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At 10.30am on Friday, February 24, Jess Stewart got into a cab in Warkworth, 45 minutes north of Auckland. He turned his cellphone to silent, put on some headphones and began listening to the hits of New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne.

As the cab turned south on State Highway 1 towards the city, a steady drizzle falling outside, Stewart texted prepared messages to his mother, father and some close friends. Lil Wayne gave way to Kendrick Lamar and Eminem, a soundtrack as carefully considered as every other element of a journey three years in the planning.

Stewart was leaving the Exclusive Brethren, a secretive religious group that preaches almost complete separation from regular society. It can be an agonising process, as those who choose to quit accept they may never see family and friends again.

But for the 23-year-old, who has no arms and legs and weighs just 22 kilograms, his departure was, by necessity, a meticulously-planned covert operation.

Another world

No TV, radio, recorded music, novels, newspapers, cinema, long hair, moustaches, university, sex education, Christmas or even flowers on burial sites. Church daily, and four times on Sunday. The 8,000 or so New Zealand members of the Exclusive Brethren live a highly-strictured life, with its focus an absolute devotion to their worldwide leader, former Sydney office furniture salesman Bruce Hales Jr.

Growing up in this cloistered world, Jess Stewart had no complaints. Despite being born without limbs, he never felt different, and doesn’t remember ever feeling sad about his situation. He was always an optimist. As a kid, he says, it was a friendly, warm community – like growing up in a small, particularly isolated town, albeit one where outsiders were loathed.

And he was a celebrity. He required 52 surgeries (mostly on his left shoulder, where the bone grows through the skin and has to be trimmed back), before he was 19, including in the US. So praying for Jess’s health was a regular occurrence. Brethren families had photos of baby Jess on their fridge. They raised money to send him to America.

“Because it’s a tribe, and you only know and care about people in the tribe,” says former member Lindy Jacomb. “They’re not caring about kids in Africa, only each other.”

Another ex-Brethren, Stuff journalist Craig Hoyle, says: “It was a huge deal when he was born. The Brethren have this idea that God only gives you as much as you can handle, so if you’re dealt a really shit hand in life, God has extra faith in you… Jess fell into that category.”

At 12, using an HB pencil gripped between his teeth, Jess drew a sketch of a Kombi van. It sold on TradeMe and spawned an annual calendar, which one year sold 30,000 copies. It was an example, he says, of “how the Brethren really do embrace that community spirit. They bought thousands of those calendars. And for that I will always be grateful’’.

Jess’s condition also meant exceptions, granted from the very top – he was allowed a computer (for educational purposes: “I learnt a lot from Call of Duty”), movies, TV and later he was given dispensation to study for an IT degree.

“I didn’t always want to leave,” he stresses. “I miss being a Brethren in many ways. I wake up in the night and remember parts of it, something from childhood or see or smell something that reminds you of it.”

But Jess was bright, and as he got older, that meant questions, uncomfortable questions, about inconsistencies in the church’s teaching – such as why facial hair was encouraged under one leader, and banned under the next – which would irritate his father. “There were a million different holes you could find … but no one outside my family would even have thought I was talking like that. You wouldn’t say that to anyone else.”

At 14, he was busted with music. “My old man went off at me and said: ‘Have you considered the chance you won’t be saved?’ It was the f…… Eagles.”

He was part of an underground network at school that downloaded as much as they could past the Brethren’s internet filters. He was caught with a Facebook account. He had a secret Netflix account (“and wasn’t struck by lightning”). When the elders rescinded his movie rights, he’d watch films in the dark and had the Hangover movies saved in a desktop folder entitled ‘English Class Tutorial’. “I always thought three steps ahead. I always had a Plan B and C.”

At 16, he wanted to leave. His dad found out and, he says, would keep throwing those reasons back at him. He says now that, at the time, he wanted to go because he wanted to listen to music and go to the movies and, in retrospect, that wasn’t enough drive to make the change.

But the strict nature of life in the Brethren made relationships difficult and by the time he was 19, Jess was resolute that he wanted to leave.

He doesn’t blame anyone for that conflict between his desire for freedom and the church’s intense rules – apart from the leadership. “Make sure you capture this next sentence,” he says at one point. “Ninety-nine out of every 100 Brethren are good people.”

He says that any friction with family and other people close to him wouldn’t have been present in the outside world. Asked about that, his father Dale says: “Every family has its own boundaries, and yes, we have ours.”

