The Oracle’s Daughter: Harrison Hill on the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps (Part 1)
A Little Bit Culty
Sarah Edmondson & Anthony “Nippy” Ames
4.6 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2026
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode is sponsored by Betterhelp.
In this episode, Harrison Hill joins us to discuss his book The Oracle’s Daughter and the rise and fall of the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps (ACMTC), a group that began as Free Love Ministries and spiraled into an intensely controlling Christian cult. He explains how founders Jim and Deborah Green evolved from 1960s hippies into charismatic leaders, built a world of early-morning prayer, deliverance/exorcisms, relentless meetings, and total obedience, and drew people in with a mix of housing, food, work, and spiritual certainty.
Harrison also traces the stories of the women at the center of the book: Deborah Green, her daughter Sarah, and Maura Schmierer, whose slow movement into the group shows how cult involvement often happens in small, incremental steps rather than one dramatic leap. He describes the group’s use of “God’s army” rhetoric, demon-based explanations for ordinary feelings like fatigue, the deliberate cutting off of “blood ties,” and the way family bonds were treated as a threat to the movement’s authority. You’ll definitely wanna stay tuned for Part 2 of our convo.
Be sure to pick up his book, The Oracle’s Daughter, and follow him on Instagram @1harrisonhill.
Trigger warning: This episode contains frank discussion of coercive control, emotional and spiritual abuse, family separation, exorcism/deliverance practices, and references to child endangerment.
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Executive Producers: Sarah Edmondson & Anthony Ames
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Transcript
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