Managers - Part XXIV - What Do You Expect of People?

A lot of attention lately has been given to workers walking out of jobs because they have had enough. Enough of abusive customers, enough of managers who don't support them, and enough of poor working conditions. I completely understand. Entry-level workers have been told for years that if they didn't like an aspect of their jobs they should just quit, so that's what many of done. The center of gravity in the employer-employee relationship has shifted in many situations to favor the employee. 

I have long said that while no job is perfect, every job is a balance between the good things about it and the bad. Where the fulcrum lies is going to differ depending on an individual's priorities. For some, a big paycheck might outweigh abusive customers, for others quality of life balance or a flexible schedule might be more important. When the bad outweighs the good, that's when an employee is going to quit. That's entirely appropriate — an employee has to decide what's best for them; everyone has to weigh for themselves what they are willing to do and what they're willing to put up with. 

As a manager in several different industries for most of my life, I hired (and fired) a lot of people. One of the things that I had to deal with in that role was people who, for one reason or another, did not understand what the job was and expected the very nature of the job to conform to their expectations. For example, if you were hired to work on a road construction crew, it would not be reasonable to be upset that you had to work outside. The nature of the job is outside work. It would be reasonable to complain if you were not allowed rest or meal breaks, were not provided with personal protective equipment, or were not paid on time. But you can't work a road construction job inside an air conditioned office. 

One of my early management positions was as a district manager for a newspaper circulation department. Delivering newspapers is not an easy job. Newspaper carriers are considered independent contractors, not employees. (This may have changed in recent years, but it was the case when I was in the business) What this means is that they don't have days off, they can't call in sick and have to find their own substitute if they get sick or the car breaks down. They don't get snow days; they are out working in the dark in all kinds of weather and on all the holidays. This was all explained in detail to every single person that we contracted to deliver papers, yet we would still get carriers attempting to "call in sick", or who quit suddenly when the first snowstorm of the year hit. It may have been a terrible job, but it was the job that you agreed to do when you signed up. 

Much of my management career was spent in various roles in retail grocery stores. While not as grueling as a job delivering newspapers, if you worked in a grocery store you weren't an independent contractor, but an employee, with all of an employee's legal protections. There were many things that retail employees put up with that are not intrinsic to the job, but can be found in many retail environments. Varying schedules, and abusive customers are two top problems. The companies for whom I worked were obsessed with "making labor". A budget was set for payroll expenses for each store and each department within each store that was based on a percentage of gross sales. Dividing that dollar amount by the average wage told you how many hours you could schedule. Problems arose when sales were inconsistent — for example if the sales at the beginning of the month were regularly much higher than at the end of the month, or holiday sales were much higher than average. An employee might find herself scheduled for 40 hours one week, 28 hours another week and 15 on a slow week. This made it difficult to plan ahead, to budget, or even have a second job. 

The biggest disconnect between the needs of the company and the expectations of employees was holiday schedules. Like in my newspaper days, we made sure that we explained our expectations to new employees. One very important expectation was that during certain holidays we were much busier than normal and that we couldn't grant vacation time off during these holidays. That didn't mean that there were no days off. Everyone still got their two days off per week, but you couldn't expect to take off from December 20 through January 5 — those were extremely busy times and we needed all hands on deck. There was also the issue of fairness: everyone wanted July 4th off, wanted Christmas Eve off, but someone had to be there. But every year we still received requests for extended vacations. People were naturally disappointed when they couldn't have the time off that they wanted, but that was the job. 

It might be argued that some of these expectations, independent contractor status of newspaper carriers or no holidays off for retail workers shouldn't be part of the job. And that's where the free market comes in. Many industries, food service and retail in particular, are having trouble filling positions and have had to change the way that they do business. Some have responded with higher pay scales. But if the problem is working conditions and not pay, they will still have trouble filling positions. If enough people stay away from grocery store, or other retail, jobs due to expectations like working all holidays, eventually some of these companies might start closing on holidays. Or perhaps some other creative solution. Agreeing to certain job conditions, like working holidays, but then complaining or quitting when asked to work holidays, is dishonest. Ask questions, find out exactly what the job requirements are; if the employer deviates, stand your ground. If the job conditions don't meet your requirements, go somewhere else, which is more efficient and less stressful than taking a job where you know that you'll eventually quit because you'll be asked to do what they said you would be asked to do. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XXIII - Other Christianities

What most Christians don't realize is that despite what the Book of Acts might suggest the early Christian Church wasn't A Christian Church, but was a patchwork of numerous Christian Churches, or more descriptively, multiple Christianities. 

