Gwen Shamblin Lara, other leaders controversial church presumed dead after plane crash Gwen Shamblin

A dietician who became the founder of the Remnant Fellowship Church in Brentwood died Saturday when the Cessna owned by her production company went down in Percy Priest Lake.

Gwen Shamblin Lara, her husband, Joe, and five other church leaders are presumed dead. Investigators had changed from a rescue mission to a recovery mission Sunday morning.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration website, no one on that flight was qualified to fly the plane. Joe Lara, 58, had a pilot's license, but had not updated his medical certification since 2017. The medical certification is required every two years.

Brandon Hannah, another church leader with a pilot license, was on the flight, but he didn't have a certification for the Cessna 500 series, according to the FAA database.

A recording of the communication between the control tower and the pilot, captured on LiveATC.com, revealed an alarm going off in the cockpit of the plane seconds before it crashed, suggesting a mechanical failure in the aircraft, which was built in 1982.

Debris from the shattered plane scattered across about a half mile of the lake, according to Rutherford County Fire Captain and Incident Commander John Ingle. Dive teams from local emergency agencies found human remains among the wreckage Sunday as the recovery effort continued.

More:Latest on fatal plane crash at Percy Priest Lake: Human remains found at crash site Sunday

The Remnant Fellowship, founded in 1999, reportedly has more than 1,500 members in 150 congregations around the world. Gwen Lara had said being overweight was a sign of greed and gluttony. She said children were to obey parents, wives were to obey husbands and members were to obey church leaders.

Lara had been a lightning rod for critical news coverage over the years after she founded the church based on what she called "faith-based" weight loss. The Remnant Fellowship website lists food ahead of drugs, depression, self focus, money, anger, selfishness, envy and jealousy as the idols that need to be "laid down."

Lara called her movement the "Weigh Down Workshop" and packed her church full of radiant and thin people, according to a Tennessean profile from 2011. She wrote a book called "The Weigh Down Diet," which sold more than a million copies. Thousands of churches around the U.S. and the world started using her book and videos as guides.

She was interviewed by Larry King and featured in an article by New Yorker magazine.

She made insensitive comments about thin Jews in concentration camps and has claimed genetics don't play a role in weight loss.

In the Tennessean article, she described her church like this: "It’s just your old-fashioned religion. It looks like a bunch of Ward and June Cleavers over there, with Leave it to Beavers.”

In 2003, she supported Remnant congregants Joseph and Sonya Smith, who were convicted of murdering their 8-year-old son Josef. The Smiths admitted beating Josef with a glue stick. The Remnant teachings support corporal punishment for children.

Members of the Remnant Fellowship church posted bond for the Smiths before the trial. The Smiths each received life sentences.

Gwen and Joe were married in 2018 and shared a love of flying. Joe Lara, 58, briefly played Tarzan in the TV series "Tarzan: The Epic Adventures" in the 1990s. The Laras took off Saturday morning from Smyrna and the plane went down moments later.

Elizabeth Shamblin Hannah, who was not on the flight, sent out a text to Remnant families Saturday.

The plane, she wrote "had to go down for a controlled, quick landing ... GOD IS IN CONTROL, and we will not stop moving forward with WHAT GOD WANTS with this church."

Hannah's husband, Brandon, was one of the victims.

Jonathan and Jessica Walters were also victims. The couple made a video that appears on the Remnant Fellowship website. Jessica said she went to high school with Elizabeth Shamblin and met Jonathan in college.

The Walters said they spent more than half their lives as members of the church. They were married in 2002 and had three children.

"One thing you can't take away from someone is how their lives have changed," Jonathan Walters said.

Jennifer and David Martin, the final two victims, joined the Remnant Fellowship at its inception in 1999. They had five children.

The Martins, on the Remnant Fellowship website, praised Gwen for changing them from passive Christians to active Christians.

"Each year of our marriage gets BETTER," David Martin wrote. "Our children have a relationship with God and they WANT to be near us as parents. Our finances have been restored. We have learned to STOP sinning, and the amazing and cool result of doing that… is that this Remnant Fellowship Church is FULL of people who can say the same thing!"

Adam Tamburin contributed to this report.

Reach Keith Sharon at 615-406-1594 or [email protected] or on Twitter @KeithSharonTN.

