So is it chicken, or is it steak? I’m relatively sure that I never
consumed chicken-fried steak when I lived in New York, or on any of my
subsequent visits back. But chicken-fried steak was my first meal in my new
home, Sidney, Nebraska. After arriving in Sidney on an early Friday afternoon
and finding a two-bedroom duplex to rent, then doing a little job hunting, we
repaired to Dude’s Steakhouse for dinner. With an effigy of a giant steer on
the roof, Dude’s is the happenin’ spot in Sidney; the restaurant is in the
front and the sawdust-covered dance floor, topped by a mirror ball, in the
back. One of the odd things about social life in Sidney in those days was the
drinking age. Nebraska, like most states, had recently decided to increase the
drinking age from 18 to 21, but was doing it gradually, grandfathering in
anyone who was over 18 when the law was passed; if you turned 18 the day before
the law went into effect, you could start drinking, if your birthday was one
day later, you waited three years until you were 21 [1].
Colorado on the other hand hadn’t
raised the drinking age yet, so there was a steady traffic of 18, 19 and 20
year olds south across the Colorado border to The Hot Spot in the town of Peetz, while northeastern Colorado
residents flocked north to the greater Sidney metropolis.
For a guy who grew up in New York City, Sidney was on the ass-end of
nowhere, a population of about 5000, most of them tobacco-chewing, pickup
truck-driving, cowboy hat-wearing rednecks who, if they weren’t dating their cousins,
it was because their sisters were better looking. On the day that we arrived,
leaving the interstate and heading toward town, the first sight that greeted us
was a trailer court, a grain elevator, a gas station and a bar, which for one
horrible moment we thought was the entire town. The reality wasn’t much more
attractive. Within hours of our arrival, it seemed that everyone knew that we
had arrived and what we were doing there. The pastors of the two dozen churches
in town had their people on alert for the “cult members” in their midst. The
irony of it all was that we weren’t very good cult members; we were terrible
recruiters; they really had nothing to worry about.
One of the more common methods of recruitment employed by evangelical
groups is door-to-door “witnessing”. The Jehovah’s Witnesses do it,
fundamentalist mega-churches do it, the Mormons do it and we did it in The Way.
The problem with door-to-door witnessing in a small town is that you quickly
run out of doors to knock on. The average number of people per household is
usually estimated at 3.5 [2];
for a city of 5000 that gives you approximately 1400 households. If you divide
the group into pairs, each pair has to knock on only 700 doors, which you can
do in a month if you set the modest goal of 25 houses per day. Since other than
working part time, all that you’re supposed to be doing with your time is
witnessing, this isn’t too difficult. In the bigger cities, where most of the
growth in The Way took place, witnessing other than door-to-door was done in
malls, parks and other places where large numbers of people gathered. This
obviously was a problem in Sidney, which had no shopping center, and other than
churches, no place where people congregated in large groups. One of The Way’s
recruiting pitches was that while they were ostensibly Christian, they viewed
all other Christians as wrong in the details of their doctrine and/or practice,
so if you really wanted to get to
know God’s will, you had to get involved with The Way and take their Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class.
So, by this logic, it made sense to go after church people who of course would
abandon their stale, error-ridden churches for the shining light of truth to be
found in The Way as presented by four marginally employed college drop-outs.
The first church that we visited was the Sidney Church of the Foursquare
Gospel, pastored by The Reverend Jerry Skinner, who would become our main
opponent during our stay in the town of One-Horse, Nebraska, also known as
Sidney.
One afternoon, the Foursquare Church was going to be hosting a “healing
ministry” by a visiting pastor. Several of us decided to attend, mainly,
although we would never admit it to ourselves, to feel superior to these poor
ignorant yokels and maybe show some of them The
Truth. Little did we know that the entire town of Sidney, and especially
Rev. Jerry Skinner, was loaded for bear and couldn’t wait to confront us with a
little truth of their own . After the service Rev. Skinner stood at the door to
the sanctuary, shaking hands, and making small talk. I had no plans to speak
with the man, but shook his hand perfunctorily, ready to make my exit, but Rev.
Jerry wasn’t about to let me off so easily. He held my hand in an iron grip and
fixed me with a steely glare; “You’re Tom, with The Way, your companions are
Rosemarie and Gail, Steve isn’t with you today…” he continued to tell us where
we were from, who we worked for and other details of our lives, nothing
supernatural or anything, but this guy was obviously someone who had done his
homework and found out all that he could about his “enemy”. One thing that we
didn’t know at the time was that Rev. Jerry had been briefly involved with The
Way in the early seventies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, the same
time and place where The Way’s new leader, Craig Martindale, had first become involved[3].