The street-smarts Jess Stewart learnt while engaged in petty rule-breaking were employed in constructing his secret plan to depart, and he was lucky the business-minded Brethren had begun to relax the rules around technology. Lindy Jacomb, who left in 2008, when cellphones and computers largely remained verboten, says as a result, “I do think it is easier for this generation [to leave]”.

Cut off from contact with regular society, Stewart used the digital world to ready himself. He spent three years preparing, using a secret second phone – the Brethren monitor the technology they supply to members – to contact former members for advice, government agencies to secure the specialist support work he needed and social media to give himself a rudimentary education in contemporary life.

He learnt slang from Instagram, and about the world from cinema (at our first meeting, he asked if New York in reality looks like it does in Goodfellas). He even posted on a Reddit forum about cults, asking for people to correspond with him about the outside. He got talking to Mercy, a 29-year-old musician and writer in Florida, who has now become one of his closest friends. “It was him poking his head out to see if the world was as crazy as everyone around him had said it was,” says Mercy. “But he understood the outside world… he had a pretty decent idea.”

While there was an emotional journey to undertake, the logistics of Stewart’s situation meant nothing could be rushed.

As he planned his exit, Stewart made a painful but necessary decision to tell nobody and keep living normally, including planning trips with friends he knew he would never go on. He organised a few casual lunches with mates in the fortnight before he departed, “and left some subtle clues, which looking back… they will realise that was me saying goodbye”. While it ensured his plan was successful, “mentally it has f….. me up a little bit”.

“I sat at my desk a few times,” he says, “thinking if I even had 1% less resolve to do this, I don’t think I would go through with it.”

On his last night as a Brethren member, he lay awake – nervous, worried, excited – but never once questioning himself. In the morning, he went into each room of his childhood home to take a final mental picture before going to his job, as a designer at a glass factory, for the last time.

Five minutes before his pre-booked taxi arrived at work, he told his boss he was leaving. Then, with nothing more than a bag of groceries, he got in the cab, cued up his “sick playlist of motivational rap” and thought to himself: “Chapter one of my life is over. It’s the start of chapter two.”

As his parents began reading his farewell message, police and social workers knocked on the door to collect Jess’s possessions. “There was no other way I could have done it. I felt awful. It would have been a shock for them. Although it shouldn’t have been; the signs were there.”

In reply, his mother asked if he could give it another 24 hours. He said he’d given it six years. His father sent a link to share his GPS location, which he ignored. Friends called, upset.

He spoke to Mercy in the US. “I was thrilled, I was ecstatic,” his friend says. “We were laughing, and screaming and joking.”

He’d arranged accommodation in the city – he doesn’t want to say where – and a mate came over. They drank bourbon and watched The Shawshank Redemption, which concludes, of course, with prisoners Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman finding freedom. “It was very symbolic. All the media I consumed in the first couple of days was planned in advance.”

Riding the rush of adrenalin, he only slept five hours that first weekend. “Then the reality hit me… Everything felt overwhelming. No friends, no family.”

We met for the first time for lunch about a week after he left. Stewart was immediately talkative, open and happy to share; many former Brethren never go public, as leavers who speak out are considered the worst, and it effectively removes any chance of reconciliation with the media-shy leadership. “Maybe I started talking to you too soon,” he reflected later, as we agreed to delay this story until he felt settled. “But you were capturing my raw emotions.”

‘Like committing suicide’

“Leaving is like a form of committing suicide,” considers Jacomb, who wrote farewell letters to her family when she left at the age of 20, expecting to never see them again.

Traditionally, those exiting the Brethren go through a two-stage process: first, being ‘shut up’, where they are isolated from the community, then they are ‘withdrawn from’ – a permanent exclusion. Once out, there’s almost no relationship with anyone inside. Stewart knew that all too well – he says while he was on the inside, leavers were talked about “in the past tense”.

“Being shut off from the outside world is horrendous, weird, and looking back, bizarre and crazy, and used as a form of manipulation,” he says. “But at the time, it didn’t feel like that. It felt pretty regular.”

Peter Lineham, emeritus professor of religion at Massey University, says the Brethren are “highly manipulative in their control mechanisms and outrageous about the way they control access to members from people who have left.”

