Ex-Wife Recounts Fall Of Scandal-Ridden Church Book Called Way To Prevent Other Pastors From Making The Same Mistakes That Toppled The Community Chapel

It isn’t just money that drove Barbara Barnett to write her account of the rise and fall of the Community Chapel, established by her ex-husband.

It’s also a warning to “God’s people” and to other charismatic pastors “so they won’t make the same mistakes we made,” she says.

It has been eight years since the church Donald Barnett founded in Burien collapsed in a sex scandal.

In 20 years, the former Boeing Co. worker and self-ordained Pentecostal preacher had built a 44-acre campus and 22 satellite churches extending into Canada with 4,500 followers.

In her book, “The Truth Shall Set You Free: Confessions of a Pastor’s Wife,” Barbara Barnett writes that they lived in “a nice home” and took regular vacations to Hawaii but avoided the extravagance of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

Then came the growth of “spiritual connections” within the church, typically between people who were not married to each other but who would dance furiously during services and offer each other help with worldly problems.

The result, she wrote, was the arrival of “demons of jealousy and self-pity … (to) take advantage of any old wounds and hurts that were left in marriages.”

Three young women sued the pastor in 1987, accusing him of using the “spiritual connection” relationship to coerce them into sexual conduct.

She wrote at length about her own connection with a younger man who she said first came to her in the guise of Jesus and with whom she never had a sexual relationship and remains friends.

After the pastor was ousted, a court-appointed arbitrator devised a settlement between him and accusers. He then founded the Church of Agape in Renton and now holds forth to about 350 members in a rented hall.

The Community Chapel and Bible College were sold to the state for $16 million and, in 1993, became the state’s Criminal Justice Training Center.

Barbara Barnett, 65, remains in Burien. Four years ago she designed her pink and blue house, paying for it from odd jobs and maintenance payments she receives from her ex-husband.

Today, as a member of a church similar to the Community Chapel, she denied that her former husband was a charlatan.

He was merely in the grip of the devil and she was weak, defending him because of her own “wrong-thinking concepts,” she said.

“I thought it was my duty as a Christian wife,” she said.

“We were really rich in the word of God because of Donald’s unusual gift given by God.

“He’s an excellent theologian.”

Donald Barnett won’t comment on his past, including the court documents accusing him of ministerial misconduct.

“I am going on and keeping a good heart and spirit in spite of all,” he said.

“I am hoping some day that Barbara will come back to me. I dearly love her and want her back again.”

Not likely, she said.

“I wouldn’t change anything that happened to me,” she said.

“I wouldn’t choose to go through it again, but if God told me, ‘This is the only way you can know me as you know me now,’ I would do it all again.”