Here I am, lying on my belly in the weeds in the alley
behind my house with my roommate Steve watching as people from the local church
march around our block two-by-two. The Reverend Jerry Skinner, pastor of the
Sidney Nebraska Foursquare Gospel Church (you can almost hear the “hallelujahs”
and the Southern accent as you read that) has staged a “Jericho March” [1]to
reclaim for God the block that I live on. Apparently God had abandoned his
claim to the block bordered by 12th, 13th, Dodge &
Cedar Streets so Skinner and his youth group (who we called ‘Jerry’s Kids’)
were going to get it back for The Lord
by marching around the block seven times, although I don’t recall any shouting,
trumpets or walls falling down. Welcome to Nebraska.[2]
Sometimes I’m convinced that some of my New York
relatives think that I live in Oz, not Nebraska, they view my adopted home as
an idyllic yet backward throwback to a bygone era. People have been amazed that
I can get “Saturday Night Live” on television. They make fun of my Nebraska
accent, apparently unaware that they have
an accent. For years people asked me why I moved to Nebraska from the center of
the known universe, new acquaintances still do and I almost always lie.
In the summer of 1979 I was twenty-one years old,
working in a May’s department store in the Garden Center, pretending that I
knew something about plants, living at home with my parents and four siblings
having taken a year off from college since I had done so poorly in the previous
semester. I had no idea what I wanted
to do with my life or where I was going. I had also been regularly attending
meetings of a chapter of The Way International, manifesting itself locally as a
bible study group. In August of that year, after attending for the second time
The Way’s annual event, The Rock of Ages, on their former farm outside of New
Knoxville Ohio, I decided to get a better job, applying for and being hired as
a clerk in E.F. Hutton & Company, a large stockbroker, and to move into a
“Way Home”.
Earlier that year there had been a push, as there was
every year, for people to volunteer for the Word Over the World (WOW)
Ambassador program, where Way members could sign up for a year of what amounted
to missionary work somewhere in the United States. Assured that I wouldn’t have
to wear a tie with black pants and a white shirt adorned with a nametag
identifying me as ‘Elder” I signed up, as had my boyhood friend Joe Tully, but
I backed out at the last minute. Feeling guilty about not doing my part to
“move the Word”, The Way’s jargon for proselytizing, I accepted an invitation
to move into a house with three others, called a “Way Home”, where we would run
fellowships (called “twigs” after the smallest part of the tree), recruit
people into The Way and run Power for
Abundant Living (PFAL) classes. [3]
Over a year earlier, just a few months before my
twentieth birthday, I had taken The Way’s PFAL class and spent the next year
somewhat on the fringes of involvement with the organization. I attended their
home fellowships sporadically; the one in my neighborhood of Rosedale had
disbanded when local leaders Joe and Tom both moved, Tom to spend a year in
Nevada as a WOW and Joe to move into a Way Home in the Queens Village
neighborhood, so attending regular fellowships took a little more effort than
it had before, but over the next year, for a variety of reasons, I became more
and more convinced that The Way was worthy of my support and commitment.
One of the things that helped The Way galvanize support
with young people back in the seventies was the perception that it was a
counter-cultural phenomenon. The PFAL class emphasized the things that made it
different and better than mainstream Christianity. Teachings focused on how
those who opposed us were those who were comfortable in their error and that we
should expect resistance. Those who stuck with The Way and the PFAL doctrines
internalized them in such a way that those who opposed them were seen as
opposing the truth, opposing God himself. Many of us reveled in the idea that
we were following God in the face of near-universal opposition. When we
received the inevitable resistance from our families and friends, it seemed
almost like a fulfillment of prophecy. And resist they did. It was a vicious
circle (or is it a vicious cycle? – I
never can remember which) with our parents expressing concern or disagreement
and we kids expressing our newfound spirituality, each round escalating and
pushing the sides farther apart, culminating with the parents convinced that
their kids were brainwashed, “changed” in some nonspecific way and the kids
convinced that their parents stood on the wrong side of the God fence.
