Nobody Wants To Move To Nebraska

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 12^th, 13^th, 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.

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[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

Nobody Knows Where Sidney Is

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 31^st. 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. 

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[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

Reefer Madness (Nobody Wants to Fail That Drug Screening)

As a high school and college student I tried a fair share of marijuana, (which, unlike Bill Clinton, I did inhale) but my use was what I call in retrospect “situational”; if I was around people who were smoking, I smoked; if I wasn’t, I rarely sought it out. I stopped smoking soon after I “found religion” in 1978, and stayed away from it during the years that my children were growing up, but in 2001, newly single, and apparently going through a second adolescence, I rediscovered the evil weed.

Pam was one of my closest friends during the interregnum between marriages; she used to hang around O’Rourke’s, one of my favorite pubs, writing poetry in the afternoons at one of the back tables, all by herself. She dated my good buddy Drew, who also wrote poetry (as did I) and played a black Fender guitar (as I did not) that he named “Zero”[1]. Drew fancied himself a drinker, but more often than not he fell asleep in the booth or started an argument with the bartender and got himself thrown out. I first met Drew one night at O’Rourke’s as I sat waiting for Sheila (not her real name), a woman who I had been dating for a few weeks, who was also an accomplished drinker. On one particular night Sheila arrived at O’Rourke’s, where we usually met when she finished work at ten on weekend nights to find me deep in conversation with Valerie (possibly her real name), a college girl with whom I often discussed politics and Nostradamus. Even though I excused myself from my conversation about 14^th century prophets and George W. Bush’s alleged lack of intellect, Sheila, who I had not previously suspected of jealousy, reasoning that her profusion of male friends precluded any problems with me having female friends, assumed that I had another girl on the side and let her ire manifest itself by flirting with Drew, who was about 30 years her junior. Drew and I became good pals after this, and happened to be sitting on adjoining barstools when Sheila, after yet another bout of raging jealousy [2] tried to apologize to me as I explained to her my low tolerance for baseless jealousy and psychotic behavior in general. On that night Drew suggested that I find a girlfriend for him, since, despite all evidence to the contrary he thought I was a good judge of women. I began introducing him to women that I didn’t know who came up to refill their drinks until finally one of them sat down with us and offered him her phone number. We ended up sitting with this young woman and one of her friends for the rest of the evening; it was on this night that it sunk in that to most twenty-three year old women, forty-four year old guys were either invisible or “that safe old guy” who reminded them of their dads, or occasionally the “creepy old guy”. Drew never called that woman back because within the next few days he started dating Pam.

Pam was kind of a hippie-chick type. She wore a lot of tie-dye clothes and scarves and purposely stayed out of the sun making her one of the whitest white people that I’ve ever met. With five other people she lived in a sort of a commune south of the city called “The Flying Fish Farm”. Drew and Pam came together through their poetic leanings, though I had met Pam before through other mutual friends, it was by way of my friendship with Drew that we really got to know each other. Since we were closer in age than she and Drew, in some ways we had more in common and often would hang out while she was waiting for Drew or I was waiting for my girlfriend du jour. We would have long rambling conversations about religion and philosophy and in some ways she helped me start down the spiritual path that I now find myself on. She and her housemates at the Flying Fish Farm hosted Equinox and Solstice parties where I was exposed me to a variety of ideas and lifestyles. The first time that I ever saw tarot cards was Pam’s hand-drawn deck.

One evening Pam asked me to accompany her to the home of Mark (his real name, but he has departed this mortal plane), her pot supplier. Mark had an idiosyncratic way of peddling his wares. If you wanted to buy from him, you had to go to his house, sit in his living room, listen to music and smoke a joint or two with him, and then, and only then, would he sell you anything. So here I am, twenty three years since I last regularly smoked pot, sitting cross legged on the floor, blissfully floating through clouds of cannabis smoke and banging a wooden frog with a stick while we all sang The Doors’ Riders on the Storm. Finally Mark brings out his sales kit: a big Rubbermaid© container filled with pot, and closes a sale with Pam, who promptly gets up and leaves me there. To be fair to Pam, she didn’t exactly abandon me, I was pretty happy with the circumstances, and smoked a few more with Mark before getting up on my numb legs, fuzzily trying to recall with my numb brain which direction was home (happily, only about 8 blocks away) and staggered home, my whole body buzzing contentedly.

