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 (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). 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 5,000, 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
effective 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 according to the Audit Bureau of (newspaper) Circulation. For a city of 5,000 that gives you approximately 1,400 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 and bars, 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 of their own truth. 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 (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). 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 (according to him) 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, assuming you got right out the door after lunch. 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”. 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 5,000. 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 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 (Oddly enough (or not) one of my sons has inherited this trait and has demonstrated his ability to bullshit his way through anything). 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 out 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 fabricated as often as not 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” (Once a group of high school kids showed up at our door wanting to know if we could conduct a séance for them). 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” (aka The Devil, Satan) 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. 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.
