So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part V

When I first agreed to take the Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class I was unaware that the fellowship that I had been attending was part of a larger organization. Up until that point I had not attended "branch" meetings, or met any Way people outside of the group that met at Tom & Joe's apartment. The class would be taught in approximately three hour increments on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday over four weeks at a home in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens. As I have mentioned in earlier installments, the PFAL class had been taped in the late sixties, but at the time I did not realize I would be watching a recording. Wierwille was talked about as the "teacher" of the class. I had also heard about someone named Jerry, who was mentioned as the class instructor. Unaware that The Way called someone who coordinated and oversaw the running of a PFAL class an instructor, I conflated "instructor" and "teacher" and thought a guy named Jerry Wierwille from Ohio would be teaching the class in Flushing. What was actually happening was that Jerry McSherry (his real name) would be in charge of running the class for me, my cousin Kathy and seven other students. He would be assisted by several other graduates of PFAL who had responsibilities such as parking, refreshments, and audio-visual (actually just audio). We would be listening to cassette tapes of Wierwille. A video version, on Betamax of all things, was only run if there were 12 or more students. Charts and illustrations that would ordinarily be part of the video, would be shown to us by a class crew member who sat up front with a flip chart.

As I mentioned, each class session was approximately three hours. Two hours of teaching, a break, and a third hour. The first few sessions were pretty hard to get through. Imagine trying to sit through that much talking without even anything to look at other than some cheap flip charts. But part of what kept us going through those first few sessions was that we had paid for it. $100 was a lot of money for a barely employed college student in those days. We lost one student halfway through, but the rest of us stuck it out. The first three or four nights were variations of the theme of "the Bible is true", he really hammered into us the premise that what the Bible said was the standard for everything else. I sort of already believed that, despite not knowing much about the Bible. Toward the end of the first week, two things got my attention and piqued my interest. One was that the Bible interpreted itself. You didn't need someone to interpret it for you, because if you just read what was written, in context, the meaning would be crystal clear. The other was that by the end of the class, Wierwille would provide undeniable proof that Jesus Christ not only existed, but rose from the dead. After that I was all in.

In retrospect, the approach was brilliant. Even if you didn't believe that the Bible was divinely inspired before you took the class, twelve hours of verses on the subject was bound to wear you down. Looking back, it was pure circular reasoning, but he wasn't trying to convince the skeptical. His oratory wasn't going to convert an atheist, but if you had any tendency toward a Bible-based mindset, his teaching was going to sweep away any doubts about the heavenly origins of the Bible, and therefore it's veracity. And that set the stage for the second week, were things really got serious.

Now that we "knew that we knew that we knew" that the Bible was true, we were ready for some crazy stuff. In the midst of all the "The Bible is the Word of God" stuff, we were admonished to read what was written, not only right in the verse, but in the context, how words were used before, how words were used when the King James was written, and be aware of customs in Biblical times. Wierwille then started showing us parts of the Bible where what we had always been taught was wrong. He started out by simply pointing to a plain reading of the text where it contradicted what "everyone knew" about the Bible. Again, this was brilliant. He started off with some fairly innocuous things, where the "accurate" reading didn't make much difference in how we lived our lives, or even touched on contentious doctrinal issues. Eventually, however, the stakes got higher. After several sessions of having much of what we always thought we knew shown, by reading the actual Bible, to be false, any confidence in what our priests or ministers had been telling us had been undermined. Ostensibly, this was to show us that we had to read the Bible as written and allow it to interpret itself. The real reason, as I saw much later, was to set up Wierwille as the authority, despite the encouragement to read and study ourselves.

The final week of the class was devoted to what Wierwille called "the manifestations of the spirit", which most denominations called "the gifts of the spirit". The most well-known of these was speaking in tongues, although other "manifestations" were included. Wierwille billed speaking in tongues as proof of the truth of the Bible. For most of the third week we were regaled with instances of speaking in tongues in the Bible culminating with a group speaking in tongues session right at the end of the final session. In contrast to the dry pseudo-intellectual tone of most of the class, this final session was emphatically emotional. Wierwille asked the class rhetorically, just before we were "led into" speaking in tongues, "don't you want to speak 'the wonderful works of God'?" before having us stand and, in unison, and backed by the crew and other graduates of the class loudly speaking in tongues themselves, speaking in tongues as Wierwille's recorded voice encouraging us. 