As it turned out, a lot of the people that I was associating with during this time were heavy pot smokers, so the situation was almost always favorable for lighting up. For something that is illegal, has always been illegal, and will probably remain illegal for the foreseeable future, (crossed fingers on the latest referendum attempt) there sure are a lot of people who smoke pot. During the slightly less than two years that I was engaging in this illicit activity, I was constantly amazed at the number of co-workers, friends, and casual acquaintances who regularly got high. Of course, most of them were amazed when they found out that I got high.

The incident with Pam & Mark was actually the second time that I had lit up during Adolescence Part II. During the first summer that I was single I had been given two tickets to B.B. King, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, George Thorogood & the Destroyers, and Joe Bonamassa, (the opening act before anyone knew who he was) playing at an outdoor venue in Council Bluffs. My buddy Mike and I were sitting in our lawn chairs, drinking Budweisers and enjoying the blues when a guy who closely resembled Jerry Garcia sat down next to us and started rolling joints, lighting them up and passing them around. The first couple of times I just passed it on, happy to be experiencing the music, but after a while I decided to take a hit, then another, and another. Ah, yes, I remember this. Now I only had to get home. As we sat in the parking lot in line behind hundreds of other cars, I glanced in my rear view mirror and was stunned to see that the car behind me was racing toward me up the hill. It was only just before impact that I realized that he wasn’t running into me, but I had let my foot off the brake and was rolling downhill into him. After the impact, the situation was quickly resolved when it was determined that not only was there no damage to either car, but no one in either vehicle was anxious to bring to the attention of the local constabulary the less than legal level of sobriety of all the incident’s participants.

One of my favorite hangouts during my second childhood was O’Rourke’s Tavern on O Street a few blocks from my apartment. One of the things that made O’Rourke’s a destination bar for me, other than Amber, the pretty Scottish barmaid, was that the clientele was extremely varied: all age groups, college kids to retirees; different socio-economic groups, from judges and politicians to people who couldn’t spell “socio-economic” and might even have a problem spelling “group”. One evening my friend Ken and another guy came into the bar, fresh from a discussion group about the Earth as a living, self-aware organism: “Gaia”. When I was told what the topic was I spouted off my own opinion about the subject. Ken smugly looked at his companion and said “I told you that the first person we talked to in here would be able to hold forth on ‘Gaia’!”

O’Rourke’s was also traditionally the last bar to shut down for “last call”; people flocked in from all the other bars to get their last drink of the night at O’Rourke’s. This meant that a seat right at the bar was highly sought-after from 12:45 – 1:00AM, because if you were sitting there, you could easily make eye contact with the bartender, resulting in quick service, while all the latecomers had to stand a row or two back, waving twenty dollar bills at the staff who raced back and forth trying to get everybody served before the lights came on at 1:00 sharp. Now just because O’Rourke’s bartenders were willing to serve you up to the last possible minute, didn’t mean that they were going to jeopardize the liquor license. It’s a City Ordinance that all drinks must be taken away from bar patrons no later than 15 minutes after last call. So, after frantically serving all the last minute drinkers, the bartenders came out from behind the bar, confiscating pool cues, unplugging the pin ball machines and yelling at everyone to drink up, yanking glasses and bottles out of people’s hands and pushing them out the door if it got too close for comfort to the danger zone time starting at 1:15AM. Then we all kind of stood around on the sidewalk outside, watching the cops rough up drunken Huskers fans and laughing at guys making that last ditch effort to get the girl of their dreams to go home with them, and to see if any “after parties” were forming.

One night, my buddy Kevin and I were standing outside of O’Rourke’s at 1:16AM, when we were invited to one of the notorious “after parties” by a couple of our younger acquaintances. Neither one of us had to work the next morning, so, after being out all night drinking beer, we agreed that staying up all morning and drinking more beer was a great idea. After retrieving my car from my apartment parking lot a few blocks away, we took off. Along the way, Kevin and I decided that we should demonstrate that we, two guys in our forties, could keep up with all the younger guys and close down this party no matter how late it lasted. I admit that we cheated a little. Our twenty- and thirty-something party companions were chugging back the cheap beers, while Kevin and I operated with finesse the fine art of nursing a drink. It helps that most beer bottles are brown, thereby disguising the level of liquid in a bottle at any given time, and that nobody checked when one of us put down an almost-full bottle in order to accept a fresh (i.e. colder-than-room-temperature) brew.

