went down in Percy Priest Lake.
Gwen Shamblin Lara, her husband, Joe, and five other church leaders are presumed dead. Investigators had changed from a rescue mission to a recovery mission Sunday morning.
The Remnant Fellowship, founded in 1999, reportedly has more than 1,500 members in 150 congregations around the world. Gwen Lara had said being overweight was a sign of greed and gluttony. She said children were to obey parents, wives were to obey husbands and members were to obey church leaders.
Lara had been a lightning rod for news coverage over the years after she founded the church based on what she called “faith-based” weight loss. The Remnant Fellowship website lists food ahead of drugs, depression, self focus, money, anger, selfishness, envy and jealousy as the idols that need to be “laid down.”
Lara called her movement the “Weigh Down Workshop” and packed her church full of radiant and thin people, according to a Tennessean profile from 2011. She wrote a book called “The Weigh Down Diet,” which sold more than a million copies. Thousands of churches around the U.S. and the world started using her book and videos as guides.
She was interviewed by Larry King and featured in an article by New Yorker magazine.
She made insensitive comments about thin Jews in concentration camps and has claimed genetics don’t play a role in weight loss.
In the Tennessean article, she described her church like this: ““It’s just your old-fashioned religion. It looks like a bunch of Ward and June Cleavers over there, with Leave it to Beavers.”
In 2003, she supported Remnant congregants Joseph and Sonya Smith, who were convicted of murdering their 8-year-old son Josef. The Smiths admitted beating Josef with a glue stick. The Remnant teachings support corporal punishment for children.
Members of the Remnant Fellowship church posted bond for the Smiths before the trial. The Smiths each received life sentences.
Gwen and Joe were married in 2018 and shared a love of flying. Joe Lara, 58, briefly played Tarzan in the TV series “Tarzan: The Epic Adventures” in the 1990s. The Laras took off Saturday morning from Smyrna and the plane went down moments later.
Elizabeth Shamblin Hannah, who was not on the flight, sent out a text to Remnant families Saturday.
The plane, she wrote “had to go down for a controlled, quick landing … GOD IS IN CONTROL, and we will not stop moving forward with WHAT GOD WANTS with this church.”
Hannah’s husband, Brandon, was one of the victims.
Jonathan and Jessica Walters were also victims. The couple made a video that appears on the Remnant Fellowship website. Jessica said she went to high school with Elizabeth Shamblin and met Jonathan in college.
The Walters said they spent more than half their lives as members of the church. They were married in 2002 and had three children.
“One thing you can’t take away from someone is how their lives have changed,” Jonathan Walters said.
Jennifer and David Martin, the final two victims, joined the Remnant Fellowship at its inception in 1999. They had five children.
The Martins, on the Remnant Fellowship website, praised Gwen for changing them from passive Christians to active Christians.
“Each year of our marriage gets BETTER,” David Martin wrote. “Our children have a relationship with God and they WANT to be near us as parents. Our finances have been restored. We have learned to STOP sinning, and the amazing and cool result of doing that… is that this Remnant Fellowship Church is FULL of people who can say the same thing!”
Reach Keith Sharon at 615-406-1594 or ksharon@tennessean.com or on Twitter @KeithSharonTN.
Source Article from https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2021/05/30/gwen-shamblin-lara-remnant-fellowship-church-tennessee-plane-crash/5272006001/
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