Everything that our parents did and said was evidence (like Will Smith as the
“Fresh Prince” sang) that they just didn’t understand, that they were unwilling
to look beyond what they had grown up believing. And there was some truth in that. Most parents didn’t want to know the specifics of why we now believed things that were at odds with traditional
beliefs; they were as ill-equipped as we were to discern the real errors in
biblical research principles and gaps in logic, but the fact that it wasn’t
what they had been brought up on was a good enough reason for them to reject
it. On the other hand, everything that we kids did and said was evidence to our
parents that we had gone off the deep end. We were arrogant in our newfound
knowledge and condescending to those who we perceived as ignorant and willfully
blind. Of course our superior and holier-than-thou attitude was going to grate
on them, of course our withdrawal from them and everything they had taught us
would be hurtful. Parents and children were both basing their decisions on
different premises. Both generations remained a mystery to the other, unaware
of the other’s motivations and unwilling to find out what they were.
So here I was, in late August of 1979, moving into a Way Home with three
other people that I barely knew, the first time that I had lived anywhere other
than under my parents’ roof. After spending a year and a half on the periphery
of The Way I had made a decision to commit myself more fully to “moving the
Word of God”. Bernie, one of my fellow students from my initial PFAL class,
would be the Way Home Coordinator and Twig (Way jargon for household bible
fellowship) Leader. Two women, Wanda and Beverly, would be sharing the home as
well. I was fully expecting to live a lifestyle that centered on God and ‘His
Word’, i.e. The Bible, to spend my non-working hours surrounded by people who
wanted to serve God as much as I did, and to see ‘signs, miracles and wonders’
come to pass in my life. The reality wasn’t quite so rosy.
Bernie, appointed as our fearless leader by other, even more fearless,
leaders farther up ‘The Way Tree’, turned out to be a heavy drinker who had
lost his job due to his drinking and spent his 9 – 5’s pretending to go to work, and using our rent and utility money to
finance his boozing[4]. It was
several months before we found out, but in the meantime, we were far from
living a life of Christian fellowship and love. We hardly ever ate meals
together and saw each other only rarely. We weren’t sure what we were supposed to be doing or what the point
was to this Way Home. Late in the year we found out where our money was going
when Beverly, home sick from work, tried to call her employer and found that
our phone was disconnected. After walking to the pay phone on the corner, and
calling the phone company, she discovered that the phone bill hadn’t been paid
for two months; additional calls uncovered the fact that we were also behind on
the electric bill, heating oil, water and the rent. All of our money could now
be found in the cash drawer at the corner bar. That evening we confronted
Bernie with this information and brought in the branch coordinator, who was the
leader for about seven or eight fellowships and Way Homes in our section of
Queens. It was decided that Bernie would continue to live with us, but would be
replaced as leader…by me (yes, that’s as scary as it sounds), and that he would
pay us back in full by paying all the bills that had been delinquent over the
previous several months. Less than a month later all of the checks that Bernie
was using to pay the past due rent and utilities bounced. Wanda, Beverly and I
decided to throw him out of the house without any input from our so-called
leadership…who supposedly had a direct pipeline to God.
Even without Bernie around things didn’t get any better, we still didn’t
know what we were supposed to be doing or why we were doing it; no one seemed
inclined to enlighten us. The consensus among the local leaders and accepted by
us was that Bernie had screwed things up so badly that we needed to just start
all over, move people around and hope for the best. Besides, with Bernie gone,
my mother was nervous that I was living alone with two women!
The New Year began with me being transferred to a different Way Home.
Things seemed better, we were organized, ate meals together, witnessed
together, pooled our money to pay rent and utilities and buy groceries and we
had people flocking to the house to hear us teach the bible. The Way Home
Coordinator, Eddie, ran the Spanish language twig while I lead the English
language twig. We convinced people to enroll in PFAL classes and experienced
things that we interpreted as miracles; I thought I was finally immersed in
that “Word-centered” lifestyle that I had been hearing so much about.
One of the things that we believed in The Way was that illnesses and
disease could be miraculously healed. Part and parcel of the Law of Believing was that healing
was a “manifestation” of the spirit, i.e. if the right biblically specified
conditions were met, the desired result would naturally follow. So, not knowing
any better, we would often pray for people after our twig meetings and usually
they would appear to be healed. Twig attendees started bringing friends and
relatives to get prayed for and healed; when they saw results they started
inviting their friends and relatives.
