So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXVIII - Apprentice Way Corps

I've lived in Lincoln Nebraska since August 1981, 45 years as of when I am writing this blog post. I'm often asked why I moved from New York to Nebraska and I often just lie. At least I did until recently when I started just telling people that I came here as part of a cult. It's made for interesting conversations! 

Back when I was actively involved in The Way I would say that I was sent here as part of a missionary program, people understood that. After I left, more often than not I would tell people that I travelled around a lot in my youth and settled down in Lincoln when I met my first wife and started a family. Sometimes I would say that I was in a cult. It all depended on who I was talking to and whether I felt they really wanted to know or were just making conversation. After my divorce I shied away from a relationship with a woman whom I liked a lot and thought I had a lot in common with because she couldn't understand how I had "been so stupid" to get involved in a cult. 

Towards the end of my year long commitment to participate in the WOW Ambassador program I made two decisions that in retrospect were idiotic decisions. Despite the utter mess that my year as a WOW had been, I (1) Decided to apply to the Way Corps and (2) Sign up for a year to live in a Way Home, an in-state program overseen by The Way's Limb (i.e. state) Coordinator. The Way Corps was The Way's supposed leadership training program. Virtually every level of Way leadership was a graduate of The Way Corps, rather than rising up organically in the community. At the time Way Corps training was a four year process. The first year, called the Apprentice Year, took place wherever you happened to live. You were encouraged to take on leadership roles: running twig fellowships, coordinating classes, and being active in local Way events. You were also expected to get your tuition together, either by saving it yourself, or, as was quite common, getting "sponsorships" (later called "spiritual partners") to help defray the costs. (more on that later) The Way Home program was similar to the WOW program with a few exceptions: you could work full time if desired, you were not prohibited from leaving your assigned area, and your witnessing time was up to you. Other than that, you were at the beck and call of Way leadership and were expected to put the needs of The Way before your own. 

The Way Home where I lived for the first half of the Way year (August-February) was in a older neighborhood. It was a three bedroom home with a finished basement. The basement had another bedroom, a family room and a laundry room. My roommates were Carol, 28 years old and a graduate of the Way Corps; Tim and Joan, both early twenties, who had been WOWs in Nebraska the previous year and were Apprentice Corps as I was; and Lisa, a senior in high school. I was assigned to be the Assistant Twig Coordinator to Carol for the fellowship that met in our home. 

In retrospect Way Corps tuition seemed ridiculously low. If I remember correctly, it was $4,000 per each year "in residence", the second and fourth years when you were at a Way property actively being "trained". $1,000 was due around 6 months before you started "in residence", the rest due at intervals during the year. But I looked up an inflation calculator online and saw that the purchasing power of a 1982 dollar is around 3 times what it is now, so in current dollars the tuition would have been around $12,000 per year. I have no idea if the tuition increased in subsequent years. To put the do-ability of coming up with this in perspective, the first full-time job I had in 1982 paid around $13,000 a year. I was tithing to The Way, so subtract $1,300 and you've got $11,700. The tuition of $4,000 would have been 34% of a typical annual wage for a non-skilled, non-professional job in those days, and most of us Way Corps candidates were in our early twenties, not college graduates and a lot of us were working part-time jobs. I have no idea if this was a reasonable amount for room and board, as well as the purported training, but it certainly was outside the realm of possibility for the typical Way kid. So the solution was sponsorships/spiritual partners. 

Sponsors would commit to contributing a set amount every month to help a Way Corps person defray the tuition costs. Some candidates had well-off friends or relatives who supported their commitment to The Way and contributed all or most of the tuition up front. Most of us had to spend time begging for money. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you take the long view) my relatives were definitely not supporting my involvement in The Way and most of my Way friends were in the same financial boat that I was. The end result was that when the first installment was due, I was a long way from $1,000 and was removed from Apprentice Corps status. 

I felt like a failure.

I was told that I was a failure.

But there's a lot more to tell about the year from August 1981 to August 1982, which I will talk about in Part XXIX.

Start from the beginning: Part I

Workin' Man - Part XXX - State Deep State

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 

 My blizzard of job applications included four positions, if I remember correctly, in Nebraska State government. I received an email back from one of them, informing me that I was being considered, and was called in for an interview for a "Fiscal Compliance Analyst". The description was somewhat vague, but the requirements listed were all things that I had, including post-secondary coursework in accounting. One of the benefits that I took advantage of at B&R Stores was their tuition reimbursement program. They paid for a good portion of the two-year Associate Degree in Business with an Accounting Focus. I completed my degree during my first year as a Store Director at Russ's. This degree got me in the door at the Department of Revenue. 

When Revenue Human Resources called to schedule an interview I had completely forgotten even the vague job description, so I went into that interview in the dark about what I was actually applying for! The interviewers, the Manager of the Incentives Group of the Audit Division and the Senior Auditor in that group, went through a list of generic questions, most of which I had asked people myself during the many job interviews I conducted in my management roles. I was asked how this position fit into my long range career plan. At fifty-seven years old, my career plan was anything but long range. I honestly told them that it didn't, but that I had read the job description (I had, even though I couldn't remember what was in it!) and I thought the requirements fit with my skill set. I then asked if the next question was going to be "Where do you see yourself in five years?" — which it was! I told them that I hoped that I'd be in a job where I was valued and where I enjoyed going to work every day. I later found out that my age was a plus, since many younger people right out of college left after getting enough experience to move to a private accounting firm for a much higher salary. They figured at age fifty-seven I wasn't a job hopper. They were right.

A week or so later I received a job offer and began my new career on January 11, 2016. 

The work group to which I was assigned handled tax incentives. Nebraska is one of many states that offer tax incentives to encourage businesses to locate in our state. In general, a company would agree to increase their employment and investment by a set amount and in return receive credits that could be used to offset income tax liability or receive refunds on sales taxes or state withholding tax. To utilize their credits a claim was submitted listing eligible sales tax transactions and claiming a refund on the amount of sales tax. Our group was made up of examiners and auditors. Examiner, which was my position, was the entry level slot. An examiner did all the initial reviews of refund claims which were then checked over by auditors. Auditors also audited the businesses who applied to be on an incentive program. An auditor needed to have a Bachelors Degree in Accounting, so for an examiner to be promoted to an auditor position, they would need to receive a a degree; there were many examiners who remained in that position for 30 or 40 years. I often referred to the Audit Division separation between examiners and auditors as a caste system. (more on my perception of Revenue caste later).

When a taxpayer in an incentive program applied for a refund of sales tax, the examiners were the first to review the claims. The taxpayer would submit a listing of all the invoices for which they were claiming a refund of sales taxes, as well as pdf images of a percentages of those invoices. The examiner's job was to confirm several items on each invoice:

1. The invoice was for a transaction that took place at the taxpayer's business address ("at the project")
2. The tax on the invoice matched what was claimed
3. The vendor who charged the sales tax was licensed for sales tax in Nebraska
4. The transaction was properly paid tax, i.e. not an exempt transaction
5. Not previously paid on an earlier claim

There were other, more arcane things, to look for, but those were the basics. In retrospect, it should have been fairly simple to train a new examiner to review a sales tax refund claim. But for some reason new examiner training was designed to be as complicated as possible, with little information on how to actually review a claim. Training started out with a few days of generic training — first with instruction on things like benefits, and moving on to audit-specific training. The problem was that the audit-specific training was very specific...it applied to auditors, not to examiners! I tried to absorb as much as I could but I'm glad I didn't try too hard, since it had nothing to do with me! 