Consider the scenario. Evan assuming that the Gospels accurately describe the scope of Jesus' following, i.e. an inner circle of twelve (minus one) men, an outer circle of seventy and an unknown number of men and women of varying levels of commitment...if they truly believed what Jesus was preaching, they too believed that the world was coming to an end. Not at some nebulous time in the future, but before the people around them started dying off! If they were driven to continue Jesus' mission, they'd be attempting to get as many of their fellow Jews living right so that they could enter the Kingdom of God. (Yup. "Fellow Jews". You read that right, there is little indication that Jesus was preaching to the gentiles.) The last thing that any of Jesus' followers would be trying to do was to start an organization, a church. 

Nonetheless, that's what happened.

It's indisputable that something ostensibly based on the teachings of Jesus spread around the Roman Empire and even bordering nations within a very short period of time. How closely what got spread around adhered to what Jesus was teaching isn't so clear. 

There are several pieces of evidence that there were competing versions of Christianity in the first century following Jesus' death. Firstly there's the evidence within the scriptures that we have. Throughout the epistles there's repeated references to false prophets, false teachers, people preaching "another Jesus" and even those being labeled "antichrist". These weren't pagans, weren't satanists, they were other Christians who happened to have a different opinion about what Jesus taught and the meaning of those teachings, including what they were supposed to do about them. Then there's the testimony of Paul, who is very clear that he had doctrinal disagreements with other Christians, including Peter. We also have clear historical evidence of self-described Christian movements. The most well known and longest lasting were the Marcionites. Their founder, Marcion, taught that the God of the Old Testament and the God of Jesus were two separate entities, with the Old Testament God being an inferior, if not evil, entity. He also rejected all the Gospels except for Luke. His movement survived for several centuries as a rival to the Orthodox/Catholic Church. (The Catholics, or Roman Catholics, and the Eastern Orthodox were one church through the first millennium, even if there were internal disagreements) Even in the Gospels, there is a difference between the Jesus being presented in the synoptics versus the Gospel of John, and differences in emphasis among the synoptics. . 

It's not surprising that there was disagreement. It would be surprising if there were not. Jesus operated in a backwater of the Roman Empire. Even in the more urban areas communication was far from instantaneous. Christian communities, even in the same province would be virtually isolated, with only occasional communication with others. Jesus' teachings would have spread exclusively by word of mouth in the early decades before epistles and gospels came to be written and passed around. Not only would transmission of "the Word" resembled a modern game of "telephone", but as nature abhors a vacuum, so does human nature. Charismatic local leaders would have put their own spin on Jesus' words. 

One competing Christianity is the sect we know as the Ebionites. These were Christians who saw themselves as followers of Jesus who retained their Jewishness. In the writings that have come down to us they were opposed by Paul, who insisted that one did not need to follow Jewish law in order to be a Christian. Earlier I mentioned Marcion. There were also numerous sects of Christian Gnostics who held any number of beliefs that we today might consider bizarre. Or anti-Biblical. But who wrote the Bible?

One of things that every group of the various Christianities claimed was that their beliefs were passed down from Jesus' original apostles. By the time the competition among the various sects came to a head, all the originals were safely dead and could no longer be consulted. That didn't stop gospels and epistles from being produced with the names of The Twelve tacked on to them. In addition to the books of the New Testament that we know from our Bibles, there were dozens of gospels, epistles and apocalypses being passed around. There was no standard. Different sects used different writings. There was no central authority to decide which were legitimate and which weren't. 

But eventually there was a central authority. Even though the Catholic Church claims that there is an unbroken chain through Jesus to his apostles to their successors up through modern day. It's more likely in my opinion that what became the Catholic and Orthodox Churches coalesced slowly over several centuries until they became the dominant sect of the various Christianities. When Constantine the Great legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire there were still competing sects: the previously mentioned Marcionites and Gnostics, and the Arians in northern and western Europe. A sect called the Nestorians found refuge in the Persian Empire. The Catholic/Orthodox however, emerged as the dominant among the various types of Christianity. Their power, backed by the Empire, enabled them to claim to be the one, true, church, and label competitors as heretics. 