Unlike most people that we encountered who were against The Way, this guy
actually knew and understood what we believed and taught and was on a mission
(from God…really) to prevent us from making any inroads into his town.
Part of the W.O.W. Ambassador program was the requirement that you
“witness”, i.e. recruit, 6 days a week. You were supposed to take off one day
from work and witnessing, preferably the same day! If I remember correctly a
W.O.W. Ambassador was supposed to witness 48 hours per week, which equates to 8
hours per day, on top of however many hours you worked your part-time job every
day. I don’t know of anyone who really followed that part of the program, we
sure didn’t. Let’s do the math: Most places of employment didn’t open until
7:00AM, figuring a 20-hour per week job, that about 4 hours per day. So you’re
done about 11:00AM. Go home and have some lunch, be done by say, 12:30PM.
You’re probably going to eat the evening meal together as a “family”, so you’ve
got to be home by 5:00PM to start preparing dinner. So you’ve only had 4 ½
hours to witness in the afternoon. By the time you make dinner, eat and clean
up its 6:30PM. You’ve now got to get 3½ hours in by the end of the day, so
you’re out until 10:00PM witnessing, unless of course it’s a “Twig Night”.
(Twig is Way-speak for a home fellowship) That takes about an hour, so
witnessing takes you out until 11:00PM...in Sidney Nebraska.
If you’re out and about from 12:30 to 5:00, who are you going to encounter:
Stay-at-home moms, retired farmers and the unemployed? There’s a very small
pool of people around during the day in a town of 5000. What about in the
evening? Just how late do you think people will be answering their doors before
they call the cops? So what does that leave? Considering that you will have
knocked on every door in about a month without even trying very hard, cafes
during the day and bars at night is where the witnessing action takes place,
which brings us back to Dude’s.
Dude’s wasn’t the only bar in Sidney, but it was the only one with a
dance floor and a deejay. There was a pool hall that Steve, who was a pretty
fair pool player and I (a pretty poor pool player), went to some evenings. The
routine was that Steve played pool while I leaned against a table and tried to
engage people in discussions about God or the Bible. Although I never played, I
could usually figure out what the best shot was since I had been watching Steve
play as well as visualizing the geometry in my head. After about a month, guys
started asking me for advice on what shot to take and even recommendations on
what kind of cue to buy. Since I acted and talked like I was an expert, the
habitués of the place thought that I
was an expert[4]. Steve
very seldom went to Dude’s, since he didn’t like to dance, so I usually
“witnessed” over there with one or both of the girls. After a while a weird set
of misunderstandings developed regarding our living arrangements. Usually I
introduced whoever was with me as “my roommates”. Some folks jumped to the
conclusion that I was a super stud based on my having two female roommates,
while others assumed that Steve and I were gay, both groups blocking out the
existence of the roommates that didn’t fit with their fantasies.
As our time in Sidney crept onward, it became more and more evident that
there was a smoldering hatred of “cults”, a visceral fear and loathing that had
started about a year before in the wake of the Jonestown mass suicide and
related killings and had come to focus on most groups that swam outside the
mainstream, which included The Way International, which in Sidney meant the
four of us. Several overlapping and mutually exclusive definitions of “cult”
exist, and most people don’t have a clear idea of what a cult is, how to
recognize one or why they are bad. Especially back in the days before the
internet, abuses within new religious groups were as often as not fabricated
and a large percentage of anti-cult crusaders didn’t understand the theology
behind the arguments against them and people sometimes confused the term “cult”
with “occult”[5].
The center of anti-cult, anti-us
activity in Sidney was the aforementioned Foursquare Gospel Church pastored by
Rev. Jerry Skinner, but a coalition of other churches in Sidney followed along
and attempted to make our lives miserable.
One of the strategies that we were instructed to employ in our mission to
convert the heathens of western Nebraska was to hold an “open house”. I’d
actually seen this work while I lived in New York, but, as I was a bit slow to
realize, I wasn’t in New York
anymore. In the days leading up to our scheduled open house, the four of us
utilized our witnessing time diligently printing up and distributing flyers all
around town. What we were unaware of was that the local church leaders were
following behind us and just as diligently tearing down our cute little flyers.
