The Kingdom of Pesch: KLAUS PESCH, BIONARC, The TEAM

KLAUS PESCH, BIONARC, The TEAM

The church still remains in the village

Observer, August 3, 2018, pages 32-34
By Yves Demuth

Free Church. The community Wildhaus has reclassified a place for a new building for the radical religious cooperative Bionarc. Dropouts report financial exploitation.

Behind the wooden shingle façades in the top of Toggenburg resentment and helplessness spread. Without looking carefully, the local council of a sect roll out the red carpet, it is said in the village.

No one in Wildhaus wants to publicly criticize the five local councils. You know each other. And you know here between Säntis and Churfirsten how difficult it is to find new investors or sell old properties. The bakery Alpiger, the Raiffeisenbank and the Landi branch closed last year and are empty. The Hotel Alpstein is available for 1.5 million francs. A villa with indoor pool for even less.

The old community center, which became redundant as a result of the merger with Alt St. Johann, quickly found buyers. A couple secured it years ago by lease with preemption. Later, the duo sold the house of the religious co-operative Bionarc - which presides over it.

Nobody cared about that for a long time. Only when the new owners presented their construction project, residents began to google. The members, they read, belong to a group that English media call sect.

The leader should be Klaus Pesch. The nice German who drives up and down in Wildhaus and is one of the builders who want to build a four-storey residential building on the site of the community center. In the middle of the village center, where the Doppelstoecker Postbus spits tourists out and the village youths hang out in the evening.

"Unconfirmed rumors". A few meters further on, on the village square, racing cyclists sit in the shade. A senior woman rushes to the Wednesday worship service in the Catholic Church. In the "Hirschen", someone calls for a cold beer. German pensioners are waiting for the car, which will bring them to the nearby birthplace Zwingli.

In the Hotel Sonne, where the radical religious members sometimes eat, one does not want to comment on "unconfirmed rumors about a sect". The Catholic pastor and the Reformed pastor never want to have heard of the Christian fundamentalists, even though the few meters away from their churches with a voluminous new building high.

Mayor Rolf Züllig knows the background of the builders for half a year. He did not do anything. The house was sold in 2013, he says. He had no adverse information about the buyers back then. The council had published the sale in the "Toggenburger Tagblatt", as prescribed by the municipal code. Nobody had taken the referendum.

He must treat the current building application like everyone else, says Züllig. However, the community is very much in favor of the religious construction consortium. She classified a municipal forecourt in a street, so that the new building can be realized despite objections, as Züllig confirmed. That does not mean that one supports any "sectarian activities". "A destructive sect" could be a problem for the tourism destination Wildhaus. "We do not want that. And if the political community can prevent it by legal means, then it does! "

It's dark in the old town hall. The new owners were rarely seen, residents say. They often come to mow the lawn or deal with objections to their construction project.

The property belongs to the cooperative Bionarc, based in Wildhaus. It is headed by Patrick Rupf, Klaus Pesch is a member. According to the statutes, it is an association for consultancy and training in the field of renewable energies, which also deals with real estate. The members conducted "charitable activities on a biblical basis". They are nine friends who work together on the basis of the Bible, says Cooperative President Patrick Rupf. "You can read everything transparently on our homepage Bionarc.ch."

Dropouts say, however, behind Bionarc stuck the sect The Team, whose leader Klaus Pesch believing Christians pull the money from his pocket. Cult expert Hugo Stamm knows reports of dropouts. He describes the small grouping as a "Christian fundamentalist group with pronounced sectarian aspects that acts in isolation and is not organized in a free association". Because this lacked control, the danger of radicalization was particularly great. It is a question of "a fundamentalist-Christian radical group, as they have often grown out of the free church in recent decades," says Georg Schmid of the information center Relinfo the Reformed Church. He also relies on statements of alumni. Such groups tried to gain new members around Freikirchen. And since there are many Protestant free churches in Toggenburg, Wildhaus is interesting.

Donated under pressure. Several alumni described to the observer that Klaus Pesch, as an authoritarian leader, manipulates group members with his allegedly infallible Bible interpretations. How families were isolated because they broke off contact with critical relatives. On Saturdays they usually had to do fronwork for the community. Many had donated large sums of money under pressure. Pesch has seduced some to borrow money to enable the community to buy and convert properties in "sacred places". Getting rid of the "team" is hardly possible without taking a mountain of debt.

The descriptions coincide with older entries published by dropouts in an internet blog - as a «warning against the spiritual teachings and business practices of Klaus Pesch and The Team». For sect expert Georg Schmid, the unquestionable authority of leadership is a "typical feature of fundamentalist Christian communities". These include the healing exclusiveness of one's own community or the fronwork and the cash flows in favor of the founder Klaus Pesch, who describe the former.

Dropouts accuse the "team" that it has built up a real estate empire for Klaus Pesch with the money of the members. The members are told that in anticipation of a new era, new rules require "sacred places" that "chosen ones" can go to.

On the island of Isle of Man, the sect with a real estate project has already failed once at baujuristischen hurdles. In Australia, the Pesch family apparently runs a larger, secluded property near Perth. In the German-Swiss border village of Öhningen, the cooperative Bionarc Deutschland owns a property in which it holds Bible lessons.

One of the most sacred places of the sect is located on a vine above Stein am Rhein, where, according to dropouts, the Holy Spirit is at home. There, the leader Klaus Pesch often stays there, and there lives also Bionarc Cooperative President Patrick Rupf. He converted his house into a stately home with the help of craftsmen and "friends". Rupf does not want to call his property sacred. This term was too strained by the church. But if he has important people like Klaus Pesch, it's his home, and he's a holy place.

Sect - these are the others. Klaus Pesch, who is currently in Australia, did not speak for the observer. Patrick Rupf denies all allegations against Pesch and The Team. A sect? These are the others, according to Rupf. The movement Adullam to Werner Arn from the lower Toggenburg about, that is an "extreme sect". He himself belongs only to a group of believing Christians. It's a loose circle of friends who seek the truth in the Bible, sometimes calling themselves a "team" and looking for beautiful places to make them a particularly beautiful home. Do not believe in an end of the world. They came to Toggenburg because they had family roots there.

Is Klaus Pesch the leader of the "team"? There is neither an organization nor an organizational structure nor a leader, says Rupf. "Klaus Pesch helped me to grow up. He enabled me to have a personal relationship with God. He taught me how to ask God. "

Patrick Rupf describes his spiritual mentor as a harmless man who shares his experience unselfishly with friends. "As a missionary in Australia, Pesch has reunited ripped Aboriginal families with God's direction and supernatural powers - without GPS and nothing. He only listened to God's voice, that's the only reason he succeeded. "Pesch is not a leader and a manipulator, says Patrick Rupf. There was the "team", no blind obedience, no control delusion, no healing exclusivity and no contact ban against other faithful. "Fronarbeit has never existed. Many friends have volunteered to help with projects such as remodeling my home in Stein am Rhein. "By no means, nobody says, he is indebted, Rupf says. "I only know the commandment from the Bible,

Arbitrary Bible interpretation. The 20 to 50 people who are still in the "team" would feel that they are doing everything voluntarily and living exactly according to the Bible, a former member tells us. "The abused our beliefs and drove us into debt." With a completely arbitrary interpretation of the Bible, Pesch controlled his surroundings and influenced personal decisions. Therefore, the exit is so infinitely difficult. The "team" is looking for free church contacts with Christians - or about their own business activities, for example, as a local advertising company, say dropouts. So you want to make relationships. "Without a friendly connection, the promise of salvation is too abstruse, as that you could find it convincing," explains a former. God's words are strong. Too often they would be abused,