Not long after the consolidation of power, the Catholic/Orthodox hierarchy saw the need to establish which writings were authorized — what constituted the canon of scripture. Related to this was the doctrine of Apostolic Succession. The Catholic/Orthodox leadership maintained that they were the successors of the original apostles and that right doctrine had been transmitted from one generation to the next through that unbroken lineage. This succession was both literal — doctrine was passed down, and spiritual — they inherited the spiritual authority of their predecessors. Referring to this authority, they decided what writings were authentic and which were not, destroying many of the alternate scriptures, although some copies survived into modern times. 

The process was somewhat circular. The Bible, once established, was what the winning contestant in the Church competition supposedly was based upon, but what constituted that Bible, was what the winners decided would be in it. More on this in a future article: Sola Scriptura.

Start at The Beginning: Part I 

Workin' Man - Part XXIII - Van Dorn Store Director

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 

 I was at the Van Dorn Russ's as the Store Director for slightly under three years. The first 18 months went pretty well — I felt that I had the support of Operations VP Tom, Larry, who was in charge of the corporate department directors as well as Scott R, the District Manager who was my immediate supervisor. The last 18 months were a nightmare. 

One very important thing that I was not told was that the store was slated to be closed. It had been losing money for years. It was situated on a very busy road but was difficult to get in or out of. Hy-Vee had built a large store a mile south, which was impossible to compete with, and B&R had committed to expanding and remodeling the Russ's at 66th & O streets two miles north — more competition. Closing the store was a wise business decision, but they hid the fact from the staff and even from me. 

Because the store was losing money it was difficult for managers to earn bonuses, and anyone with any ambition had their eyes on bigger and more profitable stores. There were a few managers who liked the slower pace, and a few who had sabotaged their careers and were stuck there, but between corporate transferring out managers they thought had potential and others applying for positions in bigger stores after being trained at Van Dorn, it was a constant revolving door of managers. The ones that were left were, like me, kind of the misfits of B&R Stores. In a meeting that I had with Patrick, the outgoing store director (who I had trained as a Grocery Manager at Pine Lake) I was informed of the myriad problems with most, if not all, of my managers. My Bakery Manager had instigated an OSHA investigation over an accident in her department. She and her assistant manager also had been involved in a relationship — she lodged a sexual harassment complaint against him, which he disputed by revealing sexual explicit texts that she has sent to him. He was transferred out. My Scanning/Pricing Manager had been written up repeatedly for spreading rumors about other employees. The Deli Manager had recently been written up for having a multitude of out-of-date items on the shelves and was so difficult to work for that we couldn't properly staff the department. One of my shift supervisors wanted to quit during my first week in the store after running over her own foot with a pallet jack. The Cash Office Manager had suffered brain injury a few years before and was routinely rude to everyone in the store. I fit right in with this crew. 

Despite the difficulty in keeping qualified staff, I attempted to lead those who stuck around in focusing on being great at the basics and good customer service. The "basics" included obvious things like never running out of ad items and keeping the bathrooms clean. Good customer service included minimizing lines at the checkouts (this would eventually be my downfall). Several of us non-cashiers were trained to run a checkstand and would "jump on" a register when it got busy. This usually took up five minutes and virtually eliminated the lines. Saturday morning checking became a regular thing for me, which was unusual, since the only cashiering that I had ever done was when I substituted for the Save Best store director one week. I set up next to Bev, an experienced cashier, so I could ask her questions. 

One of the things that corporate management never seemed to understand was how difficult it was to properly staff a store with low sales. As I explained in a previous post, the labor budget for the store and for each department was based on a percentage of sales. You multiplied the budgeted percentage by projected sales to come up with what you could spend on staffing, then divide that by average wage to determine the number of hours you could schedule. The problem which never would be addressed was that it took a certain amount of labor hours to simply prepare a department for the day's business, even if the sales turned out to be $0. For example, in the production departments, such as Bakery, Deli, Smokehouse, you were making product, not just opening boxes and putting items on the shelf. This took time and people to do it. Even non-production departments needed employees to keep the shelves stocked.  