Unusually, the church has yet to take any formal action against Jess, despite it being almost nine months since his exit. Jacomb, who runs the Olive Leave Network, a support group for those leaving the Brethren and other high-demand religious groups, is sure that’s because of the Brethren’s fear of negative publicity. “People will be devastated by Jess leaving,” she says. “They will be really worried about this.”

In a statement, Brethren spokesperson Doug Watt did not address specific questions about ‘shunning’ or why the church had not excommunicated Stewart. Watt said: “Jesse was a well-known member of our church community, many of whom supported him in different ways over many years. He made the decision to leave the church, and our door remains open to him should he wish to come back to the fold. .. we wish Jesse all the best with the path he has chosen.”

Jess doesn’t want to get into who has been in contact from inside the Brethren – anyone who did talk to him would be seen as being “poisoned” – but he’s had limited contact with his family.

One meeting didn’t go ahead when his family insisted it be at the place he was living at. He later met his mother in the car park of a KFC; it was civil but brief when he refused to say he still supported the church’s leadership. He went home feeling numb.

He says he’s accepted he might not see them again. He knows the Brethren’s standard line is that it’s up to families to decide their relationship with leavers, “and it is amazing they could lie like this” when it’s clear families are highly influenced to cut ties.

His dad, Dale, said: “We accept that Jesse is an adult, and his future is his decision. It’s his choice who he wishes to associate with in the future.”

“I feel I am doing pretty well, mentally, most of the time, but a wave hits me every so often,” says Jess. “I’ll see something on TV, or talk to someone and they will remind me of a mate or one of my siblings.”

Jacomb says leavers have the struggle of dealing with the prosaic journey – finding a home, a job, a new network, the “intoxicating” freedom – while simultaneously coping with a huge emotional journey. “You can have a functioning and happy life on many counts, but… you can never fully resolve the grief, because you can never fully bury it, because they’re not dead… There is always this grief you carry.”

The future

Three days after he got out, Stewart went to the cinema for the first time in his life (Cocaine Bear, didn’t like it much), and was excited about “watching one how they are meant to be consumed”.

On the one-month anniversary of his departure, he went to the rooftop bar of the QT Hotel and “just got smashed”.

In various rebellions since departing, he’s grown a beard (banned by the Brethren), grown his hair longer (also banned) and got tattoos of an anchor and a heart (definitely banned). He’s been to rap and comedy gigs and plenty of films. The free time he now enjoys means time moves slower; each time we meet, he has a new idea about his career direction.

“It’s like one day being in the aquarium, and now you’re in the ocean,” he says. “It’s too big to be assured you’re safe the whole time, but there’s much more opportunity, and I am exploring that.”

Stewart is incredibly adept with what he has; he achieves a lot with the combination of a stylus and his left shoulder. At 14, he won a touch-typing competition, 42 words per minute with no mistakes. Regardless of his physical limitations, he’s an excellent artist and has lately completed a series of commissions of people’s dogs. He records his own music, overlaying each track on a synthesiser. He’s good at video games; he tells me he clocked a Spiderman video game at the first attempt.

He does have to plan almost everything in his life some distance ahead. He’s also not interested in exposing every detail of how he lives his life for the prurience of others and is deeply private about his living situation, partly because of that and partly because he’s keenly aware the Brethren have a history of surveilling former members.

He’s anxious that this story won’t be entirely about the bloke with no limbs who escaped a cult, although he recognises the unique nature of his backstory. He’d like it also to be about a young man forging his own way in the world, with a range of creative ambitions – each time we meet he has another whirlwind of ideas of what he might produce or study.

He’s made sure his Instagram and YouTube accounts were live in time for this story’s publication and would very much like you to go and look at them. “I don’t want it to define me,” he says. “If people want to ask about my background, I’m fine talking about it. But I don’t want it to consume me.”

The Brethren will tell you, he says, that if you leave you will leave without money, friends and family and ultimately end up alone. So far, that’s not true. Fortunately, he owned some land, giving him financial independence.

“Anything I can do with all my limbs and growing up in society, he can do. I don’t doubt his capabilities,” says Mercy. “That man is a freight train. Whatever he wants to do, he’s going to do.”

The result is an essentially sunny disposition. He’d like a rapprochement with his family, but he’s intelligent enough to know it’s unlikely.

“I still miss a lot of it,” Jess concludes. “But I wouldn’t go back. Even in my lowest moment out here, I still feel a lot more free and happy than any time in there.”