For many people, including me, it sealed the deal. Not only had I been led, step by step, through an intellectual shedding of previous beliefs and acquisition of a new perspective, but it all came together with an emotional capstone. 

The Way had successfully got me to change what I believed about God and the Bible, but I still wasn't committed to regular involvement. I wasn't in a cult...yet.

Start from the beginning

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-i.html

Part VI

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2020/11/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-vi.html

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part IV

By 1970, Wierwille no longer had a loose association of Bible Fellowships and Sunday night meetings at his farm, he had an organization. The "hippies" as some labelled them, provided the raw material, the enthusiasm and the field leadership that he needed to expand his influence. Once he gained legal control of the associated entities of The Way East and The Way West he continued to consolidate his control. Even though he had legal control over his Power for Abundant Living class and its distribution, the organizational chart was still quite loose in the early to mid-seventies. Local fellowships tended to grow organically as people started taking the class and continuing to meet in regular Bible Studies. Leaders of the home fellowships tended to be appointed by local consensus, as well as availability. Two things changed that dynamic: the WOW Program and The Way Corps.

The WOW (Word Over the World) Program was basically a missionary program. People would commit a year of their lives to spreading "the Word", setting up fellowships and running  Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) classes. The idea was that a group of four WOWs would be sent to an area that did not have an existing Way presence. The WOWs would take a part-time job, but would spend the bulk of their time "witnessing". The goal would be that at the end of the year a local fellowship would be established, or an already existing one would be strengthened. The WOW program was wildly successful. By the end of the decade there was a strong Way presence in all 50 states as well as a number of other countries. The annual gathering at Wierwille's farm, called The Rock of Ages, was when the new WOWs were "commissioned" each year, and the previous year's group "welcomed home". By 1980, several thousand were going out as WOWs each year.

The Way Corps was a multi-year program where people were groomed to be the leadership in The Way. It was initially a two-year program spent at the Way headquarters, but eventually an apprentice, or preparatory, year spent in the candidate's home city, was added, as well as a year "in the field" to practice what was learned before graduation. As the number of Way Corps graduates increased from a dozen or so the first few years, to 500 or more by the sixth year of the program, the practice of fellowship leaders developing naturally was supplanted by Way Corps leadership at most levels of the organization. When I became involved in 1978, there were nine "branches" of 7-10 fellowships each on Long Island. Neither the leaders of the branches, nor the "Area Leader" who oversaw all of Long Island, were Way Corps graduates. Within a few years this would be reversed, and even some local fellowship leaders were replaced by Way Corps graduates. This changed the makeup of The Way from a loose confederation of home Bible Studies to a rigid hierarchy with branch leaders leading 7-10 "twigs" (what home fellowship were called, based on a "Way Tree" analogy), Area Leaders overseeing multiple branches and "Limb Leaders" overseeing an entire state.

A bureaucracy was also developing at The Way headquarters as well, with leaders over the "Trunk" (all of the United States), International Outreach, a Way Corps Director and multiple departments responsible for everything from publications to vehicle maintenance. The Way Corps was slowly morphing from a program of voluntary service to a lifetime commitment to go wherever The Way sent you and do whatever they told you to do. The WOW program, even though it was only a one-year commitment, was a program with a lot of rules and expectations, its rigidity solidified the expectation that leaders were to be obeyed unquestioningly, rather than altruistically serving. In a short 10 years, the structure of The Way changed from people freely attending local fellowships without many, if any, demands placed upon them, to a rigid hierarchy and more onerous rules and requirements to attend meetings and classes, including those in far away cities and at The Way's headquarters in Ohio.

It was around this time that the epithet "cult" began to be attached to newer religious groups, and The Way was included. The tragedy of Jonestown occurred just as The Way was peaking in membership and influence. Family members of Way followers started getting concerned. "Deprogramming" became, if not common, then at least not unheard-of. Books on cults often included The Way, and occasionally Way members would be kidnapped by "deprogrammers" hired by the family. Some left The Way after this experience, while others escaped and returned. The presence of deprogrammers in conjunction with hostility toward The Way by families of Way members and by many churches helped to foster and "us vs. them" mindset among the Way rank and file. Wierwille stoked the fires by teaching that opposition to "the ministry" was opposition to God and that Satan was stirring people up in order to attack God's people. For many Way people, this was a vicious cycle: outside opposition encouraged defensiveness and an isolationist mindset while that very attitude fueled opposition. Parents could not understand why their children, who had been faithful members of the local church, were now preaching that The Way was the only place where God's truth was being told, not seeing how their opposition was a catalyst, feeding the stridency of Way rhetoric.