While it's always a good idea to evaluate your staffing needs — you don't always need as many people as you think you do — there's a limit to how much cutting you can do. One of the more ridiculous recurring budgeting scenarios was departments whose budget didn't even allow for one full-time employee, (not even a full-time manager) yet since product ordering, stocking and basic customer service still needed to be done, employees would be pulled from other departments. Week after week I would plug sales projections into the spreadsheet that I had developed years before only to see the depressingly low available hours appear. Some of the hours projections, if followed, would have made it difficult, if not impossible, to carry out our responsibilities. I made the decision to staff my store at a level that I believed was needed to be able to provide good customer service and meet the basic requirements to operate a grocery store. This meant that I was voluntarily forgoing any possibility of receiving a quarterly bonus for meeting the budgeted labor goal. But it also meant that my employees would not have their hours cut to achieve an arbitrary number. 

My immediate supervisor at the time, Vice President of Operations Tom Schulte, scheduled an appointment with me to "show me how to write a schedule". I welcomed the input, because I sure didn't know how to cover all the departments with the labor dollars available. His input, however, was a huge disappointment. He started reviewing with me the math needed to calculate available hours for each department, which I already knew how to do. My method of sales projections were always spot on, and the math for calculating hours was pretty simple. I told him that I knew how to do the math, but what I didn't know how to do was write a schedule that would enable me to properly run a store with those hours. He didn't know what to say to that, he just mumbled something about none of the previous store directors could make labor either. 

I have to say that my relationship with Tom during my first year as a Store Director was pretty good. Despite having made some foolish mistakes in my career, I think he was impressed by the efforts I took to prepare myself for the job. He was understanding about the reality that the store was losing money due to circumstances beyond my control (we were budgeted to lose money — but lost even more than what was budgeted) and focused on my efforts to improve the operational aspects of the store. Any time he stopped by for a "store walk" I received good feedback and no nitpicking when things weren't 100 percent. Company President Pat Raybould was another story. 

Pat had two idiosyncrasies that made his visits to the stores dreaded events. Whenever he was out of town he would bring back ideas that he saw in other stores and pushed for us to adopt them, no matter how inappropriate. After visiting a store in Texas that had a giant display of nopalitos (cactus leaves), he would decide that all of our stores need cactus leaf displays. On one trip where he stopped in a small town Casey's convenience store he noticed that the Casey's seemed to be the center of activity for that little town. From that, he came to the conclusion that we needed to make our stores the center of activity. To do this we were supposed to schedule "events" one evening a week. We started out with a kids' night that was well-attended, but didn't result in any measurable increase in sales, which was the whole point. Most of the stores did this for a few weeks and just quietly stopped, hoping that Pat wouldn't notice (he didn't). 

Pat's other bad habit was that he never forgot about someone's screw up. Another Store Director relayed a story to me about a visit from Pat on National Doughnut Day while he (the Store Director) was running himself ragged getting ready for the day's massive doughnut sales. Pat wanted to talk to him "upstairs" and brought up an incident from several years previous when the Dairy Manager was doing a poor job at rotation. According to Pat, this incident was evidence that the Store Director didn't have his head in the game. It didn't matter that this Store Director was a top performing leader, had taken action to solve the problem with the Dairy Manager, eventually firing him, and it was several years in the past. In my store he would get it into his head that certain people were problem employees. He saw one of my janitors get a cup of water from the Deli soda dispenser and became convinced that he was always slacking off. Our Evening Supervisor didn't notice that lines were forming at the check stands (and no one called him) and Pat became convinced that he wasn't doing his job, despite the Evening Supervisor having duties such as adding new items to the shelves and unloading the trucks that took them away from the front of the store much of the time. He would also quiz employees about areas of the store that they had no knowledge of and draw the wrong conclusion from that. 

One of my weirdest Pat encounters involved an odor that was detectable as you first walked in the front door. It was fishy, but not really that strong. (This was an old building with plumbing issues — there were always odors) Pat was on a mission to find the source of the smell. We ended up back at the fish case. We stood in front of the fish display and could not smell any fish. We went into the back cooler and found some fish where the paper covering the fish was askew. Pat determined that a fishy smell at the front of the store, which you couldn't detect right in front of the fish case was somehow caused by fish in a closed cooler at the back of the store. 

Fish...that reminds me of the stupidity of the full-service fresh meat and fish case. Hy-Vee was known for having a full-service meat case 24 or 30 feet long if I remember correctly, staffed by three or four employees all day and evening. In order to compete when Hy-Vee built a new store just south of us B&R decided that the Van Dorn Russ's needed a full service meat case. There were two problems. One was that our display case was a measly 8-12 feet long and we did not have enough staff to man the counter. In the evening we had one employee, who in addition to serving customers had to clean the back room. In a money losing store, this was a ridiculous addition. 

