Before last year, Remnant Fellowship Church in Brentwood, Tenn., was best known as the church founded by Gwen Shamblin — who also created the controversial Weigh Down Workshop, a program adopted across hundreds of American churches that helped Christians lose weight partly by reading the Bible instead of eating when they felt hungry. Then two things happened.
First, Shamblin, known after her 2018 marriage as Gwen Shamblin Lara, was killed in a plane crash in May 2021 alongside her husband, Joe Lara (who was piloting the plane), as well as her son-in-law and two other couples who were powerful within the church. Months later, a three-part documentary detailing a host of disturbing allegations against Shamblin Lara and her church premiered on HBO Max.
Directed by Marina Zenovich and produced in part by Chrissy Teigen, “The Way Down” revealed a number of strange goings-on within the church, beyond just the pressuring of members to shed pounds. Some of it is run-of-the-mill compared with other exposés of Evangelical churches: exploitation of labor, self-enrichment of the leadership, hypocrisy of all kinds. Other allegations were more bizarre: retaliation in the form of legal action against those who left the church, efforts to minimize members’ contact with the outside world; and even the church-sanctioned abuse of a young boy that led to his eventual murder at the hands of his parents. (On its website, Remnant Fellowship “categorically denies the absurd, defamatory statements and accusations made in this documentary,” calling it “yet another Hollywood attack on religion.” A page devoted to the documentary and its allegations rebuts a number of the specific claims at length.)
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The second season of “The Way Down,” which began streaming Thursday, consists of two episodes. One explores the crash and other events that occurred deep into the first season’s production schedule. The other gives several new whistleblowers who have come forward in the aftermath of the Laras’ deaths an opportunity to finally speak openly. Here are four takeaways from the second season.
1. Some of the congregation wondered whether the crash was God’s punishment
In the first episode of the season, titled “Revelations,” an aviation expert explains that the plane carrying the Laras and five others on May 29, 2021, nosedived into Percy Priest Lake near Nashville without any sign of an explosion or engine failure. The expert, Robert Fowler, explains that the accident may have happened because Joe Lara, a licensed recreational pilot, “didn’t have a lot of hours in the specific airplane he was flying, because he was just recently certified to fly that plane.”
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Many members of Remnant connected the events to a lesson the pastor had taught her congregation. As a former close friend of hers explains, Shamblin Lara said every stroke of misfortune was a punishment from God: “One time when a woman was diagnosed with cancer, Gwen brought her up onstage. And while she’s praying over her, she’s speaking about how there must be something in her life that God needs to show her — that that was why she had cancer,” she says.
“When bad things happen, it’s God’s judgment,” adds a former associate of Shamblin Lara. “So if He takes seven of your leaders out at the same time, what other message could have been sent?”
2. After Gwen Shamblin Lara’s death, more people came forward to tell their stories of mistreatment
After the release of the first season of “The Way Down,” the documentary explains, the director and production team received an avalanche of emails and messages from former Remnant members who, now unafraid of litigious retaliation, were ready to tell their stories publicly.
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As told in the new season’s second episode, titled “The Way Forward,” many of those stories echo the disturbing accounts detailed earlier. One woman describes being put on a “10 bites a day” diet and sometimes only being allowed to consume broth, which had long-term ramifications for her intestinal health. She later attests that she cut and colored Shamblin Lara’s famously towering hair for years and was never paid for it, on the grounds that it was service to the church.
One man introduces a new kind of alleged transgression of the church: discrimination on the basis of sexuality. Steve Darling, shown in several smiling candid photos alongside Shamblin Lara and other church leaders, recounts the time he finally worked up the courage to inform church leadership that he was gay. Shamblin Lara, he says, promptly left the room and never spoke to him again; by the following week, he was being shunned by other church members.
In an email to The Washington Post, the church denied these allegations, saying that Shamblin Lara “would never have limited or withheld food from anyone,” “always compensated anyone who has ever done a service for her” and “showed genuine kindness to all — no matter their race, religion or background,” and that the church “would never shun or reject anyone.”
3. The future of Remnant Fellowship Church remains unclear
Many inside the church predict on-screen that Shamblin Lara’s daughter and protegee, Elizabeth Shamblin Hannah, will eventually take over as its leader. Shamblin Hannah, a somewhat mysterious figure, took time off from ministry after her mother and husband died. But the documentary features audio of Shamblin Hannah reassuring the congregation virtually during the pandemic that she was “doing very well” and was “very strong.”
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Still, for months after the plane crash in 2021, observers noted that no one, not even Shamblin Hannah, had stepped into her mother’s role as leader of the church. At services, congregants shared testimonies and past sermons were replayed while Shamblin Hannah called in from the seclusion of her mother’s house. Right now, she is listed as one of 38 leadership figures on the church’s website. In an email to The Post, the church stated: “Even though she has taken a break this year after so much loss, she plans to return shortly after things settle down.”
4. Sometimes, documentaries run out of story
Although the second season of “The Way Down” had intriguing possibilities at the start — a bizarre accident to investigate, not to mention far better access to the well-guarded institution this time around — it turns out that little is understood, even now, about what happened to the Laras’ jet, and that most of the substantive allegations against the church have already been thoroughly covered in the first three episodes.
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That leaves the second season grasping for more and often coming up empty-handed, rehashing the major themes and waggling suggestive eyebrows at the possibility of further scandals that the documentary can’t entirely prove. So although the first season gave the impression that the documentary ended before the story did, the second gives the opposite one: that the whole story was out there long before the documentary finished telling it.
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