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Thread: Christian diet guru Gwen Shamblin Lara other leaders of controversial church dead after plane crash

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    Administrator fuego's Avatar
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    Christian diet guru Gwen Shamblin Lara other leaders of controversial church dead after plane crash

    A dietician who became the founder of the Remnant Fellowship Church in Brentwood died Saturday when the Cessna owned by her production company went down in Percy Priest Lake.

    Gwen Shamblin Lara, her husband, Joe, and five other church leaders are presumed dead. Investigators had changed from a rescue mission to a recovery mission Sunday morning.

    According to the Federal Aviation Administration website, no one on that flight was qualified to fly the plane. Joe Lara, 58, had a pilot's license but had not updated his medical certification since 2017. The medical certification is required every two years.

    Brandon Hannah, another church leader with a pilot license, was on the flight, but he didn't have a certification for the Cessna 500 series, according to the FAA database.

    The Laras took off Saturday morning from Smyrna and the plane went down moments later.

    A recording of the communication between the control tower and the pilot, captured on LiveATC.com, revealed an alarm going off in the cockpit of the plane seconds before it crashed, suggesting a mechanical failure in the aircraft, which was built in 1982.

    Debris from the shattered plane scattered across about a half mile of the lake, according to Rutherford County Fire Captain and Incident Commander John Ingle. Dive teams from local emergency agencies found human remains among the wreckage Sunday as the recovery effort continued.

    More:Latest on fatal plane crash at Percy Priest Lake: Human remains found at crash site Sunday

    The Remnant Fellowship, founded in 1999, reportedly has more than 1,500 members in 150 congregations around the world. Gwen Lara had said being overweight was a sign of greed and gluttony. She said children were to obey parents, wives were to obey husbands and members were to obey church leaders.

    Lara had been a lightning rod for critical news coverage over the years after she founded the church based on what she called "faith-based" weight loss. The Remnant Fellowship website lists food ahead of drugs, depression, self focus, money, anger, selfishness, envy and jealousy as the idols that need to be "laid down."

    Lara called her movement the "Weigh Down Workshop" and packed her church full of radiant and thin people, according to a Tennessean profile from 2011. She wrote a book called "The Weigh Down Diet," which sold more than a million copies. Thousands of churches around the U.S. and the world started using her book and videos as guides.

    She was interviewed by Larry King and featured in an article by New Yorker magazine.

    She made insensitive comments about thin Jews in concentration camps and has claimed genetics don't play a role in weight loss.

    In the Tennessean article, she described her church like this: "It's just your old-fashioned religion. It looks like a bunch of Ward and June Cleavers over there, with Leave it to Beavers."

    In 2003, she supported Remnant congregants Joseph and Sonya Smith, who were convicted of murdering their 8-year-old son Josef. The Smiths admitted beating Josef with a glue stick. The Remnant teachings support corporal punishment for children.

    Members of the Remnant Fellowship church posted bond for the Smiths before the trial. The Smiths each received life sentences.

    Gwen and Joe were married in 2018 and shared a love of flying. Joe Lara, 58, briefly played Tarzan in the TV series "Tarzan: The Epic Adventures" in the 1990s.

    Elizabeth Shamblin Hannah, who was not on the flight, sent out a text to Remnant families Saturday.

    The plane, she wrote "had to go down for a controlled, quick landing ... GOD IS IN CONTROL, and we will not stop moving forward with WHAT GOD WANTS with this church."

    Hannah's husband, Brandon, was one of the victims.

    Jonathan and Jessica Walters were also victims. The couple made a video that appears on the Remnant Fellowship website. Jessica said she went to high school with Elizabeth Shamblin and met Jonathan in college.

    The Walters said they spent more than half their lives as members of the church. They were married in 2002 and had three children.

    "One thing you can't take away from someone is how their lives have changed," Jonathan Walters said.

    Jennifer and David Martin, the final two victims, joined the Remnant Fellowship at its inception in 1999. They had five children.

    The Martins, on the Remnant Fellowship website, praised Gwen for changing them from passive Christians to active Christians.

    "Each year of our marriage gets BETTER," David Martin wrote. "Our children have a relationship with God and they WANT to be near us as parents. Our finances have been restored. We have learned to STOP sinning, and the amazing and cool result of doing that... is that this Remnant Fellowship Church is FULL of people who can say the same thing!"