One of the guests that morning was Angie, a young woman who Kevin and I had seen around O’Rourke’s but who neither of us knew very well. Sometime close to sunrise, Angie approached Kevin and me with a problem. She had given a ride from O’Rourke’s to Jamie, a guy who had apparently thought taxi service was an agreement for sex; Angie asked if we would give her suitor a ride home, to spare her an uncomfortable situation; we readily agreed. (Of course we agreed – we were drunk and an attractive woman was asking us for a favor) A short time later we heard Jamie; amorous, yet transportationless, badgering Angie for a ride home and being informed that we were his new ride. This was not a welcome revelation to Jamie, as he surveyed us two non-females, and he informed us that no thank you, he was going home with Angie (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more, know what I mean squire?[3]). Now at this point, despite the beer-nursing subterfuge, Kevin and I had been drinking steadily for about eight hours, possibly nine or ten, and it’s common knowledge, many really, really, stupid things seem like good ideas after a few adult beverages. Well, our what-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time plan was to pick up Jamie by his armpits, and forcibly escort him to my car, where we roughly threw him in the back seat, Kevin holding him down while I quickly started it up and took off. We thought this was quite reasonable, although, not surprisingly, Jamie did not agree with our assessment, dissenting so thoroughly that he refused to give us his address so that we could drop him off, but not quite bold enough or irritated enough at the circumstances to jump out of the car, which I was driving randomly around downtown Lincoln. The conversation, as one might imagine was scintillating, Jamie’s side consisted of snippets like “You bastards, you kidnapped me!” while Kevin and I alternated with variations of “Did you really think that you were getting laid? Eventually Jamie admitted that the chance that he would have been engaged in sex with Angie was indeed vanishingly small and gave us his address, while Kevin and I allowed that we probably shouldn’t have risked the involvement of the F.B.I. by kidnapping him. We saw Jamie many times after that, but he never, ever admitted to anyone that he knew us. Angie on the other hand made sure that everyone knew that “the old dudes”, as she began calling us, had saved her with an impromptu abduction; she dumped a guy in mid-date when he questioned why she was so nice to us “old dudes”, offered to beat up women who broke our hearts and saved seats for us on busy nights.  For some reason though, she drew the line at me hitting on her mom.

A lot of things contributed to my ending my dalliance with marijuana: drug testing at work, thinking hard about the consequences, both the legal ones and the effect on my relationships, but the very last time that I smoked any was enough to make me kick the habit for good. Kevin and I decided to attend another of the infamous after parties, this time at the home of the notorious Mark, where pot smoking was sure to be on the agenda. By the time I arrived at Mark’s, I had already consumed more beer than was good for me, and downed still more sitting on Mark’s ratty couch. But it was the multiple pipes full of pot that did me in. After a while the room started to spin and I felt an overwhelming need to get some fresh air, because somehow I had reasoned that the sensation that the room was spinning could be eliminated by going outside where the whole street would be spinning. As I sat on the curb across from Mark’s apartment puking, and then puking some more, much to the amusement of the party taking place next door. Eventually Kevin and some of the other guys came out to check on me and it was determined (as much as the word “determined” can be applied to a bunch of guys stoned on top of being roaring drunk at three in the morning) that Kevin would drive me home in my car and get me into my apartment. I was a pitiful sight, throwing up every couple of minutes and curled up in the front seat as Kevin took the wheel. We figured we were safe for the eight block trip back to the Hovel, since they were all residential streets and it was hours since the bars closed, meaning the police were not out in force looking for drunks like ourselves.  It promised to be an uneventful ride home until the white Cadillac driven by a guy who looked like B.B. King pulled out of a side street and in front of us with a patrol car pulling in behind us. This was not an ideal situation, so we turned off west on the next cross street as B.B. and the cops headed north. Kevin took the first available right, carefully aware that downtown Lincoln is a maze of one-way streets, only to have the Caddy pull in front of us again, and again the LPD cruiser pulled in behind us. This time we turned east and meandered around for a few minutes trying to get back on track when B.B. King and his big white Cadillac turned into our path with the police car getting behind us once more. This low speed chase went on for about a half hour, with the cops staying far enough behind the weirdly calm old man that we ended up sandwiched between the two again and again. In my diminished state I became convinced that it was a hallucination. Eventually Kevin navigated my Pontiac 6000 into the Hovel’s parking lot without further incident, other than the front tire having been stolen from his bicycle as it leaned chained up to my back porch.

 I’ve got to move out of here!

