How Theophila reclaimed her life after Gloriavale
Theophila Pratt grew up in the cult, denied a childhood and a voice because of her gender. But since graduating from uni, she’s using those dark times to fuel her dream of helping others.
Woman's Daily/March 20, 2025
By Judy Bailey
Theophila Pratt is reclaiming her life – fighting back against the legacy of her brutally confining and abusive childhood in the West Coast fundamentalist cult of Gloriavale. The ability to appreciate the smallest of life’s freedoms and not to take them for granted is a victory.
The power to choose when she wakes each day, what she wears, what she eats and who she befriends means everything to Theo these days. Her primrose-yellow toenail polish is in full joyous view when we meet – a subtle statement from a young woman in charge of herself and a world away from the life she once knew.
All female members of Gloriavale are forced to dress in the same neck-to-toe blue full-skirted cotton frocks day in and day out. To show an elbow or an ankle, let alone a painted toenail, is considered by the all-powerful male “shepherds” an outrageous sexual provocation to the men of the sect.
Even their hair is to be covered by a head scarf and never, ever cut short. Theo’s is shoulder-length these days and a rich chestnut – another snub to the Gloriavale regime she escaped.
There’s a moment of hesitation as she greets me at her front door. She considers my offered hand. A wariness perhaps? She later explains that it comes from years of self-doubt and denial of any sense of self. “I never introduced myself to people. I never shook a hand.”
She and her partner Kevin have bought their first home at Ōrere Point, a tiny settlement on the west coast of the Firth of Thames, about an hour’s drive from central Auckland.
“It’s what we could afford,” she says, but it’s perfect for the pair. It’s peaceful, with a big garden, and just a short walk to the beach. There’s only one shop in the village, a small general store.
Theo delights in being with Kevin, who shares her love of nature.
“He was interested in me for myself, interested in what I was studying, what I thought about, not necessarily where I had come from, but where I was going,” she says.
The two have been together for six years. Kevin is not religious and neither is Theo any more.
“I believe in a higher power, but organised religion is not for me,” she explains. “I’ve tried other faiths since leaving Gloriavale, but they all made me feel like I was losing myself again.”
The girl who was forced to leave school at 15 to work in Gloriavale’s kitchens, who thought she knew nothing but yearned for a higher education, has managed to put herself through university and is now a fully qualified occupational therapist, working with children with disabilities. Theo’s graduation certificate from AUT is framed in pride of place on her living room wall. It’s an enormous achievement as she was always led to believe women were not worth educating.
“It was so overwhelming being at uni in the beginning,” she recalls. “I didn’t feel I fitted in. I was always watching to see what other people were doing.”
She has made friends with a neighbour up the road. Together they make jams and chutneys from their abundant gardens to sell at the local market. Domestic skills are something Theo has in spades – it was how she was raised. The women of Gloriavale are there to serve, cook, clean and produce children. To think there might be anything else in life was to appear “Godless”. Today she has baked a plum cake to share with me. It’s mouth-wateringly good. Luscious dark fruit dots its surface.
Theo is an extraordinarily brave and resilient young woman. She left Gloriavale eight years ago. Aged 18, she was cast out for defiantly refusing to pledge her life to the sect. Theo has just finished writing a book about her experiences, both in the cult and outside it. She’s written it, she says, not only to give voice to her own story, but also to inspire others who have lived in controlled environments so they can also be seen and heard. It wasn’t easy to write.
“I found the first two years after leaving hardest to write about,” she says. “It was such a blur. I was just surviving. It was traumatic doing the book. But it made me proud of myself in terms of keeping going, wanting to go to university and not just surviving, but being happy.”
Gloriavale was founded by Australian evangelist Neville Cooper. I first came across him in the early 1970s, when, as a young reporter on the Christchurch regional news programme The South Tonight, I did an investigation of the sect. At that stage, they were known as the Cooperites.
Cooper had already tried and failed twice to establish an evangelical community in Australia, but he seemed to have found success at Springbank, near Rangiora. They had a working farm and ran their own school there. But rumours had begun to surface around Cooper’s motives, the punishing hours that the women had to work, about how controlling he and his henchmen were, and how church members had to forsake all worldly possessions, cut themselves off from their families and sign over all their wealth to the church. Soon Cooper would insist all members change their names to ones with Biblical meanings to further distance themselves from their families on the outside.