The next phase of my training involved sitting in a conference room listening to a senior auditor go through a Power Point presentation. There was so much information that I was having trouble keeping up, or even understanding what the point of much of it was. It certainly gave me virtually no information on how to review a refund claim. Years later, when I became responsible for training new examiners, I referred to it as long on theory, but short on practice. It didn't help that the person who was supposed to be training us (another examiner started on the same day as I did) started out the training by admitting that she wasn't very good at training. After our completely useless training Jessica (my coworker who started when I did) and I attempted to review the claim that we were assigned. Since we had received no practical instruction regarding what we should be looking for, we agonized over every invoice. Attempts to get clarification elicited curt answers that were only partially helpful. Jessica was convinced that we were going to get fired because we didn't know what we were doing. I knew better. While a trainee is responsible to learn the job, the greater responsibility is on the shoulders of the trainer, who is tasked with ensuring that the new employee has the tools needed to do their assigned job. We were not given those tools. 

My own learning style is hands-on. I learn best by doing the work and learning from my mistakes and from feedback from my supervisors and trainers. Part of my process is paring away the information that I don't need and concentrating on what is important to get the job done. For example, the main incentive program consisted of six tiers. Each tier had different requirements and different benefits for meeting those requirements. With one minor exception a review of a refund claim could be completed without understanding the difference among the tiers, or even knowing what tier the taxpayer's project was. So I ignored this information. In fact, over nine years later, as I approached retirement, I still didn't know the details of the different tiers without looking them up and it didn't affect my ability to work claims, or eventually to approve and sign off on them. 

One challenge of working for the state didn't directly involve the work that I was doing, but the fact that it was extremely difficult to find a parking spot. There were two state owned garages, and several surface parking lots, but there was a waiting list for all of them. Most of the streets around the State Office Building had metered parking. When I started work parking was $2.00 an hour, soon to go up to $2.50 and eventually $3.00. For an 8½ hour day, a $17.00 per day expense ($340 for the month!) was not reasonable (private garages were $10.00 for the whole day) so while on the parking spot waiting list I had to scout around in the morning for a street without meters. After trying different spots at varying distances from the office I finally settled on a couple of streets that were pretty close. There was a couple of streets two blocks long running east-west, crossed by another street running a block north and a block south. At its closest it was two blocks from the office. I found if I arrived after 6:15 and before 6:45 there was plenty of available spots to park. The streets were full of apartments and apparently most of the residents left for work between 6:15 and 6:45! I parked there every day until I finally got a garage spot the week before we were all sent home in April 2020 due to the Covid pandemic.

Start with Part I

Workin' Man - Part XXIX - Chain of Command

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 

 While I've got my time at the state on hold until after I retire, I thought I'd revisit some specific categories of previous jobs.

One of the more frustrating aspects of working for B&R Stores was the lack of any clear "chain of command". If you were hired as an entry-level employee you might think it was pretty clear — there was a Store Director at the top of the pyramid, with an Assistant Store Director and a Human Resources Coordinator the next step down, followed by department managers. If you worked in the Dairy Department you received your assignments from the Dairy Manager, who in turn reported to the Store Director. The Store Director reported to the Vice President of Operations, or later, the District Manager (and he reported to the VP of Operations) and the Operations VP reported to the President. In theory, pretty simple. But the waters were muddied by the presence of Department Directors.

Department Directors were corporate personnel who were responsible for a single department in all stores. For example, the Produce Director was responsible for setting prices in all Produce Departments, deciding on product variety, overseeing training of department managers, and setting department standards. Every department had its own director. In theory, it wasn't a bad system, but as in most areas of life, theory and practice did not always align. The authority and responsibility of the Store Director for all that happened within the four walls of a store often competed with actions by a Department Director. One area was hiring. 

If there was a department manager opening, the Store Director would interview and make the final decision for who would be hired for the position. Assistant Department Mangers from his and other stores might apply, or there might be outside candidates. For internal candidates the Store Director might seek feedback from the applicant's manager or from the Department Director. But on many occasions the Department Director would unilaterally decide to transfer Department Managers from one store to another, in which case the Store Director had no input into his new staff member. If this wasn't bad enough, when there was an opening in a high sales volume store the Department Director would transfer a Department Manager from a smaller store to the high volume store, leaving the low volume store with the opening. Did the Department Director then fill the now open position? Nope. It was up to the Store Director, who previously did not have an open position, to run ads, conduct interviews, and fill the position. This happened to me multiple times when I was the Store Director at Russ's Van Dorn, especially when corporate knew that they were closing the store. 

Things would get confusing when Department Directors would issue conflicting orders to their Department Managers. The Grocery Department Director might instruct his managers to cross-merchandise by placing some items in specific places in the Meat Department, while the Meat Director would prohibit non-meat items from being placed in those spots, leaving it up to the Store Director to mediate. Sometimes Department Directors would encourage their managers to act as if they were independent entities. I sat in on a meeting of Meat Department Managers where they were explicitly told to disregard certain orders from their Store Directors. 

Human Resources often acted as if they were completely separate from store chain of command as well. In theory, Human Resources Coordinators were responsible for hiring entry level employees, setting up interviews for management openings, processing vacation requests and payroll, and keeping the paperwork flowing. Technically within the chain of command of a store, in practice they answered to Donna, the Corporate Human Resources Director. With a few exceptions, the Human Resources people had not come up "through the ranks" and usually had limited actual hands-on retail experience. Also with few exceptions, the Human Resources Coordinators were looked at almost as spies from corporate and not fully trusted by store management. 

There was also a turf war waged between Corporate Human Resources and Operations. This came to a head about halfway through my time in B&R.  Tom, the Vice President of Operations decided that the position of store level Human Resources Coordinator would be eliminated and replaced by a second Assistant Store Director, who would be responsible for human resources.  Donna was implacably opposed to this, but it went forward anyway. This resulted in two related problems. You had some Human Resources Coordinators applying for Assistant Store Director positions, thinking that it was the same job with a different title, when in reality the second Assistant Store Director was responsible for Human Resources and several "Center Store" departments. Most of these people had no retail or department management experience. The other problem was Assistant Store Directors suddenly being in charge of human resources with no previous experience. Dan, the first Assistant Store Director to be be thrust into this role asked for help from corporate HR, but received none. Donna, the Human Resources Director, forbade any Human Resources Coordinators from helping him, setting him up for failure. It didn't help that at the same time Ron, the Operations VP's assistant, was embedded in the store and mandating how much time Dan could spend in each of his new roles. 

The worst was the lack of coordination at the corporate level. The Triumvirate at the top consisted of Pat Raybould, company President, Tom, Vice President of Operations, and Larry, whose title escapes me, but who was in charge of the various department directors. One of the three would come into the store, walk around, make some observations that required you to reorder your priorities and create extra work. An hour later another of the three would stop by and tell you something different, often contradicting what the other one had told you! When Pat's father, Russ, was still alive, he was an additional factor, often just yelling about some minor issue. Of the three, Larry usually made the most sense, but he was obsessed with dress code — hair style, jeans versus dress pants, tattoos, facial hair. It was considered good news when all three of them showed up together, because at least we'd get one non-contradictory set of instructions. 