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[1] On one occasion I loaned Drew $80 so that he wouldn’t have to pawn his beloved Zero. Holding on to Zero myself while I awaited repayment.

[2] I had walked Sheila home from the bar and then on to my own apartment. I arrived home to find two messages on the answering machine from her and a third in progress, accusing me of cheating on her and demanding that I never set foot in O’Rourke’s again.

[3] Monty Python once again

Nobody Ever Joins a Cult

Nobody ever joins a cult. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any cults, or that there aren’t any cultists. It just means that people believe that they are joining churches, hanging out with cool people, getting involved in worthy causes, attending lectures and participating in any number of innocuous activities, but they never wake up in the morning and, while choosing among their various hibiscus adorned shirts, type in on their Outlook calendar “join a cult”, or “get brainwashed”. Everybody wants to believe that they’re smart enough to avoid getting sucked into a harmful group, and nobody wants to admit that they’re actually in a harmful group until they leave. Either they look back, smack themselves on the forehead and realize that they have been duped, or rationalize that things changed after they got involved and that the group became a cult.

      Now ex-cultists are as easy-to-find as the hair on Danny Davito’s back. The internet and evangelical churches are full of people who used to be in cults. One might then surmise that the cult problem has been solved, everybody has been rescued from the cults and are safe behind their computer monitors or at the First Church of the Holy Baby Jesus in God in Christ the Lord Jehovah United Assemblies of Zion, Yukon Synod, Reformed Covenant of 1923®.

One of the problems with the issue of cults is that there is no universally accepted definition of “cult”. Obviously the people who are in cults don’t think that they’re cultists, but what about those who are vehemently against cults? Well, some folks, notably evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, define a cult as a group that claims to be Christian but doesn’t agree with them on the main doctrinal points of Christianity. Of course, exactly what the main doctrinal points are differs from denomination to denomination[1]. For example, Mormons are considered a cult by some, but obviously not in Utah. These folks, even though they can’t agree among themselves, see the holding of minority opinions as intolerable, reserving to themselves the privilege of deciding what is the correct interpretation of the Bible, because after all, some “good” Christian might get himself fooled by these heretics and put his soul in peril. Another camp among the anti-cultists is the secular cult awareness movement. These people see specific doctrines as irrelevant to whether a group is a cult; it’s the behavior that defines a cult. The secular cult awareness movement has kind of been invisible since the Cult Awareness Network (C.A.N.), was successfully sued by the Church of Scientology, which now effectively owns it. Are you confused yet? If so, you are in good company: 99.99% of America is as confused as you are, but most don’t think that they’re confused.

In December of 1977 I didn’t think I was joining a cult. I did, however, get invited to look at a Christmas card that my cousin had received from a co-worker. I don’t remember much about the card, but it was signed “God loves you and I do too”. That’s pretty dangerous stuff. I should have been tipped off right away that some serious evil was being perpetrated in tandem with Hallmark’s fourth quarter profit and loss statement. I should probably state at this point that we were Catholics. Not “we went to a Catholic Church”, or “we practiced the Catholic faith”, but that’s who we were, Catholicism in great part defined our identities, so anything that was not Catholic was bad. In light of this, my aunt took me aside to tell me that my cousin was attending a bible study in the home of the card guy. I know; it just sends shivers of fear rippling up and down your spine to hear it, doesn’t it? Like I said, this was the day I didn’t join a cult. Anyway, my aunt told me about this bible study and asked me to accompany my cousin to one of their meetings, “just to make sure she’s alright”, so I did my duty protecting my kin from the godless Protestants (surely it couldn’t be Catholics studying the bible) and attended one of the bible studies.

I should probably note at this point that I had long been dissatisfied with the spiritual answers that I had received in church. Although very devout as a youngster, it bothered me that there were competing versions of Christianity, all convinced that they were right. I visited several of the half dozen different churches that were in walking distance of my home, but the difference was among them was less than crystal clear[2]. After being exposed to Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism in college, I became less and less convinced that there was any one, objective spiritual truth, let alone that I had been lucky enough to have won the celestial Powerball Jackpot by being born into it.

