Dwell Community Church (formerly Xenos Christian Fellowship)

Xenos began in the early 1970s as a Columbus campus Bible study in the Jesus-movement wave, co-founded by Dennis McCallum and Gary DeLashmutt, and grew unconventionally: no central sanctuary culture, but a network of home churches led by lay leaders, an intellectual apologetics emphasis, and a deep commitment to residential community. By the 2010s it counted several thousand members and was nationally cited as a model of cell-church growth. In 2020 it renamed itself Dwell Community Church.

The ministry-house system is the centre of both the church's self-understanding and the allegation record. Members — disproportionately university students recruited through campus ministries — share houses organised under home-church leadership, combining discipleship, accountability, and communal life. Ex-member accounts spanning decades, and concentrated in public waves around 2020–2023 (collected in local reporting, online forums of hundreds of former members, and podcast testimony), describe a consistent pattern at the committed core: discipleship guidance extending into dating decisions, finances, career and housing choices; hierarchical accountability in which leaders report upward on members' spiritual condition; heavy weekly time expectations; and, for those who leave or are removed, documented experiences of abrupt relational cutoff by the community that former members describe as functional shunning. Parents' groups and cult-education organisations have taken up the case; the term 'high-control' recurs across independent testimonies.

The church's response has been consistent: it describes itself as a decentralised, lay-led fellowship in which participation at every level is voluntary, points to published teachings against authoritarianism, disputes individual accounts, and attributes relational fallout after departure to ordinary friendship drift rather than policy. Leaders have acknowledged instances of overreach by individual home-church leaders while denying systemic coercion.

The profile scores the attested pattern conservatively at low confidence: axes reflect the committed ministry-house member's documented experience rather than the Sunday attender's, and readers should weight the absence of adjudicated findings. The case matters to the catalogue as the clearest contemporary American instance of the shepherding-model mechanics — residential discipleship, upward reporting, life-domain guidance — operating inside an otherwise mainstream evangelical frame.