The way things were done encouraged a culture where no one really knew what was expected of them, since the rule book was constantly shifting.

Start with Part I

Go to: Part XXX

Workin' Man - Part XXVIII - Loss Prevention

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 

When I first wrote this I was still employed at the Nebraska Department of Revenue, so I thought I'd revisit some specific categories of previous jobs. 

One of the departments at B&R Stores was the Loss Prevention Department, originally known as "Security". Like most of the B&R top dogs in the early days, the head of Loss Prevention was a friend of B&R founder Russ Raybould, who kinda-sorta was qualified. The qualifications of Loss Prevention Director Bob was that he had been a guard at the State Penitentiary. If you have access to an image of "Boss Hogg" from the old television show The Dukes of Hazzard, minus the white western hat you know exactly what Bob looked like. Up through the nineties, retail stores weren't as concerned about lawsuits from alleged shoplifters, so the job was much more physical back then. Not for portly Bob, but his crew were a bunch of cowboys. 

Since catching shoplifters was the low hanging fruit of Loss Prevention, that's what they focussed on. They would wander around the stores on the lookout for thieves. One Loss Prevention Officer has a unique approach. He had thinning white hair, and looked older than his fortyish years. He would hobble around the store with a walker, waiting to spot a shoplifter and would spring into action, using his skill as a judo black belt to subdue any resistance. Most of the Loss Prevention crew just seemed to view it as an easy part-time job where they could wander around the store for a few hours, or sit in the camera room watching security video. The fact that they were outside the in-store chain of command imbued many of the them with an outsized sense of their own importance. They didn't answer to the Store Director, and their own boss was never on site with them. A few of them spent their shifts flirting with the high school and college girls who made up a lot of the second shift staff. When I asked that one particular Romeo refrain from talking to the female employees when they were supposed to be worked he arrogantly lectured me that he was "working sources" or some other pseudo-cop bullshit. The same guy was caught lurking in the corner of the cutting room of the meat department and when challenged by the meat cutter told him to mind his own business. I threw him out of the store. 

One night while I was working the swing shift at the Cornhusker Super Saver I couldn't find our Loss Prevention guy. The clerk in the Spirits Department, where he had last been seen, told me that he had left at 6:15, which was about a half hour earlier. I went upstairs to check out his sign-in sheet and saw that he has signed out at 7:00, which was still 15 minutes in the future! I also noted that next to the time were my initials! He was fired the next day. 

During my last year at the Van Dorn Russ's Carl, the guy who had succeeded Bob aka "Boss Hogg" as the LP Director, was always doing stings, which he called "audits". There was the ever popular sending in a minor to buy alcohol, but a new one popped up one weekend. The "mission" was to have a Loss Prevention walk into areas in the store where non-employees weren't supposed to be and see if anyone stopped them. This particular afternoon I started get calls that a creepy looking guy was walking into back rooms and just staring. When asked what he wanted he would simply walk away. When challenged by a manager he flashed his little tin Loss Prevention badge. I called Carl to complain and received a condescending lecture.

I wonder if these guys ever actually prevented any loss. 

Start with Part I

Go to: Part XXIX

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'di!c 3 billion years ago, or that you get reincarnated as a rabbit? So what? As long as those beliefs aren't hurting anyone I have no problem with them.  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 by the theologians. 

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 here regarding 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 to me. The Long Island and New York City 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

Workin' Man - Part XXVII - Interregnum

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 

"The best work-related thing that ever happened to me" was how I described the day that I was fired. I never understood why they had me work the whole day getting trained for something that I wouldn't need...since they were going to fire me! I called Carl, the head of Loss Prevention, so he could be present when I cleaned out my office, and headed home, feeling like a great weight had been lifted. After taking the weekend off I started my job search in earnest.

I was 57 years old and concerned that my age would be a hinderance to finding a decent job. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, nor was I sure what I was qualified for. I had spent the largest part of my working life as a retail manager, but was not really high enough in the hierarchy to be a target for corporate head hunters. My plan was to scour the help wanted websites, including state and city hiring sites. Since I was most familiar with retail management I put in applications with Walmart, Fresh Thyme and other retail companies. I applied for a number of government jobs. 

From the Monday following Thanksgiving through Christmas Eve I worked a seasonal part-time job as a delivery helper with UPS.  It wasn't much, but it brought in some income while I was searching. After my first day every muscle in my body ached. I also had twisted my knee. I had serious doubts whether I would even be able to walk and be able to work the second day. I had to wear a knee brace the whole rest of my time with UPS. I was on-call, so I never knew for sure when I would be working. I'd usually get a call around 10:00am if I was going to be working that day, but no call at all if I wasn't being called in. For most of the four weeks I worked on a delivery route in the Havelock area, working around four hours a day. The last week or so I helped on a rural route near Denton and worked 8+ hour days. The driver on the Havelock route was very quiet. He hardly said two words each time I worked with him. The driver on my last week was a lot more talkative. He would start the day complaining about how the truck was loaded, or about his supervisors and then say "fuck it, we have a lot of work to do", and off we'd go. 

UPS had specific instructions about how we were to carry boxes. They also would send inspectors around to follow us and observe if we were in compliance. We were supposed hold boxes in front of us, which I found hard on my back, so I would hoist them up on my shoulder, which was against policy. I was caught and got a talking to. My driver also was reprimanded for letting me do it. We had a lot of dogs in rural Denton. My driver would distract the dogs with a treat while I ran up to the houses. He always had a steady supply of snacks for humans that he would share with me.

UPS was very clear that we would not receive our final paycheck until we turned our uniform in. We were issued brown pants and shirt, a brown coat and a brown winter hat, all with the UPS logo. On the day before my last day I was told by the dispatcher that I had to turn in my uniform at the end of my shift, which meant changing in the truck! My driver and I agreed that I should just wear my regular clothes and the UPS hat. They also didn't allow any facial hair other than a moustache. I had grown a beard after being fired from B&R, so I had to shave. I started growing it back during my last week. My driver said that if any inspectors said anything he'd swear it was five o'clock shadow. 

We were by no means living paycheck-to-paycheck, but the amount of money in the bank would not last indefinitely. My 401(k) was available, which we decided would only be withdrawn in an emergency. A related issue was that with the loss of employment, I also lost my insurance coverage. Since we had reached our out-of-pocket maximum we elected to utilize COBRA coverage through the end of the year and switch to coverage through the PPACA marketplace in January. 