Another useless section that most Russ's Markets had was what we called Specialty Foods. It mainly consisted of "fancy" versions of mainstream products like mustard, or whole grain flour. Some of those sold well, but most of the specialty items went out of date before we could sell even half a case. It also included "international" foods. Some of those, like Mexican or Mediterranean foods sold well enough, but we also sold foods from the United Kingdom, a nation not known for their cuisine. One of these U.K. items was spotted dick. Spotted dick is a traditional British steamed pudding made with suet and dried fruit. I was at a conference in Florida with a several other Russ's Store Directors and Pat when I struck up a lunchtime conversation with a Store Director from another state about specialty foods. I used "spotted dick" as an example, and repeated the words "spotted dick" several times. Pat, with an uncomfortable look on his face, asked me if I needed to use that kind of language. I quickly backpedaled in my mind, scanning to see if I had dropped an "F-Bombs" or any other "bad words" — nope, I came up blank. It turns out that he didn't know what "spotted dick" was and thought I was referring to another type of dick. Classic Pat. 

Start with Part I

Managers XXIII - Why Do People Apply for Management Positions?

One of the common reasons why there are so many bad managers out there is that in most companies the only way to earn a higher wage beyond a certain level is to move into management. If you've read any of the earlier posts in this series, you know that I believe that being a manager requires a skill set that may be related to, but is generally separate from, the jobs that are being managed.

For example, Mary works for Widgets International as an apprentice widget assembler. After a year she moves up to journeyman widget assembler. Mary is one of the best widget assemblers in her section. She is fast and accurate and hardly ever has a widget returned for re-work. Every year she receives an increase in pay based on her annual review, but after a few years she reaches the wage cap for her position. She transfers over to widget design, which has a higher pay scale than widget assembler, but after a few years she reaches the wage cap again. What can Mary do to earn a higher wage? Well, there's a team supervisor position open. Mary, on the strength of her excellent record of assembling and designing widgets, is hired for the position. Good for Mary! She's now on the management track! But chances are Mary, within a year, will be viewed by either her subordinates or her superiors as a bad manager. How could this be? She was the best at all aspects of her job. But supervising or managing other people requires completely different skills than doing the job itself.

New managers who have no aptitude for, or have received no training in management tend to fail in one of several ways:

Many non-managers view their own managers simply has higher-paid versions of themselves. They decide that a manager is "good" based on how much time they spend "working", i.e. doing the same thing they did before becoming a manager. New managers often bring this world view with them when they assume their first managerial position. What ends up happening is that the new manager, partly to get on his subordinates' good side and partly because he doesn't know any better, spends all of his time doing things rather than ensuring that things get done. The result is that true managerial responsibilities, such as planning, allocating of resources and employee development, are neglected. The employees likely think that they have a "good" manager, but upper management just sees a highly paid clerk.

Some neophyte managers go the other way. Their opinion of managers was simply people who got to boss other people around, so when they become managers themselves, they make no effort to actually manage, but lord it over and bully their subordinates. Employees generally think that these managers are "bad", since they don't "work". They also tend to take whatever orders they receive from upper management and deliver them to their team without any filter, so the higher ups, at least initially, like them.

This isn't to say that effective managers can't come up through the ranks, or aren't often self-taught. But there are a lot of people out there who need to earn more yet do not have management skills, but end up being promoted into management anyway. In the various service and retail industries in which I have been employed I have seen people promoted into management for two main reasons: (1) They were good at the non-management work that they did or (2) They knew how to schmooze the hiring manager. Seldom did a job interview involve questions about leadership qualities or administrative abilities. People frequently applied for positions that they were unqualified for simply because they paid more. I can't say I really blame them. If there are no other avenues for financial advancement, why not roll the dice and try for it? Especially since it could be seen that other non-qualified people had been promoted.