Eventually, our little group of half a dozen swelled to over thirty. And here I
was a twenty year-old college student, ringmaster at the greatest show in
Richmond Hill, or at least on Metropolitan Avenue.
Although things looked better on the surface, there were some seamy
doings lurking just below the surface. Eddie held down a fairly well-paying job
as an electrician, but despite being outwardly stable, spent most of his
paycheck on alcohol. Eddie was disrespectful and dismissive of our local
leaders, fighting them every step of the way and resisting their instructions, but
in turn demanding that the people in his fellowship obey his directives without question. While there was more structure and
direction at this new Way Home, there were still the same problems with ego,
personality and the huge disconnect between the ideals of living for God and
the reality of day-to-day life.
The company line at The Way International in those days was that to really grow as a believer, you had to
“go WOW”, that is, serve for a year as a Word Over the World Ambassador,
volunteering to be sent anywhere that God supposedly led the leadership of The
Way to send you. On fire with some of the apparent success in the God business,
and wanting to really grow, I decided
that I would indeed “go WOW”, reasoning that I hadn’t yet fully committed myself
to service to god and that this would do it. The process for going out as a WOW
started with an application that was supposedly reviewed by the Limb (state)
Coordinator with input from local leaders, although in practice few if any were
ever rejected, including those patently unfit for the program. Applicants who
passed this hurdle then were required to attend the Rock of Ages festival, held
during the second full week of August at The Way’s headquarters on a former
farm in northwest Ohio. WOW Training, the details of which changed regularly,
took place at “The Rock”, including a second interview by someone on the staff
of the WOW program. At this point in Way history, the WOW’s were the focal
point of the whole Rock of Ages. Incoming WOW’s were “welcomed home” during
opening night festivities while outgoing WOW’s were treated like royalty or
soldiers going off to war. At Rock of Ages 1980, the year I went out as a WOW,
we received our assignments on Friday night, the festival’s sixth night, and we
were sent off after night seven.
At our training session on Friday afternoon we all received envelopes
with numbers on them that corresponded to the seven regions that the Way in the
United States was divided into with strict instruction to keep them sealed until
told otherwise at the evening teaching in the ‘Big Top’, the huge circus tent
where the major events of the Rock of Ages took place. I sat with folks from my
twig and branch who were also going out as WOW’s as they opened up their
envelopes – “Chicago, Illinois!”, “Denver, Colorado!”, “Dallas, Texas!”,
“Seattle, Washington!” and so on, until finally I opened my envelope…“Sidney,
Nebraska…?” I sort of knew where Nebraska
was, mainly because my old buddy Joe Tully had been sent there the year before,
but Sidney? I had no idea what I was
in for.
On Saturday morning I met with my new “family”. Steve, from Texas, 20
years old and the appointed leader of our little group by virtue of his status
as a student in the Way Corps leadership program; Gail, from Philadelphia and a
veteran of a previous WOW year; and Rosemarie, a relatively new follower of The
Way from California. Included in the rules and regulations for the WOW program
was a restriction on how much money you could take with you. Whether you had a
bank account with inexhaustible funds, or didn’t have a dime to your name, you
were required to leave the Rock of Ages grounds with exactly $300 in money
orders per person. For some people this meant scrimping and saving to collect
$300, for others it meant being on the honor system to refrain from accessing
their bank account for a year. A recurring figure at the Rock of Ages was the
PFAL grad who decided at the last minute to go out as a WOW and spent all week
asking people to “bless him” with money so that he could get the required $300
together. I was closer to the scrimping and saving side of things myself, but
didn’t have to resort to panhandling.