Job hunting became my full-time job. I sent out a lot of applications throughout the month of November. Around the beginning of December I started getting called in for interviews. I interviewed at a few retail stores, including Walmart and Fresh Thyme. I'm glad I didn't get hired at Walmart, not because of the horror stories that one hears about them, but because of the schedule. The days off rotated. You would work four days, then two days off. So Week One would be Monday-Thursday, Friday and Saturday off, work on Sunday. Week Two would be Monday-Wednesday, Thursday & Friday off, work Saturday and Sunday. Week Three schedule would be work Monday and Tuesday, Off Wednesday and Thursday, work Friday-Sunday. And so on, your two days off rotating backward through the week. This would give me only two Saturdays and two Sundays off in every six week cycle and only one complete weekend off. With the wedding officiating business needing me primarily on Saturdays, this wouldn't work. It was difficult enough at Russ's when my promotion to Store Director meant working Saturdays. I was offered a job as a merchandiser for the local Coca-Cola Distributor. I accepted that one, but backed out after receiving an offer for a less physical job. I had applied for several positions in Nebraska State Government. I was called back for one — a Fiscal Compliance Analyst with the Nebraska Department of Revenue. 

My interview with the Department of Revenue was scheduled for a time when I was on call with UPS, so I had to call them and let them know that I would not be available. The dispatcher was very annoyed, insisting that it was an on-call job and that I was breaking my agreement with them. I pointed out that (1) I sat around every morning, my day on hold while I waited for them to call me, which didn't happen every day and (2) UPS was a temporary job and I sure wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to secure permanent, full-time employment when I had no guarantee that I would even be called in that day. I thought that my attitude would affect my schedule, but it continued as normal, my hours even increasing the final six working days. 

I went in for the interview, but it had been a while since I had applied, so I wasn't entirely sure what I was applying for! The interview went well, I was asked the standard questions. One question was a bit unusual: "How does this job fit in with your long term career plans?" I chuckled at that and told the interviewers that it really didn't! That I thought that it was a job that I could do well and my skills would contribute to the goals of the department. I then got off on a tangent about how I had years of experience as a hiring manager and that I'd bet the question "Where do you see yourself in five years?" was coming up. It was! The interview ended with something new to me. I was given a test on my facility with Microsoft Word and Excel. There were a few things in Excel that I was unfamiliar with, but I simply Googled the answer! 

I received a job offer a week later. The job was supposed to start on December 26th, but was changed to January 11th, since the person who would be doing the training would be on vacation. On January 11, 2016 I started what would be almost nine and a half years working for the State of Nebraska. 

Start with Part I

Go to: Part XXVIII

Managers - Part XXIX - (Post Pandemic #4) - What the Hell Happened to Customer Service?

Once upon a time business competed mainly on one aspect of their business: value. Was the quality of the product worth the price they were charging? Was the product of such sterling quality that the price was out of reach for most consumers? Was the price super-affordable but the product broke down soon after purchase? Companies looked for the balance between price and quality and battled with competitors on that basis. Then came Walmart. Most retailers couldn't compete with Walmart on price, and were often selling the same products, so they had to emphasize that ephemeral aspect of the buying experience: customer service. 

The phrase "the customer is always right" predated Walmart, but surely came into its own as a strategy to lure people away from the Bentonville Behemoth. No action was too servile if it meant keeping a customer from defecting to the low price leader down the street. Retailers in effect trained their customers to be assholes, since that was a surefire way to get what you wanted.  Customer service in the Walmart era meant that customers could scream profanity at retail workers or outlandish demands and managers would acquiesce, afraid of losing just one customer. The whole system was out of balance.  

The roots of change can be traced back to 2015, when the unemployment rate started to flirt with the 3% level. It accelerated when, during the pandemic and immediately after, when service workers realized that they had the power to set the terms of their own employment. Knowing that if they quit or were fired, another job with similar pay could be had in short order, many did quit if they didn't like the work environment. The management-employee dynamic became more balanced, if not skewed toward the employee. Overall, this was a good thing. Employees with a solid work ethic were no longer content to be enslaved by their employers. The problem is that not all employees had a solid work ethic.

Let's divert for a moment to define "customer service". I would define it as giving the customers what you advertised you would give them — this includes stock levels; and interacting with them in a civil, polite, manner — including dropping personal conversations or cell phone use when a customer needs some help. In my view a friendly demeanor is a plus, but not required. I'm not shopping in your store looking for friends. 

Back to comparative work ethic. 

Mainly due to the false perception that "nobody wants to work" and various corollaries as well as the very real low unemployment rate, managers are afraid to fire bad employees. No manager wants to be short staffed. Staff has to work harder to make up for missing people, or work simply doesn't get done because there aren't enough people to do it. Corporate executives don't want to hear what they term excuses and usually are not interested in altering expectations to accommodate the new reality. When I ran a grocery store the standard in the in-store bakery was for an employee to take a customer's doughnut request and remove it from the case and bag it up for them. The result was that one employee was tied up during peak times and one customer with a large order could cause a line — when customers would be just as happy to get their own doughnuts. Eventually, after many years, the corporate office figured it out, but not because anyone at the store level complained about it. 

So what do managers do? Two things: (1) They hire using the "warm body" principle and (2) They put up with what should be unacceptable behavior from employees. #1 is because they are in a hurry to get someone hired, and #2, they are terrified that someone is going to quit and they'll be short staffed until they can hire another warm body that incidentally they don't have the time or the staff to train properly. 

Employees at  entry-level jobs are not stupid. It doesn't take them long to see that there are no consequences to not doing the job that they were hired to do. A bad employee will just get worse seeing that management ignores them and a good employee will soon see that working hard and following company policy just means that they're doing the work of the bad employee. Overall productivity and customer service levels plummet. Who's at fault in this state of affairs? The managers.

When I say "managers", it's ultimately the fault of the level of management that makes decisions. A store manager has to have the guts to set standards and stick by them. If an employee is not doing their job, the manager can't be terrified that the sky will fall if the employee terminated and they are short-staffed. Corporate management has to be flexible enough to allow their retail-level managers the freedom to adjust expectations in response to changing situations, and not wait for months of meetings to green-light a decision that the leaders on the front lines know must be done. Earlier in this post I mentioned that in the Walmart era companies trained their customers to be assholes. In this post-pandemic era, companies have trained their employees to be bad employees. The solution isn't to update the employee handbook, or to embark on a search for the perfect employee — rules are ineffective if they're not enforced and "perfect" employees quickly devolve into horrible employees if they see that being a bad employee is the easier path. 

It's not an employee problem, it's a manger problem.

Start at the beginning: Part I

Managers - Part XXVIII - (Post Pandemic #3) - Maintaining Balance

One of the things that many employees learned during the pandemic was that it was acceptable to set boundaries for themselves. Sometimes those boundaries were entirely appropriate, other times they were simply ridiculous. It became normal for people to refuse to work their schedule, take off during busy times of year, and refuse to do simple job requirements — they knew that their managers would have difficulty replacing them and that they had the upper hand in the employee-employer relationship. But one of the main causes of strife between workers and management is a lack of honesty at the onset of the relationship.   

When I was in management, one of the more frustrating issues was new employees changing their availability. We would advertise for a position and would usually be pretty clear about what the schedule would be. We would hire someone based upon their availability and willingness to work that schedule only to find out that their actual availability was quite different. Once we advertised for a weekend clerk in the meat department. Since we usually gave workers one weekend day off the pool of potential staff was reduced on weekends when we were busiest — we thought if we could find someone who was only available on Saturdays and Sundays that would help our staffing problems. We found someone who assured us that he wanted to work Saturdays and Sundays, but after about a month he was complaining that he never got weekends off! Applicants who changed their availability shortly after being hired was quite common. I assume that the strategy was to get their foot in the door and then try to change up their schedule after being trained and we had invested time in them. 