In my retail grocery career, I saw an interesting phenomenon with job applications. At the store level there was a relatively flat organizational chart. There was a Store Director & Assistant Store Director at the top, department managers running the various sections of the store (sometimes with assistant managers) and clerks below that. In some of the smaller department the managers were doing a lot of the day-to-day work in addition to managing. When a management position opened up, there might be 3-4 applicants, depending on the size of the store, usually clerks who were already working in that department, or an assistant manager in another store. Sometimes there were no applicants. But when an Assistant Store Director or Human Resources Coordinator position was posted it wasn't unusual to see 12-15 applicants, 90% of them with no relevant experience. I thought it might be because no one really knew what the people in either of those positions really did, they thought it didn't involve any real work, and surely it paid a lot!

So what's the solution? There really are two problems: (1) Unqualified people being promoted into management and (2) No path for wage increases outside of management.

Here's a few thoughts:

Be clear regarding what precisely is expected of managers
Hardly anyone knows what managers are supposed to be doing. Making it known what managers do, other than "bossing people around", might motivate some employees to develop real management skills before they become managers. 

Set up training/education classes for prospective managers

This would be beneficial to any company that wants their managers to do what managers are supposed to do: ensure that things get done. When I worked for state government there was such a program, but people usually had already been promoted into supervisory positions before entering the class. 

Create a path for valuable, experienced employees to earn wages comparable to management positions
In some businesses this happens to an extent. When I worked for a newspaper, the unionized pressmen earned wages comparable to sales reps and some managers; pharmacists in grocery stores are often paid more than all other employees, including the Store Director. But this is rare. Most positions have a wage cap that cannot be exceeded, but there is no legitimate reason why someone who had years, or even decades, of experience can't be paid as much as a rookie manager. These people are often the ones who keep institutional memory alive, and are the ones who keeps the wheels turning. One of the companies where I worked was very explicit about it: they told people that if they wanted to earn more they should apply for management positions. 

Once companies understand that management is a skill in and of itself, separate from what is being managed

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XXIV

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXIII - Yule Edition

Let's interrupt our march through my cult years with a side visit to The Way's views on Christmas. It may surprise some people that there are Christian denominations that do not celebrate Christmas. In the early days of European settlement in North America Christmas celebrations were actually banned in some of the colonies. The Puritans in particular had problems with the way Christmas was celebrated. Their objections were manifold. On one hand they viewed Christmas as a distinctly Papist, i.e. Catholic celebration. This was in the era of religious wars between Catholic and Protestant monarchs, and the Puritans were, if anything, ultra-Protestant. The other part of their resistance was how English Christmas traditions, especially among the working classes, had become a day off from work and dominated by fun and games. And drinking. A lot of drinking. It took a long time for the Christmas observances of non-English immigrants to make their way into American ways of celebrating Christmas; but even today, there are groups such as the Jehovah's Witnesses who do not observe any special days, based upon the Biblical admonition in Galatians 4:10 not to be "an observer of days and seasons". 

The Way, at least during my involvement, talked a good game in regards to following the dictates of the Bible, but in practice found ways around their supposed standards. Christmas observance was no exception. 

It's no surprise to most people that the Bible does not give a date for Jesus' birth. It doesn't give a year either. Part of this can be attributed to the lack of a common calendar. The current A.D. numbering system was devised in what we now call 525 A.D., when Dionysius Exiguus came up with a numbering system independent of the regnal years of reigning monarchs. He calculated (although we aren't sure what he based his calculation on) that A.D. 1 was the first full year following the birth of Jesus, putting Jesus' birth in what we now call 1 B.C. (there is no Year "0" in this system). There's a lot of other theories regarding what time of year Jesus was born, ranging from the Spring to mid September, but none are definitive. The December date that was associated with Saturnalia and the birth of "The Unconquered Sun" eventually became the accepted consensus date. 

Not satisfied with the position that we don't know the actual date or year of Jesus' birth, Victor Wierwille, the leader of The Way, set out to prove that the Bible really does give us that information, and that you can discover it with some Biblical research and a little astronomy. In 1981 he published Jesus Christ Our Promised Seed which claimed to narrow down the time to a 90-minute window on September 11, 3 B.C.!