The Way never retreated to an isolated "compound", cutting themselves off from the world, even though they had several "root" (there's that tree symbolism) locations that were self-contained communities. The majority of Way members lived and worked among non-Way people, held regular jobs and met in private homes for their weekly meetings. They seemed normal. But something very different was going on beneath the surface.

Start from the beginning

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-i.html

Part V

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/11/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-v.html

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part III

At age six, my parents moved us from the Astoria neighborhood to Rosedale,, on the Queens-Nassau border. We lived in a semi-detached, two family home, with my four siblings and me on the first floor, my six cousins and aunt and uncle on the second floor, and two other families on the other side. It was Christmas 1977 and I was upstairs at a holiday party in my cousins' home. My Aunt Peggy showed me a Christmas card that my cousin Kathy had received from a co-worker. Underneath the holiday cliches were the words "I love you and God does too". Kathy's co-worker Tom was running a Bible Study in his duplex apartment in the neighborhood with his roommate Joe. Aunt Peggy asked that I accompany my cousin to one of these Bible Studies. As Catholics, we were suspicious of any other religions, and Aunt Peggy (wrongly as it turned out) thought that I would be able to sniff out any trouble. They seemed harmless enough. When I first attended one of their meetings, the small living room was packed with people, mostly high school or college aged, with a few adults our parents' age. There was some songs, some prayers and a teaching from the bible. There was also speaking in tongues. I'll get in detail about speaking in tongues in later installments, but it really intrigued me. But what intrigued me more was the absolute confidence that these people had in what they were teaching. I was a bit skeptical, but I found it interesting that these people claimed to have answers, were giving out that it was possible to be able to make sense out of the Bible and that there was proof that it was true!

I soon became a regular attendee of these fellowships, as they called them. I was by no means a Bible scholar, but I was aware of the basics of Christian doctrine that any church-goer knew. As the weeks went by I realized that there were some subtle and not-so-subtle differences between what my church (and the Protestant churches that I attended) taught and what this little Bible study was teaching. One of the main things was that they believed that Jesus was not, as most Christians believed, God. There were many others, but the details are not really that important. What was relevant to me was that it was different than the way I was brought up to believe, but at the same time they claimed to have evidence to back up their confidence. Pretty soon I started hearing about a class that was being offered. All the regulars at the Bible Study had taken this class; Tom and Joe insisted that all of my questions would be answered in this class and that it would logically lay out everything that I needed to be able to read and understand the Bible for myself. I was interested, but also somewhat apprehensive.

Disturbed as I was by the long list of differences between what this Bible Study was teaching and what my church was teaching, I made an appointment to talk with my parish priest. I asked him if he could reconcile these differences. His response was that the Catholic Church had 2000 years of tradition behind it. That's it. No appeal to logic, or Church teaching, or even an attempt to open the Bible. Tradition? Blind, mindless tradition was what I saw as the problem. Believing something  just because "that's the way it's always been" was why I started searching for answers in the first place. I walked out of the parish rectory that night upset that I received no real answer from my priest and had made up my mind that I would at least give this class a chance. I found Joe, paid my $100 and signed up for a month of Bible classes.

I'm a big fan of alternate history fiction. That genre is based on how things would be different if one variable changed. How different would my life had been if that priest had even made an attempt to convince me that the Catholic Church was built on a solid foundation and not just tradition. If he had taken seriously my longing for truth and my search for answers. Instead he was dismissive. Much of who I am today was molded by what came next, the influences from this Bible Study and this class, my reactions to the disapproval of my family and my own change in outlook.

At this point there was no indication that I was joining anything, let alone a cult. All that I was doing at this point was committing $100 and around 33 hours of class time over a one month period. I didn't imagine that anything other than my level of knowledge was going to change. But I was wrong.

