Odessa and the Professor is a story of church abuse through Scripture use. A leader of a prayer circle tells manipulative lies and attributes them falsely to prophetic gift. She cruelly deceives a disciple faithful to her, but God enables the deceived to recover through prayer and wise counsel. The essential message of the book is the hope it gives to others similarly deceived, to break the yoke of deception and to experience through exercise of Christian forgiveness genuine closure. In subtle ways, Satan blinds persons caught up in “small group abuse through scripture use.” They live in denial of their distorted reality.
In this book, the painful experiences of the naïve Odessa and the profound counseling of her perceptive Professor provide the agonizing realities and analytic reflections needed to open the eyes of the deceived. In the process, sociological, psychological and theological complexities are unraveled through semantically sharp dialogue that informs, instructs and inspires. The power of aberrant Christian leaders over even intelligent professional persons must not be underrated. Certainly, in the Bahamas as well as in the wider Caribbean and even in the United States and elsewhere around the world, the realities are the same in regard to leaders in controlling church groups or closely related discipleship groups. This book has relevance internationally, even though the contextual focus is the Bahamas. These gripping personal experiences have been slightly disguised to avoid causing even more pain to those who have been victims of the system. The effect is a greater good when these issues are seen as real and widespread. The Professor’s counsel is a major underpinning of this work, and his style as well as his substance is worthy of attention. He is suave, sure, persuasive. Churches are assessed, doctrines are debunked, history is provided, and principles are shared. In the end, readers will feel a strong sense of empathy with a desperate girl who diligently sought and found someone able to persuade her that she could escape from subtle Satanic influence. In the end, she clearly matured in spiritual understanding of herself, of her religion, and of her society. This book offers a liberating contemporary story by showing how an Androsian Seminole found her freedom from a tyrannical supposedly Christian small group leader in the Bahamas