Lest you think I'm suggesting that the problem was solely caused by employees — the flip side of this is employers who expect their staff to put up with ever-changing schedules, wildly varying hours and the expectation to drop everything when the boss needed them. When I lived in Kearney and worked at a Burger King, I might be scheduled for 35 hours one week and 12 the next. When I worked for UPS over the holidays (it was a temporary position) I was scolded for asking to be unavailable for one day to go for a job interview for a permanent job. I had given several days notice. What was galling was that I never knew from day to day whether I would be called in to work; I usually wouldn't hear until around 10:00AM if I was going to work that day. Employers should be honest about the requirements of the job and potential employees should be honest about what they're willing to do. 

One thing that many people don't understand is that a business exists not to provide jobs, but to sell products or services and make a profit doing it. Since labor costs typically are the single greatest expense, business owners will do what it takes to minimize, or even eliminate, the number of employees that they need to keep the doors open. Many of us complain about, for a variety of reasons, the proliferation of self checkouts, but this is but the latest example in a long trend of automation. Think about bar codes and scanners on check stands. When I was in my late teens I worked in a hardware store. We used a pricing gun to price by hand  every single item in the store. Cashiers would hand enter the price of every single item that they sold. Now we take the existence of bar codes and scanners for granted. When was the last time someone pumped your gas for you? Automation in manufacturing is something that has been progressing for decades, something that unions fight against...at least where there are unions. We may not like it, but that's the reality of it. But despite the creeping influence of automation, most businesses still require human beings in some capacity. 

Most businesses have busy times. They may be certain times of day, days of the week or seasons of the year. When I worked in retail grocery we had a pretty good idea when our busy times would be and tried to plan accordingly. One of my tasks was to project what our sales would be in each department every week, sometimes down to the day or hour during holiday weeks. If both the employer who is hiring staff and the job seeker are both honest they will each reveal what is necessary for a hire to take place. A grocery store that is going to be "all-hands-on-deck" during Christmas or Independence Day weeks should be upfront about there being no time off during that period; a job hunter who is unwilling to forgo family time during the holidays should make that plain and probably seek employment elsewhere. Taking a job knowing the restrictions, yet intending to flout them in the future is dishonest, just as withholding key requirements or information about scheduling just to get someone on the payroll is also deceitful. 

One of the worst things that a manager can do is hire someone just to get a warm body on board, or retain a nonperforming employee to avoid be shorthanded. And I'll include in "nonperforming" an employee who refuses to do what the job requires of them. There has always been the tendency among rookie managers to do this, but the low unemployment rate and the willingness of people to quit at a moment's notice has made the practice more prevalent. Nothing good can come of situations like this, and there are multiple negative consequences: (1) Work doesn't get done even though someone is still getting paid to do it, and (2) Built up resentment from the "good" employees. I can go on all day about how departments became more productive, working short-staffed after a lazy employee quit or was fired. Productivity will be negatively affected when other employees or the manager has to pick up the slack or constantly correct errors. 

In addition to resentment and extra work, an unpopular opinion is that it is not the manager's job to "do the work". A manager's job is not to do things, but to get things done. Of course this doesn't mean that a manager should ideally be sitting in the back room, feet up, sipping coffee all day. Depending on the business a manger might also be responsible for ordering stock, doing payroll or even stocking shelves, but it's a misunderstanding of the manager's role to believe that the main responsibility of a  manager is "getting his hands dirty" and working side-by-side with the crew. Through training, coaching, setting expectations and above all, leadership, a professional manager leverages the skills of her staff to get the job done. A newly-minted manager might find himself spending 25-30 hours doing what he should be paying other people to do while still spending 40+ hours doing "manager stuff". Picking up after employees whose idea of personal boundaries is to refuse to do what they were hired to do, or constantly correcting errors by underperformers, simply because they're afraid of being shorthanded is a vicious circle that will never end. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XXIX

Managers - Part XXVII (Post Pandemic #2) - Maintaining Discipline and Morale

Many years ago I worked for a manager who virtually everyone viewed as a "good" manager. He had a winning personality, was pretty light on discipline and for the most part let everyone do their jobs as they saw fit. If you were getting your job done you'd certainly appreciate the absence of micromanaging and how insignificant deviations from policy were overlooked. And even two decades later, most people, would say he was a good manager, including the corporate hierarchy. The problem was that his happy-go-lucky attitude not only benefitted the employees who did their job well, but it also benefitted those who chose to flout the rules. Not only did he decline to micromanage the high performing employees, but the slackers benefited from his hands off management as well. 

In this particular business, everyone theoretically worked at least one weekend day. Hours would vary somewhat based on the customer flow on a given day, but 9-5, Monday-Friday schedules weren't supposed to happen. Except that they did. One particular department manager worked part-time hours, Monday-Friday, no weekends, no evenings, no holidays. She took smoke breaks at least every hour. We were required to take a 30 minute lunch break mid-shift if we were scheduled 7 hours or more per day; she was allowed to schedule herself for 6 hours and 59 minutes (and could be found in the break room fairly often regardless). Other managers noticed. 

The point is not that any of those things shouldn't have been allowed, but that for the rest of the managers, they weren't allowed and that it was noticed and that people grew resentful. 

So, post pandemic?

National unemployment is around 4%. Locally it's around 3%. As I laid out in Part XXVI - Post Pandemic #1 people are quitting jobs rather than put up with crap. The churn that has always existed has slowed down to where there's often a large time gap between a resignation and a replacement. So what does a manager do? What I've been hearing is that managers are ignoring what ordinarily would be unacceptable — coming in late, incomplete or inaccurate work, you name it. Managers are reasoning, that as tough as it is to find replacements, it's better to put up with a substandard worker than no worker at all. While I admit that in some situations this may be appropriate, but in most this would be dead wrong. Just like in my example about the "good" manager, employees notice when other employees are held to different standards but are earning the same pay rate. 

A few years ago I had a problem employee in the deli of the store that I managed. He was part of a three-person team that worked the evening shift. He was lazy, incompetent and kept wandering off to use his cell phone. after several warnings I informed him that he would be terminated if he used his phone while on the clock again. Before the shift was over he started texting right in front of me! We were shorthanded for the rest of the week. At the end of the week one of the two remaining evening shift workers remarked that they were getting more done faster than when they had three people on duty. The remaining crew appreciated that I had gotten rid of the weak link, even though that theoretically meant more work for them. By keeping people who are not doing the job, managers are risking alienating the high performing employees. 

The final point in this post is about managers who are simply afraid that they'll need to fill in, work extra hours, or are concerned that the skill needed to replace someone is a little rusty. I've been in this position a few times in my management career. Do I really have time to drive to Humboldt every morning and deliver those papers? Can I really get all my other responsibilities done if I have to run the Frozen Department? I encountered both of those in two different management positions. In both I put up with substandard work for a long time until I was forced to take over and found out it wasn't so bad! If you've read the rest of this series on management you'll know that my theory of management is that it isn't necessarily a manager's job to do things, to get in there with the troops and work side by side — it's a manager's job, by training, coaching and delegation, to get things done. But sometimes, you have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty until you can hire and train a replacement.