As a result the only people who knew about our open house were the four of us
and all the folks who had already decided that we were a grave danger to the
American way of life. We didn’t see it then, but this open house was to be the
defining moment for our entire time in Sidney. We spent the afternoon cleaning
and scrubbing our modest duplex, arranging the furniture and setting out snacks
while Steve prepared a teaching and presentation designed to convince all but
the hardest-hearted that we were the purveyors of the truth that Sidney
Nebraska had waited its entire existence for. And the hardest-hearted turned
out to be our only guests that evening. The attendees that night included
several pastors, including our nemesis, Rev. Skinner, and a handful of his
youth group members. From an outreach point of view the evening was a
resounding failure, but like most things in The Way, we redefined things so
that they would fit with our preconceived notions of how the world worked. We
chose to interpret the day’s events as proof that we were doing God’s will and
that the “persecution” that we were enduring was evidence that “the Adversary”
was all lathered up over the four spiritual heavyweights who were speaking the
truth to the citizens of Sidney. So our focus became, not recruiting for The
Way, not lovingly sharing what we had learned or making healing available, but
patiently enduring and standing up to persecution. The good people of Sidney
were only too glad to oblige us.
It wasn’t as if we had come up with the persecution complex all by
ourselves, The Way’s founder, V.P. Wierwille was more concerned with the Devil
and his minions than anyone I’d ever heard of. There was even a class, Dealing With the Adversary, (later,
under Wierwille’s successor changed to Defeating the Adversary) that covered what Wierwille claimed to know about
“The Adversary” (“Satan” is the English transliteration of a Hebrew word
meaning “adversary”) and his “devil spirits”, constructing an hierarchy from
what he called buck privates to five-star generals, all under the orders of the
commander-in-chief, the Devil. The advanced class portion of the PFAL series of
classes, while ostensibly covering six of the nine “manifestations of the
spirit” mentioned in Corinthians (the other three speaking in tongues,
interpretation of tongues and prophecy are expounded upon in the foundational
and intermediate classes) the class mainly focused on the manifestation called
“discerning of spirits”, specifically,
recognizing devil spirits. Way members were constantly being urged to
look over their shoulder for interference by the Devil, to check their thoughts
for devilish influences and to listen for their inner holy spirit to alert them
to the presence of devil spirits in others. We were seeing the Devil all over the Sidney metropolitan area,
but the good people of Sidney were seeing the Devil in just one place, and that
was in our little duplex on Jackson Street.
Back in New York I had occasionally heard the word “cult” and had
encountered resistance to our message from individuals and even from some
groups, but it wasn’t until I moved to Sidney that people actually started doing something about their opinions. Nebraska
values in action. One of the first of many actions took place at my job. We
were all required to have a part-time job to support ourselves during our WOW
year, since we arrived on a Friday it wasn’t until the next Monday, when most
of the businesses were open that I found employment. Ken Pittam, a member of
one of those families that had been in Sidney forever, owned a store that sold
custom flooring and windows as well as a small café, both on Illinois Avenue,
Sidney’s main street. Ken hired me as a kind of go-fer, to clean up around the
flooring store, take orders and work as an apprentice to the glass cutters. One
of my first jobs was to help remove all the plate glass windows in the town’s
Safeway grocery store before it was demolished and install windows in the new
building. I was on my way to learning a trade when Ken took me aside one
morning to inform me that he was letting me go, not because he couldn’t afford
me (20 hours per week at minimum wage), or because I was a poor worker, but
because he had received pressure from the members of his church to “fire that
cultist”. I was pretty sure that it was illegal to fire someone on the basis of
their religion, but I didn’t exactly have the means to file a lawsuit, and my
priority was to “move the Word”.
Even though I was marooned in western Nebraska ensconced in the arms of a
religious cult, surrounded by a town that was in large part hostile to my very
existence, I was still a New Yorker, and the strangeness of the whole environment
sometimes trumped the strangeness of being in a cult. One of the first things
that I ordered in the local café was a traditional New York breakfast: a roll
with butter and a “regular” coffee. Now what I meant by that was a buttered hard roll, you know, the kind with
poppy or sesame seeds, and coffee with cream & sugar. What I got was a huge cinnamon roll with a cold
pat of butter setting on top, a black coffee and some funny looks from the
waitress, especially when I asked “What is this?”
One of the things that a New Yorker quickly finds out upon leaving “The City”
is that familiar foods are called different things in the outside world. The
custom of calling coffee with cream & sugar “regular” is only one among
many. Another is that New Yorkers are notoriously picky about what foods are
appropriate for mustard and which ones take ketchup. Mustard is for hot dogs
(or “franks”) and ketchup was for hamburgers. In fact, Heinz used to sell a
ketchup-pickle relish mix called “hamburger relish” and still has one with
mustard labeled “hot dog relish”. McDonald’s and Burger King both routinely put
ketchup, mustard and pickles on their burgers except in New York City. My first McDonald’s hamburger with mustard
on it was actually in Albany, New York, which was not the real New York, but that region referred to as “upstate”. Rueben
sandwiches, a New York delicacy, feature corned beef, sauerkraut and Russian
dressing, but what is called Russian dressing in New York is called Thousand
Island salad dressing everywhere else in the United States (maybe not anymore). And then you have
bagels. Thirty years later, bagels have appeared all over the country, or at
least round bread that is called a
“bagel”, but back in 1980, the farther you got from New York, the scarcer
bagels became. Don’t get me started on what toppings are appropriate for
pizzas!
