So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XVIII

One of the things that The Way drilled into us was the expectation that we would be persecuted. While the upwelling of anti-cult animus starting in 1978 following the People's Temple massacre surely drove some people away, it also mobilized a lot of people against groups like The Way, groups which weren't as extreme as Jim Jones' bunch, but which nonetheless were enough outside the mainstream to make the mainstream nervous. The Way played up this very real opposition to its operations and framed it as equivalent to the persecution suffered by Jesus, his apostles and the early Christians. In New York I was aware of anti-Way sentiment as part of the fear about cult involvement, but in a city that large it kind of got lost in the background noise of life. In a city of 5,000 we stood out as if we had a spotlight trained upon us all day, every day. Because that where I was sent -- Sidney, Nebraska, a city, if you could call it that, of around 5,000 people. 

The Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador program was in its tenth year in 1980. After a decade or more of slow growth from the mid-fifties to the late sixties, Wierwille made a move that would change the course of The Way. He travelled to San Francisco and found several leaders of the nascent "Jesus People" movement that had sprung up there. He convinced some of them to follow him back to New Knoxville and learn his version of Biblical research. They became the seed from which the fast growing "Way Tree" would spring, teaching Wierwille's Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class to their followers, who tended to be young - college or even high school students mostly. Centers of Way activity sprung up mostly organically as people "witnessed" to their family and friends. Associated "ministries" were especially active in the San Francisco and Long Island areas. In addition to this type of growth several Way followers in the Wichita Kansas area participated in a test program - leaving their home areas and attempting to start Way "twig" fellowships and run PFAL classes in new areas. This pilot program  was so successful that at a Way gathering in August 1971, Wierwille asked for volunteers to participate in the new WOW outreach program. For many years this was one of the main sources of new Way members. 

The main goal of a "family" of WOWs was to "witness" to new people in their assigned city, run PFAL classes and ultimately, if there wasn't already a Way presence, to plant a brand new Way twig fellowship there. You were to arrive at your assigned city with $300, find housing and a part-time job and then get to work "witnessing", which you were to spend 8 hours a day, seven days a week doing. Witnessing was , in effect, your unpaid, full-time job. As I revealed in Part XVII, the bus we were travelling on broke down in central Iowa. By the time we made our way out to Sidney, which as only 60 miles east of the Wyoming border, we were almost a week late.  We were raring to go, but what we didn't know was that Sidney knew that we were coming and they weren't happy about it. 

Start from the beginning

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

Part XIX

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2021/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-xix.html