Remnant Fellowship Church (Gwen Shamblin Lara)

Remnant Fellowship grew out of Gwen Shamblin's Weigh Down Workshop, a 1986 evangelical diet program that sold over a million copies of The Weigh Down Diet. In 1999 Shamblin pivoted from a parachurch ministry to founding her own church, after a public dispute with mainstream evangelical leaders over her non-Trinitarian theology. The church combined extremely strict caloric self-denial (taught as obedience), patriarchal household authority, severance from non-Remnant family, and corporal punishment of children. The watershed criminal case was the 2003 conviction of Joseph and Sonya Smith in Cobb County, Georgia, for the second-degree-murder beating death of their 8-year-old son Josef. Court testimony established that the Smiths were applying Remnant teaching on child obedience taken directly from Shamblin's published materials and personal correspondence. Shamblin denied responsibility but the case followed her in subsequent civil litigation. On 29 May 2021 a chartered Cessna piloted by Shamblin's son-in-law went down in Percy Priest Lake near Nashville; Shamblin, her husband Joe Lara, and most senior elders were killed. The HBO/Max documentary series The Way Down (2021–2022) gathered ex-member testimony and triggered the 2022 Tennessee Department of Children's Services investigation into ongoing child welfare in the church. Successor leadership has reportedly softened some teachings; ex-members report the core control structure remains.