Cooper was feeding his followers a diet of suspicion and hate of the outside world, along with the promise of a “second coming”. He could be extremely charming, but he was quick to anger if questioned. He wanted control. Our resulting news item, which raised more questions than he could answer, left him quite unimpressed.
In the early 1990s, the Cooperites moved to a 917-hectare property at Lake Haupiri, in the foothills of the Southern Alps. Cooper named the property Gloriavale after his late wife Gloria. Soon after the move, the police raided the property following up complaints of sexual abuse laid by several past members of the community. Cooper was tried and found guilty of 11 counts of sexual violation against five complainants. He was sentenced to six years in prison. He appealed and, at a second trial, was found guilty of three counts of sexual assault. Then, he was sentenced to five years but served just 11 months before being released on “good behaviour”. He returned immediately to the scene of his offending.
Theo says Gloriavale members knew little about the court case. They were told he was “a martyr for his faith”.
It came as a relief to Theo when Cooper died in 2018 of cancer aged 92.
“We never thought he would die, she admits. “We thought the Lord would come before that happened. But while there was relief, there was also anger because I knew he would never be held to account for his actions.”
So how did Theo Pratt come to be in Gloriavale?
Her parents, Erica Bickley and Eric Pratt, both joined the cult in the early days of Cooper’s reign. Erica was raised in a state house in Ōtara, Auckland. Hers wasn’t a religious family. A talented artist, she loved to draw. She left home at 16 and ended up working in an IHC facility in Māngere. She moved into accommodation run by the Assembly of God church and became friends with the pastor’s daughters. When he and his family went south to join a new religious community in the South Island, Erica went with them. She is still part of Gloriavale.
Theo’s father Eric was raised in a staunchly Baptist family in the Waikato. His father died when he was four years old. His mother would go on to remarry, but he didn’t get on with his stepfather, who was, according to Theo, an angry man. Eric dreamt of being a doctor, but from his teen years, he struggled with his mental health. He eventually moved to Christchurch and became a medic in the air force. Then, he came across the Cooperites preaching in Cathedral Square and three weeks later, he left his job to join the cult.
He would soon be forced into an arranged marriage by Cooper, despite saying publicly that he believed God didn’t want him married. And so Eric and Erica, both 24, became Peter and Humility Faithful. It would remain a loveless union, yet the two would produce nine children. Eric/Peter would continue to battle mentally.
Theo was born and named Honey Faithful. Changing her name from Honey Faithful to Theophila Pratt has been a big part of reclaiming her sense of self. She always hated the name Honey. There was a song from the 1950s called Kiss Me, Honey Honey, Kiss Me. She was mercilessly teased and older men would make suggestive comments. She officially changed to Theophila – a biblical name meaning “loved by God” – at 16 while at Gloriavale. The Pratt surname came after she left.
She was the third youngest of the nine kids. The youngest, Samuel, was stillborn. Hers was a small family by Gloriavale standards. Contraception is forbidden and families of up to 15 are common. Theo’s mother did her best to protect the children from her husband’s rages. A gentle woman, she delighted in her array of house plants.
“But everything she enjoyed doing, my father would destroy, so he would kill her plants,” recalls Theo. “She loved to cook, so he would stop her from cooking. She was a daycare teacher – that was her happy place.”
Interestingly, Theo’s first jobs on leaving Gloriavale were as a nanny and a teacher aide at a special needs school. Theo’s mother did her best within the confines.
“She encouraged us to have opinions and to think for ourselves, and to do what we wanted to do,” says Theo. “These conversations were generally snatched on Sundays, when we were supposed to be resting. We’d go for a walk and she’d talk to us.
“Dad never lived in the present. He always talked about the past, about his life before Gloriavale, and his love for his mother and his siblings. He never asked, ‘How was school today?’ or those sorts of things. The whole ‘going to Hell’ thing was what kept him in Gloriavale.”
Her father was eventually banished from the sect.
Theo had no time to herself in Gloriavale. She was up at 4am making butter before school, then helping in the kitchen and dining room. After school, there was washing and cleaning, and meal prep for the sect’s 600 residents. Often the women would have to spend the evenings bottling produce from the farm or making chutneys and jams until 11pm. Theo did, however, manage to make friendships, although best friends were frowned upon and she was deliberately separated from those she was closest to.
