So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XIX

Having driven from my home in New York City to Way headquarters in rural Ohio a few times, I was familiar with the concept of small town and farms, but living in a small town like Sidney, Nebraska was big-time culture shock. One of the biggest shifts was the prevalence of churches. I grew up in the New York City neighborhood of Rosedale, Queens. The 2010 census put Rosedale's population at around 25,000. At the time there were six churches — two Catholic, one Presbyterian, a Lutheran and an Episcopalian, plus a small Baptist church that may have actually been in Springfield Gardens. Sidney, on the other hand, with one-fifth the population, had twenty-five churches of various denominations. Of course, there was the size. Sidney was small enough to walk across in a half hour, the populated areas appears to be around 2 miles east-west and 2.5 miles north-south, excluding the area on the interstate and other areas within city limits that are not developed — and Sidney is the largest town for hours in any direction. Another feature of a small town (at least from my perspective) is the suspicion with which "outsiders" are viewed. Everyone seems to know everybody else, and families that had been in Sidney for decades were still referred to as "the new people". This may seem like paradise to many, but for four young people (we were aged 20-22) from outside the community who were representing a religious cult, this was anything but. 

We arrived in Sidney a week late, and after a night in a hotel and a dinner of chicken-fried steak (a first for me) at Dude's Steakhouse, we set about finding housing and jobs. This was surprisingly easy. The next day we rented a two-bedroom duplex one block off the main drag of Illinois Avenue/Highway 30. Steve, as the interim Way Corps leader, had been sent to scout out the city a few weeks earlier and already had a job lined up detailing cars at a local dealership. Rosemarie and Gail found jobs waitressing at a Dairy Queen and at a hotel restaurant respectively. I was the last one to secure employment, an apprentice glass cutter and go-fer at carpet store just a few blocks from our new home. 

The WOW year, especially the portion spent in Sidney, (we were reassigned to Kearney, a larger college town mid-year) was another of those red flags which should have inspired me to leave the group. On one hand we were subject to non-stop persecution by the locals and on the other the supposed "spiritually aware" leadership was incompetent. But these pressures, at least in my case, paradoxically served to make me more committed. 

Steve was a member of what was called the 10th Way Corps, i.e. the tenth group to start the so-called  leadership training by The Way. He had made it through his first year of training at various Way training locations and was now on what they called an interim year where he was to put his training into practice before returning for his second year "in residence". Steve was supposed to be a leader, someone who we were to look up to, someone who would keep us on a godly path  and lead us to success. Steve was also an irresponsible, immature, entitled, horny twenty year-old who was impressed with his own status as a member of the Way Corps without the slightest idea how to motivate or lead. Part of this was due to the top-down style that was ingrained in Way "leaders" who believed that they were blessed with a version of the divine right of kings (including droit du seigneur). Steve's weakness as a leader would be exacerbate the pressures that resulted from opposition of the townspeople. 

Start from the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XX

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XIX - No True Scotsman

In my previous "Agnostic's Look at The Bible", Christians Calling Other Christians Not-Christian, I discussed the phenomena of Christians deciding that other Christians weren't "real" Christians based on doctrinal disagreements. In this week's installment I'll look at how Christians behaving badly are dismissed by other Christians as "Not True Christians".

The classic example of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, from whence it derives its name, is this: McBeth claims that a Scotsman will invariably eat haggis regularly. McDuff replies that he's a Scotsman and he never eats haggis. McBeth retorts "Well then, you're not a true Scotsman". The "No True Scotsman" fallacy is a species of circular reasoning where the premise is redefined to exclude any inconvenient deviations and contradictions. This is a pretty common fallacy employed by Christians who by and large adhere to the "love thy neighbor" ethos against coreligionists who don't. When someone points out the horrible behavior of a group of Christians, you can be sure that someone will claim that "they're not really Christians because true Christians wouldn't act like that". 

Of course, Love Thy Neighbor Christians will argue that they're not the ones deciding who are true Christians and who aren't, God has set the standards in The Bible. The trouble with that, as I have pointed out many times in this series, is that the Bible isn't clear or unambiguous in what it has to say. In addition, "Christian" is as much a cultural identifier as a set of religious doctrines and behaviors. Anyone who says they're a Christian is a Christian. One might argue whether a particular Christian is living up to some perceived Biblical standard, but that doesn't make them Not A Christian, any more than abstaining from haggis makes an Edinburgh native whose roots go back many generations Not A  Scotsman.  