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XXVIII

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XXVII - Paulianity

The New Testament is divided into several parts:

• The Gospels
• The Act of The Apostles
• Epistles
• The Apocalypse of John (aka Revelation)

The four Gospels are truncated biographies that focus on Jesus' ministry, with two giving information about his birth and youth. 

The Acts of the Apostles purport to follow the growth of Christianity following Jesus' Ascension. It focusses on Peter for about the first half and then switches the focus to Paul. It appears to be written by the author of the Gospel of Luke. 

The Apocalypse of John is a prophetic book that combines symbolic description of then current rulers with future events.

The Epistles are letters purportedly from Christian leaders to various churches, addressing specific issues that arose. Some are by the man we know as the Apostle Paul, others by someone claiming to be Paul. 

What's odd about what the early Church, and for that matter churches to this day, did with this information, is that the emphasis on doctrine and practice isn't what Jesus' is quoted in the Gospels as having taught, but what Paul wrote in his Epistles. 

Paul, despite being generally known as the Apostle Paul, was not one of the Twelve Apostles that we are introduced to in the Gospels. He never claims to have met Jesus. In fact, in his own writings he admits to having persecuted Christians. At some point, some 15-20 years after Jesus' death he had a vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus and *poof* he changed his tune and became a Christian. Not just any Christian either. He traveled around preaching and founding churches all over the place. Then he started writing letters to these churches, addressing situations where he believed that they were deviating from what he taught them. (this was probably 20 years before the first Gospel that made it into the Bible, Mark, was written) Despite being a Johnny-come-lately he did not look to Jesus' actual companions, Peter and the boys, for information about what Jesus taught. He actually bragged about not receiving what he knew about Jesus from any human being, but by revelation from God. And what this heavenly oracle was telling him was that Gentiles could be "saved" without adhering to the Law of Moses, which was not what Peter and the others were teaching. 

So, the Gospels, which are reporting events that took place mostly around 30 CE, did not start being written until around 35 years later, the first of Paul's writings had already been around for around 20 years by this time. Was the Gospel of Mark written to debunk Paul? (Matthew and Luke were written around 20 years after Mark, by which time all of Paul's Epistles were in circulation) The Gospels for the most part, especially the Synoptics (Mark, Matthew and Luke) focus on behaviors, while Paul focusses on beliefs. Not that the Pauline Epistles teach that behavior, or works, are unimportant, but the emphasis is on what a person believes. 

There's a faction of Biblical scholars who believe that Jesus did not exist, and that the strongest indication of his nonexistence lies with Paul. Paul's entire theology rests upon a self-described vision, not any interaction with Jesus or his immediate circle. The argument against an historical Jesus based on Paul's writings suggests that the Twelve, if they existed, would not have a quiesced to a newcomer like Paul, especially a former enemy, taking the lead that he did while they all faded into obscurity.  It's certainly plausible, but it's not a theory that I agree with. 

Early Christianity, as I have recently written about, was a collection of competing Christianities, differing ideas and interpretation regarding what Jesus really taught. I don't think it's necessary to ascribe Paul's dominance to the absence of The Twelve, or of Jesus himself, despite his whole theology being based on unverifiable revelation. It's just as plausible in my opinion that the Pauline faction simply pushed out the Apostolic faction, especially if Peter and the others were adamant about remaining Jewish where Paul was opening the club up to everyone. He could have simply steamrolled over the Twelver faction, with remnants putting together the Gospels as a counterbalance and a reminder that Jesus was all about works, with the Gospels just getting absorbed by the 'faith trumps works' Paulists. 

At this 2,000 year remove it's impossible to say, but for a faith supposedly based on Jesus, they have built his church, not on his most enthusiastic follower, Peter, but on Paul, the one who basically hallucinated him. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I 
 

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XXVI - Dispensationalism & Zionism & The Rapture (Oh My)

It wasn't very long ago that I explained dispensationalism in one of my articles, but I've been seeing social media posts connecting Zionism to Dispensationalism and the concept of a "Rapture". Many of these "debunk" Dispensationalism as a new, unbiblical doctrine and conclude that this undermines the whole concept of Zionism. 

Biblical Contradictions

Many Christians would take issue with the fact that the Bible contradicts itself, not to mention historical and archeological records. Many others simply ignore the contradictions — or don't know about them because they don't read the Bible. But from the very early days of Christianity theologians have been aware of contradictions and discrepancies and attempted to reconcile them. (I'm mainly dealing with how Christian theologians addressed inconsistencies, I am not very familiar with how Jewish scholars may have approached issues in the Jewish scriptures).

The question of the nature of Jesus Christ — was he God, or was he a man? — caused a lot of ink to be spilled in the theological battlefields of the early centuries of Christianity. Even when they thought they had an answer — he's both! — the minutia of how he could be both, as well as the ramifications of the various theories, occupied Christian leaders for centuries, when it could be argued that they certainly had better things to do. 

The problem that the Church Fathers identified was that there were sections of the Gospels and Epistles that very clearly indicated that Jesus was a man, a very holy man, a special man, but a man and not God. There were also other verses which just as clearly came down on the side of Jesus being God. These second century scholars had a choice: they could ignore the question and focus what Jesus preached and encourage people to follow his example and live their life as he taught; they could decide that Jesus being a man made more sense and interpret the verses that suggested that he was also God in that light; or place their bets on Christ's divinity and interpret the verses that said otherwise in that light. What they did was decide that Jesus was man and God. They argued interminably about the details, but ended up with the conclusion that he was fully God and fully man. That was the starting point for the doctrine of The Trinity, a theological edifice to explain away a contradiction — a Christology which cannot be found in any actual book of the Bible. (The nuances of that stance take up fat volumes — check it out some time). 

The God of the Jewish Bible (aka The Old Testament) vs. The God of Jesus

A very large plot hole in the Bible is the stark difference between how God is portrayed in the Old Testament and the New Testament. (Other than the Apocalypse of John [aka Revelation] which reverts back to the wrathful, vengeful God imagery). In the 1800's there arose a theological position called Dispensationalism, which attempted to explain the differences. But long before that, Marcion, a Second Century Christian, came up with his own solution. Marcion took a blunt force approach to Biblical criticism and simply threw out the parts he thought made no sense. Observing that the vengeful God of the Old Testament bore no resemblance to the God of the Gospels he concluded that they were different gods. In Marcion's view, the Old Testament God was evil, while the New Testament God of Jesus was the "true" God, the good God. He threw out the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John and the non-Pauline epistles and heavily edited what was left. Say what you want, but Marcion took care of those pesky contradictions!

Dispensationalism as an Answer to The Contradictions

Nineteenth Century Dispensationalists eschewed Marcion's approach. Rather than relegating the Old Testament God to second deity status, they arranged history as outlined in the Bible into a number of "dispensations". A dispensation, according to them, was a time period where God dealt with humanity in different ways from the other time periods. Even though Dispensationalism as a interpretative framework did not come about until the Nineteenth Century, it is predicated upon the observation that God appeared to act differently toward humans during different periods of history, which is clearly based on scripture. There was a time when God required his people to follow The Law of Moses, yet Paul wrote that Christians were not required to follow The Law. There was a time before The Law, and there will be a time after Christ returns when all the rules will be different. And Jesus was certainly following the Law of Moses, at least in spirit, if not in Pharisaic detail. How to reconcile all that? The answer was to theorize that since the rules obviously changed periodically, there was a need to demarcate those divisions. 