    Gwen Shamblin Lara, Remnant Fellowship group in fatal plane crash

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    According to the Federal Aviation Administration website, no one on that flight was qualified to fly the plane. Joe Lara, 58, had a pilot's license but had not updated his medical certification since 2017. The medical certification is required every two years.

    Brandon Hannah, another church leader with a pilot license, was on the flight, but he didn't have a certification for the Cessna 500 series, according to the FAA database.
    So this is interesting, but could be misleading. Your pilot license never expires, but you have to renew your medical every 6 months, year, or 2 years depending on age or what class of medical you are going for, 1st, 2nd, or 3rd class medical. The fact the husband's medical had expired doesn't mean he wasn't physically capable of flying the plane, but he wasn't legal to do so. It doesn't say if he was rated for the jet though, so we don't know.

    The other man had a pilot's license, but apparently didn't have what is called a 'type rating' to fly the jet, which mean you had specific thorough instruction on how to fly that plane and get a specific rating to fly it.

    So I'm wondering if it was flown regularly and this time it happened to crash, or if this was the first time it was flown in a long time. You would think they used it frequently, but we don't know who regularly piloted it. It says there was an alarm going off on the recording between the plane and tower (these planes aren't required to have 'black boxes' like the airlines), and the first thing I would think the 'alarm' was would be the stall warning horn. So maybe they stalled it into the lake by getting to slow.

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    Senior Member Cardinal TT's Avatar
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    Terrible accident

    From reading just the above I don't think this was a spiritually healthy church

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    Quote Originally Posted by fuego View Post
    So this is interesting, but could be misleading. Your pilot license never expires, but you have to renew your medical every 6 months, year, or 2 years depending on age or what class of medical you are going for, 1st, 2nd, or 3rd class medical. The fact the husband's medical had expired doesn't mean he wasn't physically capable of flying the plane, but he wasn't legal to do so. It doesn't say if he was rated for the jet though, so we don't know.

    The other man had a pilot's license, but apparently didn't have what is called a 'type rating' to fly the jet, which mean you had specific thorough instruction on how to fly that plane and get a specific rating to fly it.

    So I'm wondering if it was flown regularly and this time it happened to crash, or if this was the first time it was flown in a long time. You would think they used it frequently, but we don't know who regularly piloted it. It says there was an alarm going off on the recording between the plane and tower (these planes aren't required to have 'black boxes' like the airlines), and the first thing I would think the 'alarm' was would be the stall warning horn. So maybe they stalled it into the lake by getting to slow.
    That part where she wrote "a controlled, quick landing" didn't sound good at all.

  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Cardinal TT View Post
    Terrible accident

    From reading just the above I don't think this was a spiritually healthy church
    Not in the least. If your vision is "Jesus and..." you are headed for trouble.

    1Tim 4:8 comes to mind:

    "For bodily exercise profits a little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come."

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    Quote Originally Posted by FireBrand View Post
    That part where she wrote "a controlled, quick landing" didn't sound good at all.
    Well if it was 'controlled' it seems at least some would have survived. You can land that thing on water like Sully did in the Hudson River. 'Alarm' on the audio sounds like it was probably the stall warning horn and that thing stalled and hit the water nose down. Now that will kill you.

    But how does she even know if it was controlled or whatever if they're all dead?

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by fuego View Post
    Well if it was 'controlled' it seems at least some would have survived. You can land that thing on water like Sully did in the Hudson River. 'Alarm' on the audio sounds like it was probably the stall warning horn and that thing stalled and hit the water nose down. Now that will kill you.

    But how does she even know if it was controlled or whatever if they're all dead?
    Most likely she was scribbling out a quick letter as some sort of last word. I don't know. Maybe she was writing what she just read in a manual like Sully's co-pilot.

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    Administrator fuego's Avatar
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    From what I've read now it does appear her husband was type rated for that jet. And that he was also a helicopter pilot. He just had an expired medical which doesn't affect his ability to fly the plane, just made the flight illegal. Of course there may be a reason he had let his medical be expired for 4 years that could have contributed to the crash because he thought he might not pass his medical exam.

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  14. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Neo View Post
    That was chilling to listen to.

    Thx for posting.

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