Tom & Joe, who ran the bible study in my neighborhood, rented a small duplex apartment, looked pretty ordinary, had ordinary furnishings in their home and had a record collection typical of most guys in their early twenties in 1978. They wore regular clothes without a hint of saffron, although Tom did favor sandals and played guitar, as well as sporting a full beard and little round glasses. If I had been looking to join a cult that day, I would have passed these guys by. These guys were vanilla pudding without the sliced bananas and Nilla wafers. That is until the bibles came out. The participants in this particular bible study were fanatical about the bible, not in a wild-eyed, drooling, the-end-of-the-world-is-coming way, but with a calm intellectual confidence that they knew what they were talking about. Specific questions were referred to specific sections of the bible, contradictions were explained; esoteric truths were unveiled. This was different. Maybe there was a one, objective spiritual truth and unlikely as it seemed, maybe these guys had it.

In line with my plan to not join a cult, I continued to attend the bible studies several times a month. Soon I started hearing about a class that they were offering that would lay out the basics to bible study; the goal being that graduates of this class would be able to research and understand the bible on their own, without needing bible scholars or priests or gurus to tell you what it said. Now this was something that I was interested in. Everybody I knew claimed to believe in the bible, but I didn’t know anybody who could read it and make any sense out of it. Sure, there are parts of the bible that seem to proceed in a linear fashion and tell stories that everyone seems to know, but not really know about, like Noah and Jesus and Adam & Eve, but there didn’t seem to be an easy look up system, an index where you could look up the answers to questions like “Is masturbation a sin?”, or “Will you go to Hell for smoking dope?” (Both were important questions to a nineteen-year old). But these people acted like you could get answers like that after taking this class. By this time I had noticed some differences between what I had learned in Church and what I was hearing at these bible studies, small differences theologically, like how many people were crucified with Jesus and on what day he died and big ones, like was Jesus Christ God or wasn't he? Or were the dead in some semi-alive state after death or consciously inhabiting heaven or hell? My parish priest was no help, pointing out that the Catholic Church had 2000 years of history on its side, but providing real no reason other than longevity why I should stay away from this bible study and stick with The Church.[3] So I immediately went out and didn’t join a cult, but put down $100 and signed a green registration card for the bible study class, which was called Power for Abundant Living.

Unknown to me at this time, there was living in Ohio a guy named Victor Wierwille, a former Evangelical & Reformed Church pastor who had in 1953 started teaching a class called Power for Abundant Living (PFAL). The class, initially titled Receiving the Holy Spirit Today, was about having God’s power in your life. He taught it to friends and relatives, to members of his church, and eventually started traveling around the country teaching it. In 1967 it was put on film. This was the class that I had signed up to take. At the time I didn’t know anything about Wierwille, PFAL, or for that matter, Ohio,[4] so I wasn’t too impressed with this skinny tie-wearing farm guy with the funny accent (That’s right, a New Yorker, complaining about a funny accent) and the cheap seventies rec-room paneled set with the picture of White Jesus with the long flowing hair and the faraway eyes.

PFAL was presented over the course of three weeks, with classes running from 7:00 – 10:00pm Monday, Tuesday, Thursday & Friday. We started out with an orientation, which took place at Jerry McSherry’s house (his real name). We watched a video called Changed which consisted mostly of testimonials about how people’s lives changed after taking PFAL. At this time, some confusion that I had regarding who was teaching this class was cleared up. Jerry was what they called the class instructor. I was under the impression that “instructor” was more or less synonymous with “teacher” which is what they called Wierwille, but the “instructor” was just the guy who made sure that everything was in place, including finding volunteers to cue up the tapes, bring snacks, set up the chairs and make sure that there was plenty of coffee (I did mention that these classes went for three hours?). I had been under the impression that the class was being taught by Jerry Wierwille who moved from Ohio to Flushing Queens!

Now the teacher wasn’t even in the same room, or for that matter the same state as us. The class had been filmed in 1967. This facilitated distribution, since shipping videocassettes was easier than Wierwille driving all over the country personally; but we weren’t even going to get to watch a film, no, you needed 12 people to see PFAL on video, and we had only nine, so we listened for three hours to cassette tapes of a disembodied voice teaching the bible every night, supplemented by slides of the charts that we would have seen in the video class.

Finally the class began. Sitting in metal folding chairs facing a wall where a teacher might have been standing if there was one physically in the room, were the nine students, none of whom were joining a cult. Besides me, there was my cousin Kathy, a year younger than me, who worked with Tom, one of the bible fellowship guys; Tina, a tiny, aspiring dancer; Bernie, who worked in the building trades; Kevin, a fellow Baruch College student; Herminia, an older Puerto Rican lady whose children had talked her into taking the class; a married couple whose names I can’t remember to save my life; and Jim, a tall, dark haired guy who dropped out before the class was over. I don’t know why the other eight people were sitting in those chairs, but I was one of those searchers, people who want to know what’s going on and why, and are willing to put some effort into finding out.