In the late 1800's a Church of England minister, E.W. Bullinger, wrote a book titled Witness of the Stars. The premise was that the constellations told a story—the story of the Bible, and that interpreted properly, you could trace the prophecies of the coming Messiah throughout the zodiac. His reasoning behind this was quite convoluted and somewhat technical, if not completely opaque and inaccessible to the layman, but Wierwille latched on to it and added his own theories. Wierwille made the assumption that the Magi of the gospels (nowhere are they called kings by the way) were the successors of the wise men of the court of Babylon who answered to the prophet (and lions' den guy) Daniel, which was why they thought a "star" heralded the birth of a king of a backwater province of a foreign power. This made sense, sort of, but like so much of Wierwille's "research", he took what was a plausible assumption and promoted it as fact. So what did he think the Magi were looking for? Certainly not a laser beam from heaven spotlighting the manger. No, based on the constellation Leo the Lion representing the Tribe of Judah, Wierwille looked for astronomical events that would have been visible in Roman Judea during the time period between when he calculated Herod came to power and his death (which was based on calculations that disagreed with virtually all those who studied that time period). I don't recall the details, but he came up with something and tied it in with the completely unrelated verses in Revelation 12 about a woman "clothed with the sun, with stars in her hair and the moon at her feet" to indicate when the constellation Virgo was visible between sunset and moonrise using astronomical software and came up with the incredibly specific time frame that if I remember correctly was an 81 minute (my memory is a bit fuzzy on the actual time frame) time span the evening of September 11, 3 B.C. It was assumption built upon assumption based on a crazy theory, but it was wrapped up in a blue book cover and presented as undisputed fact. "Teachings" featuring the claims from this book were highlighted every December, with all of us faithful Waybots telling ourselves how superior we were to regular Christians because we knew this completely irrelevant and worthless information. We were also pretty fond of changing the words of Christmas Carols to make them more "accurate" and telling everyone who stood still for a half minute that angels don't have wings. 

Even before this book came out, The Way had a split personality when it came to Christmas. On one hand they preached that we weren't to be observers of days and seasons (like Christmas) but on the other hand we did observe most of the cultural and secular aspects of Christmas. Somehow The Way's leaders thought that simply changing the name made it all okay, hence the Wayism: Household Holiday. (I'm not going to get into it in detail here, but The Way made a distinction between the family of God and the household of God, with the household being the more exclusive, special and blessed subset of the family). Even assuming that The Way was God's "household", what made December 25th a household holiday? No one ever had a good answer. What annoyed me personally though was how "Household Holiday" became "Ho Ho" and we would wish each other "Happy Ho Ho". Way employees, and those in their Way Corps training program, were given some time off during the "Household Holidays" in order to temporarily "relocate" off campus to visit family or friends (you know, just like people who did celebrate Christmas)—which was called (of course) "Ho Ho Relo". Yikes. 

Throughout my involvement in The Way I observed Christmas just like any other secular American. I had a tree, I put up decorations, I sent out cards, exchanged gifts, but I also engaged in smug superiority over all those poor, ignorant Christians who just didn't understand the "true meaning of Christmas". 

Start from the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XXIV

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXII

To say that the people of Sidney were fortified against us was an understatement. In addition to the "Jericho March" incident there were frequent threats of violence and attempts to run us out of town. We were confronted in the grocery store by shouting church members; cars driven by those opposed to our presence attempted to run us down in the street; objects were thrown at us in public; we were evicted from our home on New Year's Eve; we were the subject of a radio program warning the town about us; continuing attempts to get us fired...it was constant.

One thing that this treatment solidified in me was a tendency toward anti-bigotry. I remember thinking at the time that while this persecution was horrible, I could convert to one of the mainstream churches and it would all stop, or I could move to the next town and no one would know that I was in a cult. A Black person on the other hand, couldn't un-Black himself in order to stop the racism. This lesson stayed with me. Although there was still work to do ridding myself of racist mindsets and habits, being the target of virulent prejudice made me think twice about engaging in it myself. 

But when you're in a cult, your thinking tends to follow certain grooves. Just like the opposition from our families was seen as proof that we were angering "the adversary" (aka The Devil), and therefore doing God's work, the steady opposition from the townspeople put us in the company of the followers of Jesus in the Bible's Acts of The Apostles. We were being persecuted for speaking "The Word". Of course this widespread antipathy in such a small town meant that we had quickly worn out our welcome. Door knocking became out of the question, and there weren't many public venues where people hadn't made up their minds about us already. But we somehow found the energy to pat ourselves on the back for being such devoted and committed followers of The Way, Jesus Christ. 