“I had a group of about eight to 10 friends,” she tells. “Most of them have left now. You never really knew who to trust or when a friendship might change because we were all just trying to survive.”
The women and girls were easy targets for sexual abuse. The men of Gloriavale had been led to believe women were there for their pleasure, to serve them, and to be subservient and submissive. Theo was sexually abused by an older family member when she was six or seven. When she later raised the issue with one of the leaders, she was made to believe she was the one who was to blame. She became used to being grabbed from behind and fondled by random men when waiting on tables. It has taken her years to begin to trust men again.
“I used to always apologise,” she says. “I could feel myself becoming subservient, shrinking into myself.”
Since 2018, 11 men from Gloriavale have been found guilty of sexual offending against children. The police are currently investigating more than 100 potential crimes ranging from physical assault to serious sexual offending.
Theo’s mother had planted the seed of rebellion in her young daughter.
“From the age of 14, I knew I’d leave some day,” she says. “But my mind was made up when I saw how some of my friends who had left were treated. I thought, ‘How can the leaders just flip from loving someone to, as soon as you walk out the gate, you’re evil?’”
Her escape came when she turned 18. When she refused to sign the commitment dedicating her life to Gloriavale, the leaders came en masse to confront her, surrounding her, angry and threatening. She would not be intimidated, so they threw her out. With nothing but an old suitcase and $200, her mother and a brother took her to the bus in Greymouth. They told her she would be “damned to Hell”.
She headed to Auckland, where she had managed to track down an old friend of her mother’s. She would stay with her for much of that first year of freedom while she came to grips with navigating a world that was completely alien.
“Making choices was so hard,” she recalls. “Even to have a conversation, I was second-guessing myself all the time. I had to watch everyone just to know what to do.”
The fact her much-loved oldest sister Precious had been sent to India to help start a new community there had been another red flag for Theo. Precious had been a treasured mentor, her go-to person. “I think she volunteered to go because she wanted to escape,” she says.
It has been no escape, though, as Theo discovered when she visited the remote Indian community as part of the TVNZ documentary about Gloriavale, Escaping Utopia.
“Precious was a shell of the person she was.” Pregnant with her sixth child, exhausted and vacant, she says Precious has also suffered sexual abuse from men in the community. Theo is determined to rescue her sister and her children, along with other families there. “Precious has no passport – it’s being ‘kept safe’ by the community leader. Her children have no birth certificates, making it virtually impossible to escape.”
Theo has called on help from high-profile human rights lawyer Deborah Manning, who in turn has National Border Security and the police taking the matter “very seriously”.
Theo has three brothers still at Gloriavale with her mum. “Three years ago, my sister tried to commit suicide there. The police were called, and they removed her and my mother. Since then, Mum has chosen to return, but she has a cellphone so we can communicate.”
She tells me life has changed markedly at Gloriavale since the much-publicised Employment Court ruling that women there should be paid for their work. Now women are no longer allowed to work. Instead, they “volunteer” their services for domestic chores. The current leader, or “Overseeing Shepherd”, Howard Temple, is facing a raft of sex charges, offending which took place over 25 years. His alleged victims were as young as nine and as old as 20. Meanwhile, he is not permitted on Gloriavale property, but according to Theo, still runs the place from close by with his acolytes doing his bidding.
Gloriavale itself has fallen into disrepair. There is mould on the walls and ceilings, and the paint is peeling. People have no sense of community and have instead divided into small groups within the complex. It appears Cooper’s dream is at last disintegrating.
Theo will soon be taking up a new position with Te Whatu Ora, helping 12-to 24-year-olds with mental health conditions, children who suffer from anxiety, many of whom are disengaged from school.
“I want kids to feel they fit in,” she asserts. “I want them to feel included, that their voice matters. Gloriavale has made me stronger in who I am. It was part of me but not all of me.”
She is also keen to help others who have suffered, as she has, to access services, like the ACC Sensitive Claim provisions for women who’ve been sexually abused, which give access to counselling and other healing therapies.
“I want to tell them life will get better,” says Theo. “Education is your friend. The world is your oyster. Don’t box yourself in. Take your time to recover – don’t rush it. The trauma will always be there, but that’s not you. You’re valuable in who you are. You have something to offer.”
