There were two parallel paths that I would take through the rest of the Way year. One was paved with red flags that in hindsight I should have heeded and got the hell out, the other path was crowded with what at the time looked like what the Bible calls signs, miracles and wonders. The problem was that I didn't see the red flags as red flags and I had been conditioned to look for divine intervention everywhere. We had been indoctrinated with the view that when bad things happened it was "the Adversary" (i.e. The Devil) attacking us due to our "stand on The Word of God". So both side-by-side paths were convincing me that I was on the right path.
When I was still living at the first Way Home I had re-enrolled in college. I had dropped out during my sophomore year, and, due to some bad grades I had been put on academic probation. When I re-enrolled I was still on probation, which meant that I could not fail any classes and had to maintain at least a "C" average. I had also taken a job in Manhattan working for the stock brokerage firm, E.F. Hutton. I worked at Hutton during the day and attended classes at night. This meant that it was difficult for me to spend much time on Way activities. Way leadership suggested that, although I was living in a Queens Way Home, it might be better if I attended Twig Fellowship in Manhattan, where I worked and went to college. If this situation had continued, things might have turned out differently, but two things happened to change the course of my life. The first was that I failed a math class. It may have been advanced algebra, or maybe calculus, I don't recall. Even though I had aced every other class, I was still on academic probation, and this one failure meant that I was dismissed from Bernard M. Baruch College. Around the same time I was offered the position of Twig Fellowship Coordinator. I was virtually locked into a Way trajectory.
I mentioned the two parallel paths—I want to address the one that was festooned with red flags first. As far as I knew, Eddie wasn't removed from his positions because higher leadership thought he didn't have leadership qualities. His branch responsibilities ended simply because there weren't enough twigs for three branches and the other two branch coordinators had more of the accepted credentials. His Twig Coordinator of the English-language fellowship position wasn't taken away due to incompetence or ungodliness or lack of leadership, but to allow him to concentrate on the various Spanish language fellowships. But with the 20/20 vision that comes from being 40 years in the future, I can tell you with conviction that Eddie was a sociopathic abuser. A characteristic that somehow escaped the notice of the supposedly spiritually savvy leadership.
I'm not going to get specific about all of the insanity that Eddie engaged in. I mentioned in Part XIV that he believed that "casting out devil spirits" was the appropriate response to a roommate talking in his sleep. He constantly belittled the people around him, especially women. He drank to excess. We sublet a basement apartment to a woman who he coerced into sex. Several of us complained about him to upper leadership to no avail. The fact that Eddie was put in a position of leadership where he was supposed to care for other Christian believers and lead by example, should have suggested to me that upper leadership didn't know what the heck they were doing. But I somehow rationalized the situation. The "obey leadership" habit was hard to break. There must be some kind of plan that I was unaware of. Part of me thought that I just needed to up my spiritual game and commit myself more fully. More on that after I take you on a stroll down the other parallel path.
When I took over the fellowship on Metropolitan Avenue in Richmond Hill, Queens, there were four or five of us. By the time I left New York that August, there were easily thirty people crammed into our living room on Twig Fellowship nights. The main method of increasing membership was to "witness". Like Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, The Way engaged in door-to-door witnessing. Since we started out with just a handful, we would have a short meeting and then hit the streets, the bowling alleys, the bars and knocked on doors. We also started seeing people who had been inactive in Way events start showing up. Maybe they didn't like what was going on when Eddie was in charge and wanted to give us a shot. Maybe it was just coincidence, but these formerly inactive people started bringing friends. And the friends started bringing friends. The house started filling up.
One of the measures of success of a Way Twig or Branch was running a class. The Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class was for people who wanted to stick around, it was the first level of commitment in Wayworld. You needed seven new people to be able to run a PFAL class and typically several Twigs combined their new people into one class. We were able to run one all by ourselves. Then we were able to run another one. And a third—which was unheard of. Way fellowship meetings were beginning to tend toward formal at that time. We went in the opposite direction which seemed to draw in even more people. For some reason that I can't recall I started running meetings and teaching barefoot and sitting cross-legged on the couch. We were told to start running a 10:30 fellowship on Sundays—because Way HQ did. No one specified that it was to be 10:30AM, so, rebels that we were, we met at 10:30PM on Sunday and the living room was as full as any other time. The biggest thing was that we started to get known as the place to go for miraculous healing.
As an agnostic who these days casts a skeptical eye on the miraculous, I really don't know what to think about this aspect of my time in The Way. We would pray for people and it sure seemed like they were healed of various maladies. There wasn't any eyesight to the blind or healing the lepers, but we were all sure convinced that healing was taking place. And it wasn't just the hardcore Wayfers, but people who would show up at our house for the first time and swear that their illness, or limp or whatever was gone. To me, this was some bona fide Book of Acts stuff...signs, miracles and wonders. These apparent miracles helped to convince me that The Way was...the way. After all, I didn't see anything like this when I was attending Catholic mass.
The red flags were rationalized away as a sign that I needed to increase my own commitment. The Way's doctrine of The Law of Believing always put the blame for bad things squarely on the shoulders of the person that they happened to, so of course I needed to ratchet up my own believing. The huge increase in people who attended our fellowship and experienced miraculous healing confirmed it. What was the next step? I made a twofold decision: to enroll in the Advanced Class that was taking place that summer in Rome City, Indiana and after that to sign up for the Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador program. A decision that would take me from my home of New York City and deposit me in a town of 5,000 in the Nebraska Panhandle.
Start from the beginning: Part I
Go to: Part XVI
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