The first Rock of Ages festival took place in 1971. Called initially “The
Return of the Rock of Ages” it was the musical portion of a weekend “advance”
(The Way didn’t like to use the word “retreat”) at the end of their summer
school series of classes and seminars. At this time The Way was still
relatively small, having only made inroads among young people within the
previous two or three years. During the summer of 1971 V.P. Wierwille, The
Way’s leader, authorized a group of about a dozen people that he called
“Ambassadors” to travel around the country “witnessing”, i.e. registering
people for his PFAL classes and generally working on increasing The Way’s
numbers. He decided to make this experiment a continuing program and during the
Return of the Rock of Ages weekend, he announced that he was seeking volunteers
to go out for a year as part of this new outreach effort. The volunteers came
back to his New Knoxville farm a few weeks later for “training” and were sent
out to expand The Way’s base. A year later, the Second Annual Rock of Ages
Festival was held to welcome the returning WOW’s back, and to send out a new group.
(“Return of” had been dropped and any reference to the 1970 event was called
simply “The first Rock of Ages”)[5]
This continued every August until 1995. The first several festivals took place
at local fairgrounds, until 1978 when it returned to the former farm that was
the Way’s headquarters, where it remained until the final Rock of Ages.
Starting out as a weekend get together, “The Rock” gradually became a seven-day
affair before settling at six days for most of the eighties and into the
nineties. Initially just a bare bones music and teaching event, it expanded
into the central event of the Way year with specialized seminars, a bookstore,
plays and continual entertainment.
My first Rock of Ages was in 1978, a few months after I had taken the
PFAL class in New York. A group of people were heading out from Queens and I
was recruited to help drive. At this point I wasn’t particularly active in the
organization, but I was always up for a road trip. I took off with no idea
where I was going to stay, how to get where I was going or what I was going to
do once I got there: the perfect adventure! The car I was driving belonged to a
couple with several small children who were going to be WOW’s that year. The
husband was already in Ohio; my job was to drive the car so the wife could take
care of the kids. Three other carloads of Way people travelled with us in a
caravan[6].
After about fourteen hours of driving we arrived at the headquarters of The Way
International and pulled into a large muddy field that had been converted into
a giant parking lot. We slept in our cars overnight and awoke to find that the
giant parking lot, relatively empty when we arrived about midnight, now
harbored thousands of vehicles with more pouring in every minute. My first
“Rock” went a long way toward convincing me that The Way was more than just a
local group of bible-thumpers. I was impressed with how well everyone got along
and how clean and orderly the grounds were. Two years later I was to enter
those same grounds as an outgoing WOW Ambassador.
After our new “WOW Family” met, we had to work out transportation to our
new assignment. There was no requirement that a prospective WOW actually have a
means of transportation, so many did
not. Looking back, it was probably this, rather than any great spiritual
insight, that determined who would go where. Of the two groups of four people
going out to western Nebraska there were two vehicles with a total of six seats
between them. Two of us, Rosemarie and I, would catch a ride with some folks from
Grand Island, in the central part of Nebraska, who owned a big yellow school
bus. So far so good…until the bus threw a rod about ¾ of the way across Iowa
and we were stranded, sleeping on the bus and in the tents that it was a good
thing that we had; several folks stuck out their thumbs and hitch hiked back to
Nebraska.
I was one of the folks who decided to stick it out and wait until the bus
got fixed. We pitched our tents behind the gas station and pooled our resources
to buy food at the café that was part of the service plaza. On the second day a
flatbed truck carrying a load of pipes landed in a ditch and turned over,
dumping its load. The station owner hired all of us guys to help reload the
truck, which took all day, and ended up paying for all the food we were eating,
if not the repairs on the bus.
Eventually we got the bus fixed and met up with the other half of our
group, arriving in Sidney on a Friday afternoon, only five days behind
schedule. Somehow I convinced myself that this wasn’t a harbinger of doom.
[1] Remember
that bible story about Joshua defeating the city of Jericho by marching around
it for a week and the walls falling down to sound of trumpets?
[2] More on
this in “Nobody Knows Where Sidney Is”
[3] See
“Nobody Joins a Cult” for more information on PFAL
[4] Amazing how
leaders who claimed to have a direct pipeline to God often missed simple,
obvious things like this.
[5] A
hallmark of The Way was changing the past to fit in with the present. Rather
than a spur-of-the-moment idea, the idea of a “WOW program” was described as well
thought through, godly inspired
[6] “Caravans”
were part of Way road trip culture
No comments:
Post a Comment