After the first of the year, after having to find a new place to live after being evicted, Ronnie, our state leader decided that we would be relocated halfway through the year, in February. Our witnessing wasn't without any results, we had two men signed up for the PFAL class, but since we needed seven to run a class, we hadn't been able to run one. Once we found out we were moving, both of our new coverts decided to move with us, to Kearney as it turned out. Although one of them was having sex with one of the WOW women and the other one had some serious mental issues, so they weren't quite as devoted to "The Word" as we thought. 

Our time in Sidney ended on an amusing note. We had invited Rev. Jerry over for coffee to say goodbye. While in our home he made a big deal about how "The Lord" had informed him that two of us were staying in Sidney while the other two moved on. I still remember Gail laughing and telling him that The Lord must have thrown him a curve since we were all leaving. The next day, after selling or giving away our furniture and packing up the car, we headed for Kearney.

New problems awaited us there.

Start from the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XXIII

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XXII - Translations

Translating the Bible from the language in which it was written isn't anything new. During the Third Century BCE a translation of the Jewish scriptures was made from Hebrew into Greek since many Jews, especially those of the diaspora, no longer spoke or were able to read Hebrew. Aramaic or Greek were the everyday languages of most Jews of that era. This translation came to be referred to as The Septuagint. This was the version of the Old Testament that the writers of the New Testament were familiar with. Old Testament quotes typically adhere more closely to the Septuagint than to the Hebrew. 

The New Testament was originally written in Greek. Although there are some who maintain that parts of it were first written in Aramaic, this position doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. While Aramaic was the common tongue among Jews in Judaea, Syria, and other parts of what we now call the Middle East, Gentiles, as well as many Jews, employed Greek as the lingua franca. 

After Christianity was legalized in the Fourth Century CE, Latin translations were made, culminating in St. Jerome's Vulgate. ("Vulgate" means "common" in Latin). This incrementally became the official Bible of Western European Christianity. The Douay-Rheims translation was an English translation made from the Latin Vulgate in the late 1500's. 

During the Protestant Reformation emphasis was placed individual reading of the Bible, thus English language versions began to be made. There were several, but the most well-known is the King James Version (KJV). The KJV was not translated from the Latin version, but from Greek texts. A myth has proliferated that King James influenced the theology of the KJV, or that "parts were changed", or "taken out" to strengthen a patriarchal or anti-feminist viewpoint. Firstly, King James was not a theologian, nor did he have any theological aspirations. He did instruct the translators to adhere to Church of England structure and theology. This would be reflected, for example, in the word episcopos being translated as "bishop", rather than "overseer", among other things. The actual translation was done by several teams of translators who were experts in Biblical Greek. There is no evidence that there was any wholesale changing or deletions of sections in order to diminish the role of women, or to make any major theological revision. Whatever perceived theological problems surfaced had always been there. 

The KJV was revised regularly, mostly updating spelling and syntax, as it was originally written at the very beginning of the Early Modern period of the English language. Around the turn of the 19^th Century wholesale revisions started to be produced. The KJV translators, while using Greek manuscripts to compose their translations, relied on a small number of manuscripts that in retrospect were not very reliable. By 1900 there were a greater number of Greek manuscripts to work from. Greek manuscript editions known as "critical manuscripts" were composed, producing Greek New Testaments that compared various readings. Not only were there better manuscripts to work from, but the knowledge of Biblical Greek had improved over three centuries, as had the understanding of cultural referenced that might not be obvious from a literal translation. KJV contained many English words and expressions that had changed their meaning since it had been first published, in addition to Greek idioms. The newer versions endeavored to make the language of the Bible more accessible and understandable. A modern translation is likely as "accurate" as can be reasonably expected. 

What a translation, any translation, doesn't do, is wave away the contradictions and discrepancies. They're all still there, they're just rendered in modern vernacular. Even if we can be reasonably sure that we have Greek texts that reflect what was in the originally composed gospels, epistles and apocalypses, that doesn't make any of it true. I'm not concerned that the earliest epistle was written 20 years after Jesus supposedly lived, or that the first gospel another 10-20 years after that, or that Jesus himself never left any written records. That's normal. Most historical records that we have access to today were not contemporary records. Just because it's explainable, doesn't confer the laurel of truth upon it. Just because we can confirm certain facts about the Iliad and the Odyssey doesn't mean that all the supernatural doings of the various gods are true. 

What we've got is a pretty well preserved version of documents considering that they were written almost 2,000 years ago. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I 

Go to: Part XXIII