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Christian diet guru Gwen Shamblin Lara dead in plane crash - New York Daily News
A former dietician who formed a controversial church died Saturday, along with her husband and five others, in a Tennessee plane crash.

Gwen Shamblin Lara, husband Joe Lara, church leaders David and Jennifer Martin, Jonathan and Jessica Walters, and Lara’s son-in-law, Brandon Hannah, were on the plane when it crashed into Percy Priest Lake around 11 a.m., according to the Rutherford County Fire & Rescue.

The private jet had taken off from Smyrna Airport, just outside of Nashville, and was headed for Palm Beach, Florida.

Shamblin, who founded Remnant Fellowship Church in 1999 after the success of her Christian diet program “The Weigh Down Workshop,” was dogged by accusations that her church was more of a cult than a religious institution, according to News 5 in Nashville. Followers claimed to view her as a prophet and the station previously reported a recording in which she praised parents for locking up their child as a form of obedience training.

Those parents, Joseph and Sonya Smith, were convicted of murdering their son in 2007. The Remnant Church was raided as part of the investigation.

==‘Tarzan’ actor Joe Lara killed as plane crashes into Tennessee lake »==
During an appearance on Larry King’s show, Shamblin told the interviewer that she looked at concentration camps in devising her weight loss program.

“How in the Holocaust did you have all these people getting down real skinny?” she said on the show. “They ate less food.”

Who Was Gwen Shamblin Lara? Christian Diet Guru in Plane Crash That Killed 7
Gwen Shamblin Lara, a controversial Christian diet guru, is among seven people presumed dead after a small plane crashed into a Tennessee lake on Saturday.

The Cessna C501 crashed into Percy Priest Lake near Smyrna after taking off from a nearby airport at about 11 a.m., according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

It was not immediately clear what caused the crash, which remains under investigation.

At a briefing on Saturday evening, authorities said all seven people, including Shamblin Lara and her husband, aboard the plane are believed to have died in the crash. The others were identified as William J. Lara, Brandon Hannah, David L. Martin, Jennifer J. Martin, Jessica Walters, and Jonathan Walters.

They were all members of the Remnant Fellowship Church, which grew out of founder Shamblin Lara's Christian diet program, The Weigh Down Workshop.

Local station NewsChannel5 reported that Lara's daughter, Elizabeth Hannah, sent a message to Remnant families, saying the plane "had to go down for a controlled, quick landing" with her mother and husband on board.

"More information to come, but be in prayer—and be at peace," Hannah, who was not on the plane, reportedly said in the message. "GOD IS IN CONTROL, and we will not stop moving forward with WHAT GOD WANTS with this church."

The station reported that the Cessna C501 was registered to JL&GL Productions LP, a partnership formed by Shamblin Lara and her husband.

In a trailer for the YouTube series "Life with Gwen & Joe," the couple speak about how religion impacts every aspect of their lives. It also shows that Joe Lara was a pilot who appears to have flown the couple around the country regularly.

According to the Remnant Fellowship Church's website, Shamblin Lara "spent every waking moment on behalf of others—and then is often up in the middle of the night prayerfully seeking wisdom and guidance from the Heavens." The website details her philanthropy work, which included counseling people and founding a program to help inmates in several states.

But Shamblin Lara's for-profit religious weight loss movement times has also long been controversial, according to NewsChannel5.

She once claimed that she found support for her ideas that genetics aren't a factor in weight loss by looking at the starvation of Jews in concentration camps in Nazi Germany. "How in the Holocaust did you have all these people getting down real skinny? They ate less food," she told CNN's Larry King in the late 1990s.

She also denied the program's for-profit nature when asked about her lavish lifestyle, claiming that half of the money "goes to the government, the other half goes to keep it going so someone else can be helped."

Shamblin Lara also faced accusations of leading a cult, with some former Remnant members saying she was viewed as a prophet, according to NewsChannel5.

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"I don't believe I know what my gift name is," she told the station in 2003, after being asked if she was a prophet. "So I will tell you I'm still wrestling with that. I've been told that for years."

Remnant Fellowship Church has been contacted for comment.

Updated 30/5 9 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with additional information.

Christian Weight-Loss Guru Gwen Shamblin, Former 'Tarzan' Husband, 5 Others Die in Plane Crash
Gwen Shamblin, the extremely controversial founder of Remnant F