This doesn't mean that the Love Thy Neighbor Christians don't have a good reason to be embarrassed by the antics of their bigoted, hateful brethren. Like a family of cops who have that one sibling who just got out of prison, they think they're making them look bad. Guilt by association. But these hypothetical cops don't claim that their ex-con brother isn't their brother. But Christians are trying to boost their godliness average by eliminating their more embarrassing brethren from the statistics. 

This is by no means a Christians-only phenomena. Fundamentalist Muslims who require their women to wear a hijab look down on the Muslims who don't as not true Muslims and the burqa-wearing sects are sure the rest of the Muslim world are just as damned as Christians and Jews, maybe more so. Ultra-Orthodox Jews are pretty judgmental about their Conservative and Reform branches — some don't recognize weddings officiated by non-Orthodox rabbis. Heck, I've even encountered this tendency among Pagans! But since Christians are the power wielding majority in this country, this is whom I'm focusing on. 

The truth is, that between Fundamentalist Evangelicals, Conservative Traditional Catholics, Mega Church Pastors and the like, cultural Christians who identify as right wing conservatives and espouse beliefs largely divorced from the Love Thy Neighbor morality are likely the majority of self-identified Christians in the United States. You can't just pretend they're not the face of 21st Century Christianity. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XX

Workin' Man - Part XIX - A Shady Business

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 All four Lincoln Super Saver ASDs switched in one move. The Cornhusker ASD (me) moved to Pine Lake, that AD  moved to 56th and Highway 2, the 56th ASD moved to 48th & O, and that ASD moved to Cornhusker. I'm going to divert from my own personal story to focus on what was going on in another store. 

Store Directors earned bonuses based on how close their gross profit was to what was budgeted. In most situations if you achieved or exceeded your budget the budget was increased the following year. Rarely was it lowered if you failed to achieve the profit target. For some reason the exception was the store that the previously mentioned Ron S ran, the 56th and Highway 2 Super Saver. The profits regularly exceeded the budgeted amount by a huge margin, but the budget was never increased. This guaranteed that the Store Director and Assistant Store Director received the maximum amount in their annual bonus. The ASD who was leaving 56th was very upset about leaving. He was used to getting the maximum bonus — in fact, he had recently divorced and his child support was based on the assumption that he would continue to receive the maximum bonus. As I mentioned previously, Bill had been transferred out of my store and to the 56th Super Saver, since Ron S had been "promoted" into the corporate office. A couple of things happened in the wake of these moves. The first was that the budget for gross profit was changed to more closely reflect the business that the store actually did. (Why not sooner?) The second was that the store's inventory was counted more closely. 

Without getting too deep into the math, one of the key numbers that determined a store's profit was the inventory level. If inventory was undercounted, profit calculations would be low, since the assumption would be that the missing stock had been either thrown out for being outdated, or stolen, since there was no revenue to account for it. If the inventory, on the other hand, was overcounted, then the opposite would be true and the profit margin would be calculated higher than the real number. The latter was what was going on at 56th under Ron S. 

56th & Highway 2 was a test store for using an internal ordering and inventory system called INGEN (I forget what those letters stood for), which, among other things, kept a running daily count of all items in the center store departments. One of the problems with using this system for your inventory count was that there were many possible data entry error possibilities. For example, a customer buys two cases of Chobani yogurt, 12 to a case. There are eight different flavors, but the cashier rings them all up under one flavor. The result is that one flavor's inventory will be lower than the actual numbers, while the other seven will show a higher inventory. Markdowns were another problem. Usually marked down items were rung up manually by department, so there was nothing in the system to indicate that it had been sold. Outdated items that were thrown out had to be scanned out of the inventory, but if not, the system thought they were still there. At 56th under Ron S it was discovered, after he left, that the inventories for several departments were higher than actual and were skewing the profit calculations, making the store look more profitable than it actually was. 

One of the things that B&R Stores engaged in was never questioning good results, while freaking out over bad ones. The 56th and Highway 2 Super Saver was a profitable store. At the time there were no competitors nearby (this was pre-Walmart), so no one questioned the continual high profits. The store management who were raking in huge bonuses certainly didn't question it. It wasn't until a new management team came in that the inventory issues were discovered. One of the things that stores were supposed to do, was continuously update their inventory. There was to be an employee specifically dedicated to this task who would rotate through the store, keeping the inventory accurate. Bill, and his new ASD Dan set about to check their inventory and get things in line with company policy. They found out that things were really, really bad. The inventory numbers were way off. So much so that several departments had negative gross profits, which is virtually impossible. Another thing that was virtually impossible was the scenario where the new management was so incompetent as to take a very profitable store and run it into the ground in less than one year. Not only run it into the ground, but screw it up so badly that it was losing money. (One of the things that I found out about that store was that routine maintenance and repairs were being ignored when Ron S was in charge. This led to Bill having to spend a lot of money fixing things that never should have been broken. The store was also filthy. When I was there for a reset the dirt under the shelving was so thick that small animals could have gotten lost in it. When we discovered this Ron [who with us] tried to get us to believe that years of dirt had accumulated in one year)

