This story originally published online at The Assembly.
There are dozens of Christian campus ministries at North Carolina State University, but few seem as hungry to save students’ souls as the group of young, ardent evangelists who make up Restored Church Raleigh.
Since August, members of the non-denominational church have embarked on a campus recruiting blitz, approaching students in high-traffic areas with an innocuous question: Do you want to join a Bible study?
Restored Church Raleigh might seem at first like other Christian churches, but it’s not. The church is an offshoot of a religious movement known for using aggressive tactics to proselytize on college campuses, particularly in the 1990s. By 2000, at least 39 colleges and universities reportedly banned the ministry for soliciting or harassing students, including Meredith College in Raleigh and Queens University in Charlotte.
Some former members at N.C. State said Restored Church Raleigh targets vulnerable students, especially those in their first year. Its leaders relentlessly pressured them to be baptized and tried to isolate them from friends and family, they said. It started to feel “cult-like,” one said.
Two students filed a police report in September, and a parent also complained to police, according to documents obtained by The Assembly through a public records request.
A spokesman for N.C. State said the university is aware of the church, but offered no further comment.
When the students participated with the ministry last August and September, it was part of the International Christian Church. In October, the ministry splintered into Restored Church Raleigh, with many of the same people leading the efforts at N.C. State.
A representative of Restored Church Raleigh declined to comment for this article.
“They prey on people who don’t really know the Bible and don’t really know the differences of what’s expected in the church and what’s not expected,” Brayden Wilkins of Pembroke, an N.C. State first-year student and former attendee, told The Assembly. “It is dangerous mentally [and] financially for people to get sucked up in this.”
Total Commitment
Restored Church Raleigh, which doesn’t have its own building, holds its lively Sunday services at N.C. State, often in the student union. Members cheer when Ashton Hughes, the church’s lead evangelist, prepares to start his sermon, which the church records and posts online. They occasionally affirm him with an “amen” or “c’mon bro.”
“I’m what people like to call a ‘hollaback preacher,’” Hughes, 26, said in a recent sermon. “You can hit me with the ‘c’mon bro’s, ‘let’s do this,’ whatever you want to say. I’m fired up.”
Hughes and his wife, 26-year-old Kara Hughes, left their church in California to plant the Raleigh church in July with roughly a dozen other evangelists, most of whom appear to be in their 20s. Several church leaders, including Ashton Hughes, work in ministry full-time. Another was hired in August as a temporary worker for N.C. State dining, personnel records show.
The Assembly interviewed three N.C. State students who attended services and participated in other activities, including Bible study, but ultimately left the group.
The former members said at first the church seemed casual. Several students met a few of its leaders at Tucker-Owen Beach, a volleyball court between two dorms that’s a popular spot for first-year students.
The group held daily Bible studies in the student union, the defectors said. The sessions were usually two-on-one or one-on-one, and gradually became more intense.
“After 10 studies, they were pressuring me to get baptized,” said first-year student Jayden Spruill, 18, of Creedmoor. “And the more and more I pushed off, the more and more the pressure intensified.”
Spruill said he was hesitant to get baptized just weeks after starting with the church. He said his mom agreed. When he told Hughes that, Hughes tried to call his mom, Spruill said. She didn’t answer.
“They had this whole fit about how I shouldn’t listen to my parents, I shouldn’t listen to my loved ones, that they’re like the devil in disguise,” Spruill said. “I was like, ‘No, this can’t be my family. My family just wants the best for me.’”
Hughes declined to comment about how the church operates on campus. It’s unclear if any of the church’s leaders are ordained ministers. Several of them attended the International College of Christian Ministry, an unaccredited college in California started by controversial evangelist Kip McKean, according to their Facebook pages.
Kelcey Robinson, 18, a first-year student from Fayetteville, said he was baptized in the church in August. Shortly after, he said church leaders asked him to move into an apartment with other “disciples.” They told him he could only date other members of the church, he said.
