A secretive Christian commune in Baltimore, marked by allegations of abuse and strict authoritarian control.
The Lamb of God Community was a Catholic charismatic covenant community based in the greater Baltimore, Maryland area, active from the mid-1970s until its dissolution in the mid-1990s. Widely described by former members and outside observers as a cult or high-control religious group, it attracted significant scrutiny from the Archdiocese of Baltimore over allegations of authoritarian leadership, financial misconduct, and sexual abuse. The community is one of the more extensively documented examples of a covenant community — a form of intentional Christian living that emerged from the Catholic Charismatic Renewal of the late 1960s and 1970s — descending into what critics characterized as abuse and exploitation.
The community’s roots lie in the broader Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement, which swept the United States beginning in the late 1960s. Perceiving the American Catholic Church to be in a state of spiritual decline, Marylander Dave Nodar, his wife Cheryl, Father Joe O’Meara, and a few others envisioned a kind of New Jerusalem in Baltimore. The Lamb of God Community was not created entirely in isolation. The group was begun in the greater Baltimore area in the late 1970s and was initially formed under the institutional umbrella of the Sword of the Spirit, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based ecumenical “super-community” that oversaw a network of covenant groups across the United States and eventually internationally. Lamb of God had been formed under the Word of God/Sword of the Spirit for most of two decades. The Sword of the Spirit itself would later face its own serious controversies, including civil lawsuits over the sexual abuse of children by members of its Servants of the Word branch.
At its core, the Lamb of God Community was organized around the concept of a “covenant” — a formal commitment by members to live in accordance with the group’s rules and submit to the authority of its leadership. They settled on the Westgate and Rock Glen neighborhoods off Edmondson Avenue on the City/Catonsville line. By the late 1980s, approximately 250 families occupied the two-story homes in those neighborhoods or on their periphery. This geographic clustering was intentional, designed to reinforce communal bonds and make oversight of members’ daily lives easier. The community also possessed a 15-acre retreat estate in Timonium, Maryland, known simply as “The Farm,” which served as a gathering place for large community events, celebrations, and prayer meetings.
The Lamb of God Community was roughly two-thirds Catholics, with the rest being a mix of free church and mainline Protestants and Messianic Jews. This ecumenical character was somewhat unusual for a group so steeped in Catholic charismatic tradition, and it created notable internal contradictions. Yet if there was any rule Dave Nodar and the Coordinators held onto at any cost at General Community Gatherings and community courses, it was to never mention Catholicism, including Mary, the Sacraments, the Pope, or the saints. In practice, the community drew heavily on Protestant charismatic sources for its worship, including songs from John Wimber’s Vineyard Christian Fellowship and materials from televangelist Larry Lea.
Leadership within the community was organized around a small number of men called “coordinators,” who wielded considerable authority over members’ personal, financial, and spiritual lives. In Lamb of God, Dave Nodar was that one leader right from the start. His actions were unquestionable. His perception of what God was telling us to do was always right. While there were other “coordinators” in LOG such as Fr. Joseph O’Meara, Fred Lessans, and Phil Buck, Nodar was the top dog. Financial arrangements within the community reflected this concentration of power. Community contributions or “tithes” paid for his and Lessans’ houses. A former member and engineer named John Cignatta later documented how the group’s Articles of Incorporation and IRS filings were structured in a way that enabled a group of 4 to 5 men to wield complete, unchallengeable control over this particular covenant community and its million-dollar assets.
Women occupied a formally subordinate position within the community’s hierarchy. The group designated women leaders as “handmaids,” though male coordinators remained supreme. A policy notebook adopted from a parent community in Michigan stipulated that women — even higher-ranking “handmaids” — were to submit to their husbands and bear as many children as God willed. The Lamb of God’s doctrine became explicit: Christianity good; Islam, feminism, secular humanism, and Marxism bad; and the rules strict — complete submission of all members to the leadership, and of all wives to their husbands.
The community operated a private school serving children from kindergarten through eighth grade, located in Halethorpe, Maryland. Children spent much of their school days in prayer and worship, learning how to properly fear God and how to be perfect. The school sought to minimize contact with secular culture, part of a broader community ethic that discouraged engagement with the outside world. From the start, leaders encouraged Lamb of God’s members to eschew the modern world. Families were to limit television, secular news reading, even charity work. In Nodar’s view, offered to The Baltimore Sun in 1984, do-gooders meant well, but they “tended to fall into Marxism.” It was better to focus on one’s soul and the group than to become involved in “humanist” causes.