In addition to missing the uniquely New York take on food, there were
also some Nebraska oddities. One afternoon I stopped for lunch at the Fort
Sidney Hotel Restaurant, where Gail worked as a waitress. As a side I had
ordered a “Jell-O salad”, which I assumed would be some fruit mixed in with
Jell-O. What arrived was a small square of Jell-O with what looked like a
little curlicue of whipped cream on top. Except that the “whipped cream” turned
out to be Miracle Whip! Augh! As I contemplated this affront to fine dining I
was approached by one of the managers of the restaurant who informed me that no
members of The Way would be welcome to eat at Fort Sidney. While in theory a
business can refuse service to anyone
this is the first time I had seen it applied in regard to a person’s religion. Later that day, the daily mail
included a letter from our landlord, informing us that we would be required to
vacate our duplex apartment no later than December 31st. A visit to
the landlord elicited “I ain’t gonna rent to no cult” as the reason for our
eviction. People started accosting us in the street and screaming “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus”; the
clerk at the grocery store “rebuked” me in the produce aisle; the bulletin
board at my job started to feature notes and articles about the “dangerous
cult” loose in Sidney; and a town hall meeting was convened on the subject of
“cults” (which we all attended!). Not satisfied with verbal abuse, Sidneyites
started swerving their cars to try to run us over, throwing rocks at us and
standing in front of our house cursing at us. Finally, there came “The Jericho
March”.
Lurking behind all of this was Sidney’s religious establishment, and
right in the middle of it all was our old pal Rev. Jerry Skinner, pastor of the
Foursquare Gospel Church. Sometime in late January, just as we were finishing
up a “twig” meeting, we noticed a yellow Mustang, which belonged to a prominent
member of Rev. Jerry’s youth group, circling our block. Shortly thereafter we
began to see people walking, two-by-two, past our house, apparently walking
around our block. Steve and I snuck out the back door and hid in the darkness
of our backyard, which, since it was on a corner lot, had a good view of the
participants in this late night stroll. As we lay on our bellies in the grass,
we noticed that everyone on this promenade was part of the Foursquare Church.
Steve, struck with a brilliant idea, leapt up and joined the parade, which
snaked around our block a few more times and ended up back at the church, just
a few blocks away. Bundled up in a hat and scarf, Steve blended in with the
crowd and was unrecognized as he slunk into a back pew. Rev. Jerry, leading his
congregation in prayer, asked them to close their eyes. As part of his prayer,
he talked about the purpose of that evening: a “Jericho March”, named after the
march around the city of Jericho in the biblical Book of Joshua which resulted
in the walls falling down after seven days of marching around the city,
culminating in a seventh day march of seven times around the city, followed by
trumpet blowing and yelling. They were claiming our block back for God, who
thankfully did not see fit to knock down our walls. When the prayer was over,
Jerry and his congregation opened their eyes to see Steve, who by this time had
removed his hat and scarf in the indoor heat, grinning from ear to ear at the
back of the church. Steve waved to the group and walked out. These people were
crazy.
Shortly after this incident the leadership of The Way of Nebraska decided
that we were being pulled out of Sidney and reassigned. On a lark Gail and I
decided to invite Jerry over to the house for coffee. We talked about this and
that, discussed the Bible and how he wished that he had people like us in his
youth group, that but for our error he admired our commitment. He then went on
about how “The Lord” had told him about our reassignment and how did we feel
about being split up. Gail asked him what he was talking about and Jerry
replied that The Lord had revealed to him that two of us were leaving town and
two of us were staying. Gail followed with the best comeback of the year,
“Jerry, the Lord threw you a curve; we’re all leaving!” Later that week we
began the second half of our year about two hours eastward, in Kearney
Nebraska.
[1] At the
time that I left, drinking age in New York was 18, I was 22 when I arrived in
Sidney. The youngest member of our troupe was 20.
[2] According
to the Audit Bureau of (newspaper) Circulation
[3] There were
several focal points of early growth for The Way in the early seventies,
Wichita Kansas was one of these hot spots. The Way leaders in Wichita spread
out to Lawrence during this time period.
[4] Oddly
enough (or not) one of my sons has inherited this trait and has demonstrated
his ability to bullshit his way through anything.
[5] Once a
group of high school kids showed up at our door wanting to know if we could
conduct a séance for them
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