Part IV

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/11/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-iv.html

Start from the beginning

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-i.html

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part II

In the early 1940's another young man was searching for answers. Unlike me, this young man was born in a rural area, far from any big cities, to a farming family and part of a Protestant denomination in the Reformed tradition. He was the youngest child in a large family and religion was a part of daily life. In order to get answers, or perhaps because it was perceived to be easier than farming, this young man entered a seminary and was in due course ordained as a minister in 1941 and given a small church to oversee. By 1942 he was already disenchanted and disappointed that the answers he sought had not materialized. Years later he claimed that God had spoken to him audibly and promised to teach him if he would teach others. Obviously, there is no way that this could be independently verified, and in all likelihood was completely made up. 

In October 1942 our young minister started hosting a program on a local radio station in conjunction with his pastoral duties. He brought in guest speakers for his radio program and to his church, ostensibly to learn more about the Bible so that he continue to teach it. After a few years, he once again was starting to feel that he really wasn't getting the answers that he sought. Around 1951 or '52 he became aware of a class called The Gifts of the Spirit that was being taught by a minister in Calgary. He traveled to Calgary and became entranced with what was taught in the class, especially with speaking in tongues. By 1953 he was teaching a version of this class, without permission from the originator, initially called Receiving the Holy Spirit Today, later changed to Power for Abundant Living, as if he had originated it. He taught this class, mainly around his area of the country, gaining a small number of followers, all the while maintaining his position as a minister in the local church. In 1955 he incorporated separately from his church and in 1957 either was removed or resigned from his position as pastor. For the next few years he taught his classes, mostly within a one day's drive from his home, setting up his headquarters at the family farm that he and his brothers had inherited upon the death of their parents.

Once again, in 1968, our not-so-young-anymore former pastor was unsatisfied with how things were progressing. (It seems like this was a recurring feature of his life) Some graduates of his classes attended services on Sunday nights at his home, while many remained active in their home churches. He had recorded his class so that it could be distributed outside his home area. No longer a cog in the wheel of his original denomination, he had his own organization, was publishing pamphlets and books, and had a modest following. 

Around this time young Christians around the country became involved in what was popularly called "The Jesus Movement". They were by and large unhappy with the traditions of the churches in which the were raised and sought greater spirituality in new Christian groups. Our former pastor, now 52 years old, traveled to San Francisco with a copy of his taped class and made contact with a group of young people (referred in retrospect as "the hippies") who he introduced to his novel approach to Christian doctrine. They hit it off immediately. His structured approach, combined with the enthusiasm and love of the young people, made for a perfect storm of outreach. Small Bible study groups, made up of graduates of the class started to spring up all over the Bay Area. A similar situation occurred in the northern suburbs of New York City. Graduates who moved to other areas brought copies of the class with them and started local fellowships in their new homes. Locals went off to college and started classes and study groups there. Soon there were followers of our once searching pastor all over the country.

At this time I should probably introduce our your seeker by name. Victor Wierwille. The group that he founded was eventually called The Way Incorporated. The San Francisco and New York groups incorporated under the names The Way West and The Way East. The new influx of followers gave Wierwille, if not answers, at least followers, as well as prestige and power, which may be what he was really after all along. In short order he managed to gain control of The Way West and The Way East and folded them into The Way International. He started a program for potential leaders which he called The Way Corps in 1970, and in 1971 he initiated The Word Over the World Ambassadors (WOW), basically a missionary program. In just a few short years there were followers of The Way in all 50 states as well as numerous other countries, sending in their tithes of 10% of their income and gathering every August in Ohio at the Rock of Ages festival.

In the New York City area, by 1978 there were 2 branches of 7-10 home fellowships each in all New York City boroughs, as well as in Nassau & Suffolk on Long Island. Most of these were led by college age men and women who had graduated from The Way's Power for Abundant Living class.

This is where I came in.

Part III

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-iii.html

Start from the beginning

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-i.html

So, You Want To Join a Cult - Part I

No one wakes up in the morning, and after a shower and that first cup of coffee, decides that they’re going to join a cult. No one approached by someone with an engaging smile and an encyclopedic knowledge of the bible thinks “Cool! A cult! Just what I’ve been looking for!” Yet, every day in America, people join up with groups that are labelled cults. Sometimes the labeling is by former members of the alleged cult. The problem with the term “cult” is that there is no consensus on what a cult is. Sure, you can find lists that include things like “Has a charismatic leader” or “encourages an ‘us versus them’ mindset” while others go straight to brainwashing and sleep deprivation. Others, notably among fundamentalist denominations, label any group that deviates from their particular definition of orthodox Christianity as a cult.

