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[MUSIC PLAYING] PASTOR RILEY SVIHEL: You feel like marching?

CONGREGANT: Hallelujah!

[CONGREGATION CHEERS AND APPLAUDS]

PASTOR RILEY SVIHEL: Hallelujah. Amen. Amen.

CONGREGANT: Praise him. Hallelujah!

PASTOR RILEY SVIHEL: I thought you'd maybe march right out and start the war now, but, uh--

KATE MOOS: It's the 10:30 service at Zion Christian Center in North Saint Paul. There are a couple of hundred people here for worship, a service which combines rousing marches and gentle hymns with ecstatic prayer and praise and speaking in tongues, which in this congregation, is believed to be the direct expression of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Christian Trinity.

CONGREGATION: [SINGING CHURCH HYMN]

Regulars are quick to admit the service may seem unusual to newcomers and may easily be misconstrued. Pastor Riley Svihel says the church has been in existence for 12 years. He says it preaches, among other things are literal interpretation of the Bible, the need for personal salvation through Jesus Christ, the preeminence of the family and male authority within it, and the literal existence of Satan. While Pastor Riley carefully notes that no one can predict when the second coming might occur, he says there are signs that it could be toward the end of this decade. Sherry Bergdorf is the founder of the local chapter of Fundamentalists Anonymous.

SHERRY BERGDORF: An enormous amount of fear, it was when I was young, of course, I used to worry whether I was in fact saved.

KATE MOOS: Bergdorf was not a member of the Zion Church. For over 40 years from early childhood on, she was involved in various fundamental Lutheran denominations. She's one of about a dozen people who attend weekly meetings of the group whose aims include developing a self-reliant and confident personality and an ability to tolerate ambiguity.

SHERRY BERGDORF: It's very hard to somehow realize that life isn't a matter of all evil and all good and that you don't have two choices. You pick one choice or the other. That's extremely hard. I've had a hard time with that.

KATE MOOS: Bergdorf and others in the group say their faith became a form of mind control which prevented them from thinking for themselves.

PASTOR DOUGLAS MCLAUGHLIN: I would say no, I don't think it is a form of mind manipulation because we're free at any moment to disagree, we're free at any moment to say no. I don't buy that.

KATE MOOS: Pastor Douglas McLaughlin of fourth Baptist Church in North Minneapolis. The church, over 100 years old, is a long way both geographically and theologically from Zion Christian Center.

PASTOR DOUGLAS MCLAUGHLIN: We believe that all of life is built on universal non-optional principles, that is, we take them to be God's principles revealed in scripture. That's what a fundamentalist believes and he believes he has good reason for that. OK, they're universal in the sense that we believe they apply to all men. They're not optional, not in the sense that you cannot disagree with them, but in the sense that if you do disagree with them, we believe there are certain predictable results that come from that.

KATE MOOS: It is the fear of those predictable consequences which members of Fundamentalists Anonymous say contributed to their difficulty leaving. Dick Hebner spent 15 years in a fundamentalist church in Wisconsin. He became involved as a teenager at a time of family troubles, got more and more involved, eventually, breaking off all outside activities and friendships, except when evangelizing.

DICK HEBNER: You get into the system through a subjective experience. Then you're told, now I'm a baby Christian. You're a baby Christian and we'll feed you the easy-to-swallow doctrines at first. And then after you've been in it for a while, then you get what they call the meat of the word, which is the harder-to-chew stuff.

KATE MOOS: Hebner says such hard-to-chew teachings may include doctrines on the eternal damnation of loved ones who are not saved or various teachings on the end time, the final battle between good and evil the Bible calls Armageddon. Fourth Baptist's Pastor McLaughlin.

PASTOR DOUGLAS MCLAUGHLIN: We don't believe in the end of the world in the technical sense. That is to say, we have a very optimistic view of history. We believe in the establishment, ultimately, of God's kingdom on this globe. We do believe in the disintegration of this globe and the reconstruction of it or a new globe in which there will be what we would call the eternal state.

KATE MOOS: Fundamentalists Anonymous was founded nationally by Dr. Richard Yao, formerly a Wall Street lawyer who grew up in a fundamentalist community. In his pamphlet titled "Fundamentalists Anonymous, There Is A Way Out," a statement for FA says the group believes in the right of anyone to embrace fundamental beliefs. But it also warns of what it calls the dangers of fundamentalist religious ideology. The FA process, as it's called, includes confessing to group members of one's past or current involvement with fundamentalism and sharing testimony on one's escape from it.

Parts of the organization's pitch may sound odd. The literature says a $12 basic membership in the group entitles one to what it calls a free subscription to the FA newsletter. A donation of $500 makes one, in the organization's parlance, an angel. For Sherry Bergdorf, FA is a place to begin to put the pieces back together and to find others who share her obstacles and discoveries.

SHERRY BERGDORF: It is tough, though really. [CHUCKLES] You know? It's just really, really tough because you kind of feel as though everything, everything is gone, just like the rug has been pulled out from under you and the floor is gone too, you know? And it's just-- you're just at a total void.

KATE MOOS: Sherry Bergdorf, founder of the Minneapolis Chapter of Fundamentalists Anonymous.

[CHURCH HYMN]

(SINGING) It is God who trains my hands for battle.

This is Kate Moos reporting.

(SINGING) It is God who trains my arms for battle and I can--