Scofield Reference Bible

Dispensationalism became popularized with the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1900 by American Bible student Cyrus Scofield. It was innovative in that it included commentary in the margins, rather than in a separate volume as was the previous custom. In 1909, Anglican Minister E.W. Bullinger edited The Companion Bible, which was similar in its inclusion of notes and commentary, along with voluminous appendices. Both men were Dispensationalists and their commentary reflected this belief.

The Dispensations

Following is a common division of dispensations:

• Innocence/Original Paradise/Garden of Eden — Adam and Eve before eating from the Tree of Knowledge
• Patriarchal — before the Law was given
• Law — the giving of the Law to Israel
• Grace or Church — this started when the Law Dispensation ended and includes the present day
• Tribulation — starts with the rapture and includes all the horrors of the Book of Revelation
• Millennial — ends with Christ's return to defeat The Beast and The Devil and initiates the Thousand Year reign of Christ on Earth
• This is sometimes combined with either The Tribulation or Paradise Dispensations, 
• Paradise — establishment of God's eternal kingdom on earth 

There were usually seven of these time periods, although I have seen eight listed as well. Since these dispensations were the opinions and interpretations of the theologians who came up with them, there were different ways to divide them up. Here are a few of the other divisions from other groups:

• Conscience — after "The Fall" — no rules, people followed their own conscience, ended with The Flood
• Human Government — From Noah to Abraham
• Promise — starts with Abraham and indicates God dealing with one specific group of people — ends with Moses
• These three are often combined into one
• Jesus' Ministry — some recognized this as a separate Dispensation; some interpretations ended the Law at Jesus' resurrection, some at the beginning of his ministry, some at the ascension, other at the end of The Acts of the Apostles. 
• Part of The Law, at least definitely separate from the Church Dispensation

Despite there being disagreements among Dispensationalists on where these divisions should begin and end, the concept does have its own logic. There's no question that God acts differently throughout different time periods as outlined in the Bible. But there are no bright lines delineating changes in God's rules — if there were, there would be no disagreement among the various advocates of dispensationalism. You won't find the term in the Bible, but it's a legitimate interpretive framework.

Tribulation, The Anti-Christ and Other Hallucinations

The Apocalypse of John, also known as Revelation (not Revelations) is the final book of the Bible. It was not universally considered to be inspired scripture during the canonization process in the Fourth Century, and it was re-examined by Martin Luther. Luther questioned Revelation, as well as several other previously canonized books, but ultimately left the New Testament Canon intact. Objectively Revelation is a figurative commentary on then-current events, and has nothing to do with our times, or any other time in the future of the First Century CE. Fundamentalists and Evangelicals however, view it as prophetic, and a blow-by-blow description of how the world will end and be replaced by the Kingdom of God that Jesus thought was going to happen 2000 years ago.  

There are a few things that make it at least plausible as a prophecy of future events. One of these is Chapter 1, v7: "Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen.", which fits very well with First Thessalonians 4:15-17 "For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord."

The other point is that the interpretation of chapters 20 and 21 makes the most sense as a description of events after the triumphant return of Christ. 

The Rapture

It's true that the concept of The Rapture is relatively new, it wasn't taught widely until the mid-1800's. But it does have a Biblical foundation, even without resorting to the acid trip that is the Apocalypse of John, aka The Book of Revelation. It's pretty clear from the Gospels, at least the Synoptics, that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, i.e. he preached that the world as it was known was going to end, and God would inaugurate his Kingdom on Earth. Not at some hazy future time, but soon. He is quoted as saying that end would come before the current generation passed away. Paul, writing around 20 years later, and arguably writing toward the end of that generational countdown, thought it would happen soon as well. 2000 year old spoiler alert: it didn't happen. 

Within Paul's epistles he addresses the undeniable fact that it hadn't happened yet. He comforts those who were concerned that those who had died would miss out in First Thessalonians chapter 4 by describing those who had already died rising from the dead, followed by those still alive, to meet Jesus in the air. "For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord." First Corinthians chapter 15 gives additional information. Second Thessalonians chapter 2 addresses those who thought that the resurrection was spiritual and had already happened by stressing that it was still future, would be physical, and could not happen until a "great apostasy" took place. The great apostasy, or "falling away", as some translations render it, could conceivably be linked to the "Beast" of the Book of Revelation. 

As Paul grew older, with no sign of Jesus returning to gather the believers in the air, he started writing about his belief that a believer would be in God's presence immediately upon death. As the Catholic/Orthodox version of Christianity became the dominant, official, version, the canonical doctrine became that a believer would immediately be ushered into God's presence (or, if evil, to Hell) at death. The future resurrection was viewed, if at all, as a return of Jesus to herald the new heaven and new Earth. 

Dispensationalist End Times

Nineteenth Century Dispensationalist theologians combined the description of a resurrection in Paul's epistles with the events in Revelation and with various prophesies in the Old Testament to concoct a timeline of the end times. It eventually became an article of faith in Fundamentalist and Evangelical circles that a rapture of believers would be followed by a "tribulation" which would end with the triumphant return of Jesus, the last judgement and the ushering in of paradise. It's my opinion that the Rapture itself, even apart from the Book of Revelation, is a plausible interpretation of the New Testament doctrine regarding the fate of the dead, despite it being a relatively new theory. 

Zionism

The name Zionism comes from "Zion", the name of the mount upon which Jerusalem was built in Biblical times. It originated in the mid-1800's as a movement to create a national home for the Jewish people. Alternatives to Palestine were considered, but the consensus settled upon Palestine. The Ottoman Empire was still in control of Palestine at that time. Jews from other areas in Ottoman lands, as well as from Europe where Jews endured regular persecution, began to migrate to Palestine. Some Zionists had a religious motivation: to fulfil prophesies of the return of Israel to its ancestral land, others had purely political motivations — to secure a safe haven where Jews were in control. When the Ottomans lost in World War One, the United Kingdom took control of Palestine, which then included what is now the Kingdom of Jordan. The United Kingdom agreed to assist in the creation of a "national home for the Jewish people". Israel declared itself an independent state within the borders set by the United Nations in 1948. 

Christian Support For Zionism and the State of Israel

Even though the Jewish Zionists were not motivated by the Book of Revelation (even if some were spurred by Old Testament predictions of a return to their ancestral domain) the support they received from the United Kingdom was. Dispensationalism and the related End Times interpretation of the Book of Revelation had taken root within the upper echelons of U.K. government. They saw it as their Christian duty to facilitate Israel's return to The Holy Land. Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States military and financial support for Israel is based on some of the same assumptions. (It's ironic that many of these same cheerleaders for a Jewish state, nevertheless tend to be bigoted toward actual Jews.) 

Dispensationalism became a bedrock doctrine of American Evangelical and Fundamentalist Churches and explains a lot of the right wing support for Israel. The relevant scriptures that point to a re-establishment of Israel and The Temple are not found in Revelation however. References are scattered throughout the Old Testament: Ezekiel 37:21-25, Zechariah 14:2-4, Jeremiah 31: 31-34, and others refer to Israel and the Israelites returning to the Biblical lands. The implication of these verses is then read into the events of Revelation. 