I’m going to take you through my journey, before, during, and after, back in and kicked out, of a group that I have labeled in retrospect a cult. You can make up your own mind whether or not it really was a cult. I’ll tell you from the outset that no one asked me to drink any poisoned Kool-Aid, or commit any illegal acts. I didn’t live in a “cult compound”. During most of the time that I was involved I looked and acted “normal”. I worked a regular job, I got married and raised children. I did not wear any distinguishing clothing. The difference was in my mind, in my beliefs, in who and what I allowed to control and influence my actions.

My family was (and still are, mostly) Catholics. Our neighborhood of Rosedale in Queens, New York City was predominantly Catholic, mostly ethnic Irish and Italian with two Catholic parishes. One of the defining features of Catholicism is that you don’t stop “being Catholic”. If you’re unhappy with how things are, you don’t find another denomination that better fits your views, you either tough it out, or move into one of the categories of Catholics who aren’t regular churchgoers: “Ashes & Palms” Catholics, those who show up only for the major holy days and “Lapsed Catholics” – still Catholic, but not participating. You rarely hear about “ex-Catholics”, at least not back then. I was a fairly religious kid. I was an altar boy, I prayed (in private, as well as at church), I regularly went to Confession and attended mass every Sunday. Even during my late teen years, when sex, drugs and rock & roll began to exert their influence, I still prayed and went to church and got ash on my forehead on Ash Wednesday, but I wondered. I wondered why, if we were the spiritual descendants of the apostles, were there many denominations, I wondered how we knew if any of it were true.

My first foray into scratching that itch occurred in my mid-teens. There were several Protestant churches in our neighborhood, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Episcopalian. I had no idea what a small slice of Christendom this represented. I attended services at all these churches and was struck by how similar they were to a Catholic mass. It didn’t really seem to make a difference where you went to church, none of them were excited about providing any solid answers. During my first year of college I took a comparative religion course. I did a lot of reading about the major world religions and was quite impressed with Buddhism, but it was still just people talking, without any actual evidence.

One of the things that cult scholars point out is that cults are always on the lookout for people like me, people who are unsatisfied with the status quo, who are not getting anything out of whatever religion they were raised in and are looking for answers, looking for meaning. They also point out the cults are also looking for people who meet other criteria, those who have hit rock bottom in some part of their lives, people who are lonely, who are outsiders. This latter category wasn’t me by any means. I had good parents, a stable family, decent middle-class opportunities, and access to a good education. I wasn’t down and out and at the end of my rope, but I was, inside, desperately seeking meaning and validation and I thought that religion was where I would find it.

Unlike the Protestant mainstream which emphasizes the Bible as the standard upon which to base belief, Catholicism emphasizes Church teaching embodied in apostolic succession, a chain of bishops stretching back to the original twelve apostles. The Protestant Reformation was in large part a rejection of this reliance on the opinion of Church leaders and a reversion, or so they thought, to a reliance of the text of the Bible, just like the early Church did. The problem with that was, for the early Church there was no "Bible". Of course there were the various gospels and epistles being passed around, but many of these weren't even written until many years after Jesus' ministry, and it wasn't until several hundred years later that a consensus of what precisely constituted "The Bible" was arrived at, referred to as "the canon of scripture". In Christianity's early days there was a proliferation of writings. In addition to those that we are familiar with, there were many other gospels, epistles, apocalypses and miscellaneous writings. There were contradictions among the many writings, some of which were clearly defending a particular point of view or condemning an opposing point of view. (This could also be said about the canonical writings, but that's another blog post!) A lot of stock was put in authorship. Something that was purportedly written by an apostle, or at least a close disciple of one, had a better chance of being accepted than an anonymous treatise or one written by an ordinary Christian. At some point, someone had to make the decision regarding what was legitimate and what wasn't.  The logic of the time was that the original apostles were most likely to have accurately passed on Jesus' teachings. Those who had been directly taught by those twelve also were thought to have transmitted the teachings of Jesus correctly. This was "logically" extended to anyone who was in an unbroken line of leadership from Jesus' time to the present, not allowing for human error or willful misconstruction. The leaders of the Church at the time the canon of scripture was decided believed that they, by virtue of unbroken apostolic succession, were able to determine which writings were genuine and which were not. During my time of searching for answers I knew none of this. I believed that Catholic doctrine and the Bible were identical.

I was wide open for someone who could point out the discrepancies.

Part II:

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-ii.html