Around this time the corporate office decided to change assistant store director responsibilities again, using 56th as a test store. The position of in-store HR Coordinator would be eliminated, and each store would have two ASDs, one of whom would be responsible for HR functions as well as a couple of departments, and the other would oversee the rest of center store. This was a project pushed by Operations VP Tom Schulte and opposed by HR Director Donna Bristol. A second ASD was brought in and Dan, the existing ASD was given the HR responsibilities, which he was completely in the dark about. He attempted to get help from corporate HR, who refused to assist him, or even educate him on his HR duties. He reached out to HR Coordinators in other stores, who were willing to help him, but were prohibited from doing so by Donna, in a petty retaliation for losing the battle to Tom. Of course Dan failed. He was set up to fail. 

Meanwhile, in order to solve the problems that took place under Ron S's watch, corporate sent in...Ron S. He set up a little card table in the grocery office as his desk and went about micromanaging the management team, including mandating the precise number of hours that Dan could spend working HR. Of course nothing that he did fixed the problem. The problem traced back to overstating inventory, which, when corrected, led to low and negative gross profits. Correct inventory levels would cause the profit problem to correct itself. These obvious observations never occurred to the corporate directors. Bill and Dan were blacklisted and moved to smaller stores as punishment. This opened my eyes to the kind of people that I was working for, even though at the time it had no direct effect on me. 

Before I close out this sordid chapter, I want to call back to another sordid chapter. HVAC maintenance and repair for all the stores had been contracted out to A-1 Refrigeration, a local company. While I was still working at the Cornhusker store, one of their technicians was sexually harassing a teenage girl who worked in the Deli. She complained to the Store Director, who complained to A-1, who immediately fired him. Dan H, the pervert in question, went on to start his own HVAC company. With the collusion of John W, one of the Super Saver ASDs, he obtained some of A-1's invoices and approached Jane Raybould to become contracted to maintain the HVAC equipment at some of the stores, underbidding A-1's rates. Jane gave him the contract for all the Russ's Markets, leaving the Super Savers to A-1, despite being made aware of why A-1 had fired him. His company was also given the contract for the new Russ's at Coddington and West A. Jane eventually fired him, but only because he did not obtain permits for what he was doing, not because he sexually harassed teenaged girls. 

Yes, a shady business.

Start with Part I

Go to: Part XX

Managers Part XIX - "Good" Managers

What makes a "good" manager? That's where we started this series almost a year and a half ago. I don't think that I'd be going out on a limb to say that what makes a good manager and what makes a good person are two sets that don't completely overlap. Granted, someone who is a bully, a thief, lazy, abusive, etc...things that might describe a "bad" person, would probably also describe a "bad" manager. But the traits that make someone a good spouse or a good buddy don't necessarily translate into the traits of a good manager. A manager must inspire trust in her subordinates in order to fully leverage the abilities of her staff. One might think that being a buddy to subordinates or rolling up the managerial sleeves and pitching in, stepping back and "letting people do theirs jobs" or passing out rewards like no-questions-asked time off or ignoring the dress code makes one a good manager. This type of manager might be a popular manager, but for every employee who thinks Goodtime Charlie is the greatest, there will be one or two who resent the lack of support, the chaos, and favoritism that go along with the alleged positive traits. Other employees, seeing Charlie's willingness to do their work with them, will soon be expecting the manager to do their work for them.

A good manager is the fulcrum, balancing the needs of the company, along with upper management, with the needs of the employees. This means that the manager is responsible for maximizing the output of his employees, not by working them to death or by cutting staffing to unsustainable levels, but by training subordinates to function as independently as possible. This means retaining the best people, not by holding them down in positions where they are unhappy or they are paid less than what they need to be, but by giving them the support and resources to advance in the company...and sometimes even outside the company. As I've said before in this series, the job of a manager is not to do things, but to get things done.