Anti-Israeli Backlash

Recently, especially, but not exclusively, among progressives who support Palestine and decry the Israeli government's treatment of them, there has been a backlash. This reaction usually takes the form of denying that the modern State of Israel has anything to do with the Biblical Nation of Israel. This is often extended to include an assertion that the State of Israel is an illegal colonialist entity that has no right to exist. I'm not going to debate that issue here, but just as we shouldn't be conducting foreign policy based on the Bible, we shouldn't be doing so based on whether a country that clearly does exist, shouldn't exist based on a different Biblical opinion. In other words, our support for another nation should be predicated on our national interest, not whether that nation's existence fulfils a prophecy. Equally, scouring the Bible for reasons that a nation doesn't fulfill a Biblical prophecy, should not be a reason to abandon an ally. We shouldn't be using anyone's Holy Book to set national policy!

The movement to delegitimize Israel and our support for their war also includes denial of the legitimacy of Dispensationalist theology, including the Rapture. Opponents of Israel apparently believe that  debunking the interpretive legitimacy of Dispensationalist and Rapture theology undermines any rationale for our alliance with Israel. Their foundation is not particularly strong, Dispensationalism, which in my opinion has its weak points, can be justified Biblically. 

Antisemitism — An Offshoot Or Foundation of The Backlash?

An unfortunate side effect of all of this is a resurgence of Anti-Jewish bigotry, discrimination and persecution. Social media posts that I have seen attempting to discredit Dispensationalism often include the false assertion that the Scofield Reference Bible was "commissioned by the Rothschilds". Anyone who has paid attention to antisemitic tropes over the years knows that "The Rothschilds" is often shorthand for the conspiracy theory that powerful Jews are running the world through their alleged control of, among other things, banks, the media and government. No Rothschild had anything to do with the Scofield Bible. Another feature of the backlash is an insistence that the modern State of Israel has nothing in common with the Biblical Nation of Israel. This assertion is usually based on a 1976 book by Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe. Koestler theorized that Ashkenazi Jews (i.e. Jews from Eastern Europe as opposed to Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews — from Spain and Egypt respectively) were descended from a Turkic Tribe that had converted to Judaism in the Eighth Century. Koestler claimed that this would remove the racial basis for discrimination and persecution against Jews. It had the opposite effect. It became a favorite of White Nationalists, the Christian Identity Movement, and Arabs who maintained that modern-day Jews had no ancestral claim to Palestine. 

Bottom Line 

It's complicated. I am not a Bible believer, and am firmly against basing our foreign policy on religious texts. But most of what you're reading on this subject is not true. There are plenty of reasons to be against our war with Israel against Iran, and many reasons to abhor Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, but insisting that certain Biblical interpretations are wrong isn't one of them. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I 

Go to: Part XXVII

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXVI - Sunk Costs

One of the things you learn in economics courses is the concept of "sunk cost". Most people don't understand it. Sunk cost is the money that you have "sunk" into a project or a purchase that you will never get back, no matter what you do. The sunk cost fallacy is when the money that you already spent becomes the justification for continuing to spend money, even though you really don't want or need to continue. An example would be sitting through a terrible movie because you already paid for the ticket; or you paid for repairs for your junk car last month, and it needs repairs again, so instead of getting rid of this money pit of a car, you keep repairing it, not wanting to "waste" the money you already spent; or holding on to an asset that in all likelihood will never again be worth what you paid for it because you don't want to "lose" money by selling it for less than the purchase price. In all of these examples the money for the movie ticket, for the car repairs, for the purchase of the asset has already been spent in the past no matter what you do in the present. It's gone. 

My point of view regarding my involvement in The Way International was very much a sunk cost fallacy. There were red flags aplenty, many reasons why my involvement was a bad idea, but I had rationalized that I had put so much time and effort into it, that it wouldn't make sense to back out. I had completely changed my religious world view, I had antagonized my family and abandoned my friends, I had quit college and moved halfway across the country to participate in a program that turned out to be a joke, I had seen people who supposedly were Godly leaders seriously falling short of even the most basic of expectations, yet here I was, signing up for another year of commitment to this sketchy organization, and not only that, I was taking the first steps to joining their so-called leadership training program, a lifetime commitment. If I had made all of those big moves, I "reasoned", why wouldn't I want to double down and not "waste" the time and preparation I had invested so far. 

One thing that is clear in retrospect, but I wouldn't admit to myself back then, was that I simply didn't want to admit to everyone who thought that getting involved in The Way was a bad idea, that it was a bad idea. 

So here I was, now in a "Way Home" in Lincoln Nebraska. There were no restrictions on how many hours I could work, or a minimum number of hours I was required to "witness" every week, I could travel to visit family  — in short, none of the formal strictures that defined the WOW Ambassador program. But there was still an expectation that the Way leadership had first call on my time. If there was a meeting, I was required to attend, if there was a class, I was required to participate; the whole purpose of the home in which I lived was to serve the needs of the Way hierarchy. One of the first things that I noticed was that things were conducted much more formally than I had grown used to. In New York, which was one of the first areas to experience large numerical growth in the seventies, the wide spread of fellowships had outpaced the ability of Way headquarters to staff them with Way Corps graduates, or even Way Corps students. This resulted in a very organic leadership structure, largely free of a lot of egotism or central control. In Sidney, isolated as we were from other Way people in the state, we were similarly informal in our activities. But the state leader of The Way had graduated from the Way Corps several years earlier, and was in his third year as Limb (state) Coordinator. Branch, and even home fellowship, meetings were highly structured, and lacked the spontaneity that I came to expect. Despite my initial resistance to this approach, I became somewhat enamored of it myself and began to enjoy being "the leader", the local "Man of God" after I had been appointed Twig Leader of a small fellowship. 

One of the things that was always at the forefront of the minds of Way leaders was outreach and growth. The way these things were measured was twofold: running PFAL classes and "splitting" twigs. PFAL classes I have discussed before. If your twig fellowship could find seven or more people to take the class, you were outreach heroes. It really didn't matter much if the class graduates wandered away afterward, the important thing was that we had run a class. Splitting a twig indicated that you had too many people to comfortably participate in a home fellowship and that you had enough to start up a new fellowship in another home. When I arrived in Lincoln, there were six or seven home fellowships as part of the Lincoln branch and a similar number in Omaha, with a few isolated twigs in smaller towns around the state. Around halfway through the year Rev. Ronnie, our state leader, decided to split all the fellowships. Now we had double the numbers of twig fellowships, double the numbers of leaders, but not double the number of people. This became an issue the following year when the new incoming state leader discovered that the Lincoln Branch and the Lincoln Twig Area (basically a half-size branch) didn't contain ten thriving fellowship requiring two Way Corps overseers, but four feeble little home fellowships. 

An issue, however, that was to cause problems before the ministry year was out was that a lot of us were young people (I had just turned 23) and been (mostly) celibate for the previous year. There was an overabundance of young, single people looking for boyfriends and girlfriends, and along with that, sex. This reality, coupled with The Way's hypocritical and inconsistent views on pre-marital sex and even dating, was going to result in a big change in my relationship with The Way.

Start from the beginning: Part I