Weekly worship gatherings were a central feature of community life, featuring what members described as direct experiences of the Holy Spirit — speaking in tongues, prophetic utterances, and ecstatic prayer. Members were encouraged to believe they were participating in a uniquely chosen community witnessing a divine breakthrough of God’s kingdom on earth. This sense of divine election reinforced loyalty to the group and made questioning leadership feel tantamount to questioning God. Leaders would threaten that if people left, they wouldn’t have “spiritual covering.”
Concerns about the community’s cult-like character began surfacing formally as early as 1983. Between 1983 and 1987, a woman named Whitman wrote a series of letters to Archbishop William Borders conveying her concerns about the Lamb of God’s cult-like tendencies, including its “view of women as submissive and subordinate creatures,” and citing scandals in covenant communities in other states. He urged charity toward her fellow Catholics and claimed to have no authority over the group. Whitman’s complaints were met not with action but with what she described as intimidation: it was never long after mailing her concerned letters about the Lamb of God community that members would linger outside her gate to pray, one even sprinkling holy water in her yard.
The Archdiocese’s posture shifted only gradually, and critics later argued it never truly acted in the interests of vulnerable community members. In the early 1990s, rumors began to spread that some community money was missing, and Borders’ successor, Archbishop William Keeler, summoned Whitman downtown to talk. Only after their meeting did she realize he had picked her brain to see how much she knew, not because he wanted to help the people in the community. He seemed worried she would go to the media. Neither Borders nor Keeler honored her requests for confidentiality.
External church authorities were also troubled by what they found. In the Lamb of God Community in Baltimore, complaints of a “Stalinist” internal surveillance network interfering in personal relationships prompted Cardinal William Keeler’s interventions in 1993 and 1994. The criticism of Keeler and other bishops extended beyond Baltimore: a shared critique by Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore, Archbishop Peter Gerety of Newark, and Bishop Albert Ottenweller of Steubenville, Ohio about the covenant communities in their areas was the lack of rotating leadership practice. The absence of any mechanism for leadership turnover meant that Nodar and his inner circle faced no structural checks on their authority.
The community had formally separated from the Sword of the Spirit before the most serious complaints came to light. Of note, these complaints rose to private attention of the local Catholic Bishop two years after Lamb of God had separated itself from the Sword of the Spirit. Instead of reforming itself after severing its submission to the Sword of the Spirit, this Covenant Community appears to have continued on in an aberrant manner.
The most serious allegations to emerge from the Lamb of God Community involved sexual abuse by Father Joseph O’Meara, one of the group’s founding coordinators. Fr. Joe was removed from ministry after three women accused him of “inappropriate touching.” The allegations did not stop there. Fr. Joe has been identified as number 155 in the state attorney general’s report on child sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. He reportedly kissed children on the mouth and would try to move his hands up girls’ legs toward their genitals when a dinner guest at their homes. The inclusion of O’Meara in the attorney general’s report placed him within a documented pattern of clerical sexual abuse across the Archdiocese, one of the largest such investigations in Maryland’s history.
In 1995, at the end of one former member’s sixth-grade year, the community had just been investigated by the Catholic Archdiocese for “cult-like practices,” prompting a revealing exposé in Baltimore Magazine, and the Lamb of God’s foundation was beginning to crack. When the leadership got word that the wife of one of its coordinators was questioning its authority, they did what they could to nudge them out. The dissolution of the community followed in the mid-1990s, with many members leaving voluntarily and others being effectively pushed out as the group’s authority structure collapsed under the weight of accumulated scandal and ecclesiastical pressure.
The group ran into the mid-1990s when it was effectively dissolved by Cardinal Keeler. Following the community’s collapse, Nodar decided to start a new incarnation of Lamb of God called “ChristLife,” with him as the head once again, this time claiming the imprimatur of the Archdiocese of Baltimore. ChristLife operates as an evangelization ministry sponsoring a series of courses in parishes, and Nodar remained its sole leader for years after the original community’s end.
The Lamb of God School in Halethorpe continued to operate after the community’s dissolution, functioning as an interdenominational Christian K-8 institution no longer formally affiliated with the original group. Former members of the community have described wide-ranging psychological consequences from their time in the group. The experience at Lamb of God has been reported by some former members to have triggered severe psychological responses years or even decades after leaving, including OCD, suicidality, and difficulties trusting religious or communal authority of any kind. Writer Ben Appel, who grew up in the community, has described the group’s trajectory in published accounts: what began in the mid-1970s as a small group of born-again hippies who played music, prayed together, and proselytized to whoever would listen about Jesus’s unconditional love and mercy, descended into authoritarianism in the 1980s after its founder linked up with the broader charismatic renewal movement that had been sweeping the nation.
References
- Baltimore Magazine
- Break the Covenant
- Christianrenaissancemovement
- Cultnews101
- Quillette
- Scribd
- Substack
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