If you try to do everything yourself, there's only so much you can do. Lets say that you have 40 units of work to do and you are scheduled for 40 hours. If you're not delegating and assigned, what happens if the workload increases to 50 units? You'll probably have to work 50 hours. How about 65 units? Settle in for 65-hour week. Your business's productivity is pretty much capped at 65 units. But what if you have trained two assistants to take on 20 units each. They'll be slower than you are, being trainees, but they can do 20 units each. So now you have freed up 40 hours. You can drop back to 40 hours: 25 hours to do 25 units of work and 15 hours to train your assistants and oversee the whole company. Once they are fully trained, their ability to take care of 40 units each also allows your business to expand to 80 units, with you spending 40 hours on managerial tasks. You can add additional assistants as business grows, or promote your assistants to supervisors and staff another level. Of course all of these people need to be fully trained and able to work independently or you'll be spending your 40 hours fixing substandard work or giving out assignments rather than delegating responsibility.

Management is a skill set separate from the actual work of a given industry. Just because you're a good widget-maker doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be a good widget-maker's manager. In most businesses the only way for an employee to make more money is to become a manager, and in most businesses, managers are not chosen for their management ability, but for how well they performed as a subordinate. 

Do you want to be a manager? If you want to be effective as a manager, you have to be in it for more than the money. Think about it: would you apply for a job as a mechanic if you had no experience, even if it paid double what you were making now? Would you apply for any position that you had no aptitude for, just because it paid well? If you did you'd soon find yourself in over your head. If you had a goal of becoming a mechanic you'd go to school, or become an apprentice, or even go to YouTube for instructional videos. Why then, do so many people apply for management jobs when they have no experience or skill in management? Because our culture doesn't view management as a profession, but as an extension of the underlying profession.

Do you want to be a manager? Find out what it involves and educate yourself!

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XX

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XVIII - Christians Calling Other Christians Not-Christian

Growing up I didn't think too much about other Christians and what they believed, or whether they were "real" Christians. I was raised in the Catholic Church, which definitely teaches that it's the "One True Church", but it wasn't something that came up in everyday conversation. In my teens I became aware of the Protestant Churches in my neighborhood and attended their services out of curiosity. This disturbed my parents, but I didn't detect anything very much different. It wasn't until I got involved in The Way that I was exposed to the idea that some Christians didn't think some other Christians were...Christians.

I'm not talking about one Christian judging another Christian's behavior as unchristian, but the characterization of another Christian denomination as being fundamentally outside what the Bible would define as Christian. Not just labeling fringe denominations as cults, but other "regular" denominations. This a doctrinal thing, not behavior. 

I've written much about The Way's cultishness, but their attitudes about how one would define a "true" Christian was right in line with conservative Protestant thinking. The thinking that fueled the engine of the European religious wars of the 1600 and 1700's had definitely not completely gone away. Catholics viewed Protestants as deluded schismatics and Protestants viewed Catholics as Mary worshipping Papists. In the nineties my ex-wife and I were home schooling our children and purchased some textbooks from a Christian book publisher. I clearly remember the description in a history textbook of Catholics as a "false religion". 

I mostly hear these accusations of Christians not being real Christians mostly in a political context. Supporters of both major presidential parties are sure that no real Christian could truly support the other candidate. Abortion is a major theme in this flinging of heretical epithets, but even something as ordinary as clapping back at hecklers becomes "evidence" that a candidate hates Christians. In the political realm it's not so much suspect doctrine that gets one viewed as outside the pale, but the assumption that God is without a doubt on one side. 

This is not something new. The New Testament Epistles are full of references to "false teachers" who are accused of leading people astray and even being diabolic influences. Who are these allegedly false teachers? They weren't pagan priests or Jewish rabbis, they were other Christian leaders! Of course, since history is written by the victors, we don't see much of what the other factions of Christians in the First Century had to say, but you can bet that they were writing the same things about the eventual authors of the epistles that the epistle writers were saying about them. Even beyond the era when The Bible was written there was a constant battle among different factions of Christians to decide what the truth was. There was a constantly evolving opinion about various topics about which the Bible was unclear. Why? Because the Bible was unclear.

And other than politicians disingenuously promoting themselves as the only Christian alternative, the reason that regular Christians can confidently conclude that what they believe is the truth while other people are deluded fools or shills for Satan is that the Bible is (1) Unclear (2) Internally contradictory and (3) Not a concise doctrinal statement. The Bible is not a manifesto laying out a clear statement of beliefs and clarifying all manner of moral and practical conundrums, it is a loose collection of biographies (which contradict each other) and letters addressing behavioral problems in specific places. This leaves a lot of room for interpretation. In order to make sense out of it a Christian is required to cherry pick, ignore the contradictions and parts that they don't like and interpret the ambiguous sections in a way that props up their own morality. Then decide that any other view is not just wrong, but inspired by The Devil. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XIX

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XVIII

One of the things that The Way drilled into us was the expectation that we would be persecuted. While the upwelling of anti-cult animus starting in 1978 following the People's Temple Massacre surely drove some people away, it also mobilized a lot of people against groups like The Way, groups which weren't as extreme as Jim Jones' bunch, but which nonetheless were enough outside the mainstream to make the mainstream nervous. The Way played up this very real opposition to its operations and framed it as equivalent to the persecution suffered by Jesus, his apostles and the early Christians. In New York I was aware of anti-Way sentiment as part of the fear about cult involvement, but in a city that large it kind of got lost in the background noise of life. In a city of 5,000 we stood out as if we had a spotlight trained upon us all day, every day. Because that where I was sent—Sidney, Nebraska, a city, if you could call it that, of around 5,000 people. 

The Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador program was in its tenth year in 1980. After a decade or more of slow growth from the mid-fifties to the late sixties, Wierwille made a move that would change the course of The Way. He travelled to San Francisco and found several leaders of the nascent "Jesus People" movement that had sprung up there. He convinced some of them to follow him back to New Knoxville and learn his version of Biblical research. They became the seed from which the fast growing "Way Tree" would spring, teaching Wierwille's Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class to their followers, who tended to be young—college or even high school students mostly. Centers of Way activity sprung up mostly organically as people "witnessed" to their family and friends. Associated "ministries" were especially active in the San Francisco and Long Island areas. In addition to this type of growth several Way followers in the Wichita Kansas area participated in a test program—leaving their home areas and attempting to start Way "twig" fellowships and run PFAL classes in new areas. This pilot program  was so successful that at a Way gathering in August 1971, Wierwille asked for volunteers to participate in the new WOW outreach program. For many years this was one of the main sources of new Way members. 

The main goal of a "family" of WOWs was to "witness" to new people in their assigned city, run PFAL classes and ultimately, if there wasn't already a Way presence, to plant a brand new Way twig fellowship there. You were to arrive at your assigned city with $300, find housing and a part-time job and then get to work "witnessing", which you were to spend 8 hours a day, six days a week doing. Witnessing was, in effect, your unpaid, full-time job. As I revealed in Part XVII, the bus we were travelling on broke down in central Iowa. By the time we made our way out to Sidney, which as only 60 miles east of the Wyoming border, we were almost a week late.  We were raring to go, but what we didn't know was that Sidney knew that we were coming and they weren't happy about it. 

Start from the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XIX

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXVII - No Kool-Aid Necessary

One of the things that people misunderstand about cults is that what makes a cult cultish isn't what they believe, it's what they do. 

You want to believe that the earth was populated by aliens from the planet Xrts'dic 3 billion years ago, or that you get reincarnated as a rabbits? So what?, as long as those beliefs aren't hurting anyone.  Most Christians believe a number of things in common, despite differences in church governance and ritual. One of those things is that God exists as something called The Trinity, which oversimplified means that God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit are all God, not three separate gods and that neither is superior to or pre-existed the other. The doctrinal nuances and niceties are over most people's heads and what people actually believe would probably be considered heretical. 

The Way International didn't believe that God was a Trinity, but that Jesus was simply a man. For many mainstream Christians this was enough to label them a cult. Just as those same Christians labelled Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses as cults due to their non-mainstream view of God and Jesus. I'm not going to discuss the details of why The Way International believed that Jesus wasn't God, because I don't think it is relevant to their categorization as a cult. My own view is that the writers of the Gospels and Epistles, far from being inspired by God to put together a coherent narrative, were all fallible human beings who had different ideas about the nature of God and Jesus. Their disagreement needed to be explained somehow—early Orthodox-Catholic Christians harmonized the contradictions by coming up with The Trinity; Unitarians, ignoring or explaining away verses they didn't like, came up with their own doctrine. 

No, what makes a cult is something that has little to do with the minutia of doctrine. Is there a charismatic leader who is deferred to? Does it claim to have special knowledge that no one else has access to? Does it work to cut you off from previous ties? Does it attempt to regiment and control aspects of your life? By no means does it have to be as extreme as the People's Temple in Guyana. It doesn't have to require you to dress in yellow robes like the Hare Krishna group. You aren't necessarily locked away in a "compound" like David Koresh's Branch Davidians. Usually the signs are a lot more subtle. 

When I was first involved in The Way while living in New York the cultish nature wasn't as apparent. The Long Island fellowships had grown quickly and organically and for a long time were functionally independent. When I was in the WOW Ambassador program I rationalized the level of control being because I was in a structured program, it wasn't until I moved to Lincoln that I saw that living a normal life, i.e. job, education, relationships, etc, was going to be hampered by involvement with The Way. 

Start from the beginning: Part I