“They start using scripture, talking about how if you feel like anyone is trying to discourage your walk with Jesus, then you should cut them off,” Robinson said. “They were kind of trying to use that to seclude me from everything, so the only thing I had was them—the church.”
The church requires total commitment, ex-members said. Baptized members can’t miss its near-daily meetings and must donate weekly. They should “make disciples, baptize them, [and] teach them to obey everything,” according to a leader’s Bible study notes obtained by The Assembly. That’s a reference to the Great Commission at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus instructs his 11 disciples gathered at the mountain in Galilee.
Credit: Julia Wall for The Assembly
Wilkins, the student from Pembroke, said as he went to Bible studies, he started to feel uneasy about the group. The studies started to get “progressively more wrong” doctrinally, he said. He grew up and was baptized in the Baptist church, but he said church leaders told him he wasn’t a real Christian.
And when Wilkins compared his Bible study notes with Spruill’s, he said he realized leaders weren’t teaching them the same lessons.
Spruill, who didn’t attend a church growing up, said he was told that their church was the one true church, but Wilkins wasn’t. Wilkins said he thinks it’s because the leaders knew he had more experience in the church and would question their interpretation of scripture.
All three left the church in early September. But Robinson’s “mentor” in the church and its second most-senior leader, 30-year-old Chris Martin, kept texting him days later, he said.
“Just cause it DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT doesn’t make it wrong,” Martin said in one text that Wilkins shared with The Assembly, citing verses from the New Testament that describe the Antichrist as a “powerful delusion” that God sends. “If you don’t love the truth, God will let you think that this decision of not being a disciple anymore is a good idea. A DELUSION.”
Spruill said the experience was “kind of traumatizing.”
“The one time I really decided to really dive into religion and really get closer with God, it kind of pushed me away,” Spruill said. “Now I’m sort of scared to really dive into that type of thing just for the simple fact that the one time I tried to do it and I was really committed to it, it ended up in that way.”
Focused on Campus Ministry
The International Churches of Christ, founded in 1979 by McKean, was one of the fastest-growing churches in the country decades ago. It diverged from the mainline Churches of Christ, which cut ties with the ICOC in 1993.
ICOC leaders taught that baptism in their church, which they believed was the only true church, was necessary for salvation. The church said “every new Christian needs to be taught or ‘discipled’ by another Christian to obey all of Jesus’ teachings,” according to an archive of its website.
From its beginnings, the ICOC was focused on campus ministry, which McKean and another leader described as “the ever-flowing fountain of future preachers and missionaries.” As the church exploded in growth, so did outcry from defectors, who said it was exploitative and manipulative.
N.C. State in 1995 warned first-year students about “destructive religious groups” after fielding complaints for years about the Triangle branch of the ICOC, WBTV reported at the time. Meredith College’s then-campus minister did the same.
The ICOC rebuked claims it was a cult. “We’re no more a cult than Jesus was a cult,” spokesperson Al Baird told U.S. News & World Report in 2000, adding that the church didn’t condone harassment.
By 2002, the ICOC’s reported worldwide membership reached 135,000, but an estimated 250,000 people had left. That year, McKean resigned from his top post in the church’s leadership hierarchy. In his resignation letter, he said he was arrogant and “focused more on numeric goals than on pleasing God.”
McKean’s resignation sparked a reckoning for ICOC leaders, who publicly apologizedfor various “sins,” including “authoritarian discipling,” and promised reform. The church “lessened a lot of the control” and stopped pushing a “quota system” for recruits, Chris Lee, a former leader in the early ICOC movement, told The Assembly. He is now executive director of REVEAL, a nonprofit that supports ex-members.
In 2006, McKean started the International Christian Church, which he said has “almost exactly the same core Biblical convictions” as the original ICOC doctrine.
A series of lawsuits filed in recent years claim McKean and the two churches covered up sexual abuse allegations to protect their reputation.
One lawsuit, filed in July 2024, alleges ICC leaders refused to report at least 10 child predators in the church who were later charged with sex crimes, including a children’s ministry volunteer who in 2011 pleaded guilty to the forcible rape of a four-year-old girl and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
“The ICOC, the ICC, and its affiliate churches created a money-making enterprise through their psychological manipulation, tight control, and hierarchical ‘discipleship’ structure,” the lawsuit says. “That structure fosters an environment fertile for sexual abuse.”
Every member has an “elder disciple” who acts as a “quasi-mentor-qua-jailor,” the lawsuit alleges. The church’s hierarchical discipling structure is “the mechanism of control and coercion frequently exerted over its members,” the suit says.
In a January court filing, McKean said that the lawsuit lacked factual support to constitute a cause of action against him. It’s scheduled for a hearing on February 26.
“Plaintiff has made no allegations—specific or otherwise—that serve to state a claim for relief against Defendant McKean,” McKean’s lawyers wrote. They did not respond to a request for comment.
Attorneys for the ICOC last week asked a court to dismiss similar claims, arguing the statute of limitations had expired.
The Raleigh church split with the ICC in October, joining a new church led by former ICC staff who alleged “corruption, blackmail, and extortion” among the ICC’s top leaders. The founders of Restored Church Worldwide, which McKean recently joined, say they left to preserve the “original convictions and culture upon which the ICC was founded” and want to exponentially grow its converts.
Targeting First-Year Students
After they left Restored Church Raleigh, which was then part of the ICC, Robinson and Wilkins reported the church to N.C. State’s student engagement center and university police.
“The students believe they are targeting first years who are going through drastic changes so it’s easier for them to get baptized, further meaning they are with the church forever,” wrote one of the student engagement center workers who fielded the complaint.
After Wilkins’ third Bible study, “They had manipulated me into thinking I was not a true Christian and I was all but prepared to be baptized after I had completed the whole study,” he wrote in his report to police. The church “twisted the verses to make them say things that they didn’t say,” he added.
A parent also reported the group to police at the time, according to public records. “This is a serious safety concern and students need to be warned,” the parent wrote.
A university team that manages threatening or potentially threatening behavior opened a case to investigate the concerns, but N.C. State denied The Assembly’srequest for the case filings, citing a federal student privacy law.
As a public university, the school has limited latitude in dealing with groups that operate on campus, according to internal emails obtained by The Assembly.
“We want to ensure that our actions do not inadvertently target religious organizations or the First Amendment rights of the freedom of association,” David Elrod, the university’s associate vice provost for equal opportunity, wrote in an email to administrators in response to concerns about the group.
If there are “true concerns for safety, threats, etc., I think that there should be conversation about appropriate university responses,” Elrod wrote, but “not the mere fact that an individual was approached and/or challenged about their belief would rise to the level.”
Another administrator, assistant vice chancellor Justine Hollingshead, wrote in an email, “I don’t think there is much we can do, but it’s important to be aware of predatory behavior.”
A Christian student organization in 2016 sued N.C. State administrators over the university’s free speech policy, arguing that it was unfairly enforced against the group because it was religious. The policy required people to get a permit before soliciting in public spaces, such as the student union. The organization dropped the lawsuit after N.C. State changed its policy and no longer required a permit.
Restored Church Raleigh is still active on campus, and it has a goal of reaching 50 new people a day, a leader said at a recent devotional. Eight N.C. State students are members of the church, Hughes, the lead evangelist, said in a text message. There are 16 to 20 leaders, according to Wilkins.
The church is now affiliated with a registered student group called THRIVE Campus Ministry, which is eligible for student government funding and can reserve rooms on campus. It hasn’t received any funding yet, according to the student government’s appropriations history.
Robinson said he’s now attending a church in Durham, the nondenominational King’s Park International Church. He said it’s vastly different from his experience last year on campus with the International Christian Church.
“They were definitely very strict,” he said. “Other churches, they’re like, ‘Come when you can; we’ll pray for you.’”
Emily Vespa is a freelance journalist and a recent graduate of North Carolina State University.