Like most people in the United States, Christianity was the default spirituality for me. I grew up hearing about the God of the bible, Jesus Christ, the saints and all that; it was the background noise of our culture. For most of my life it seemed like there was only two choices: believe in God (and by extension the bible) or don’t; there was no “other” that you could latch on to, not legitimately anyway. From my narrow little world I couldn’t see the incredible array of choices that lay beyond the horizon. Until I went to college, the people that were different from me were the tiny number of Protestants, who as far as I could tell weren’t all that different than us, and Jews, who most Christians viewed as people who just didn’t keep up with the latest developments in the God business. Culturally I was conditioned to believe that practicing Christianity was essential to be a “good” person; exposure to various world religions in college introduced me to the concept that there were other choices, but viscerally I still felt that the biblical God was the God and that if I was going to live a good life, then his way was the way. [5] Tom and Joe’s bible study group with their PFAL class were the first people who offered to show me how and why the bible and the God described therein was the way.

The first several three-hour sessions of PFAL were variations on the theme of “The Bible is true”. There were segments [6] on “The Integrity of The Word”, “The Greatest Secret in the World Today is that the Bible is the Revealed Word and Will of God”, “The Word of God is the Will of God”, “How We Got the Bible”. There were teachings on how the bible was “god-breathed”, i.e. given by inspiration of God, that it interprets itself, not being of “private” interpretation, how “The Word” is faithful, how God gave us the bible…on and on, hour after hour. Even though he wasn’t really presenting much new information in these first several sessions, Wierwille was establishing his bona fides as somebody who knew his way around a bible, as a teacher who cared deeply about what was written in the pages of the bible and whose greatest goal in life was to make the lessons of the bible accessible to everyone, not just the seminary trained, or the great theologians. Wierwille, like all good salesmen, first got us to trust him. And trust him we did when he finally began unveiling the points where he disagreed with most other Christians.

Part of how Wierwille really cemented that nascent trust into place was by his teaching in session four, “How the Word Interprets Itself”. It was presented as a lesson on how to apply certain keys to researching and studying the bible. The keys were simple, even simplistic; they boiled down to “Read What’s Written”, and admonitions to understand the words in the way that the writers understood them, which wasn’t necessarily the way that the same words would be used in the present day. Wierwille starts this teaching off by reading various sections of scripture, sometimes pointing out how what is clearly written contradicts most of he called “denominational Christianity”. He starts out slowly, at first pointing out minor discrepancies, each time taking the students to the bible itself, where it is as plain as the nose on your face that what most Christians believe is not what you can read for yourself in black and white. The whole time you are being convinced, little by little, that Wierwille knows what he is talking about and the churches do not. After all, you’re reading what is written, and what is written contradicts much of what you were taught back at your family’s church. The student is now convinced that Wierwille is trustworthy, that the churches are not, and that you too can be privy to the truth as it hasn’t been known since the First Century when the apostles of Jesus walked the earth clad in sandals, togas and truth.

As the class progresses the stakes get higher and the doctrines deviate from orthodox Christianity further and further as Wierwille dazzles the students with his knowledge of the bible. What the student almost invariably failed to realize[7] is that Wierwille is no longer simply reading what is written, but reading into what is written. He is bolstering his case for novel interpretations not with what is plainly written, but with recourse to translations of Greek and Hebrew words that appear in no lexicon, to documents that no one but he has seen, to texts that he says must exist,[8] but that no one has ever found, in short he is doing what he has accused every other church of doing, putting forth his own interpretation of the bible, but he is doing it while convincing the student thoroughly that he is simply reading what is written.

The details of what these deviations are is irrelevant, after all, disagreements among Christians goes back to five minutes after the apostles lost sight of the bottom of Jesus’ sandals, but this class was billed as a way to avoid the common trap of having to rely on someone else for your knowledge of God, to let the bible interpret itself, to understand it using easy to understand “keys”, but it was just another man’s interpretation.

The biggest pitfall in Wierwille’s teaching was that, since the bible was self-interpreting, then anyone, utilizing the research keys taught in PFAL, would naturally come to the same conclusion as he had since the bible wasn’t subject to “private interpretation”; and since Wierwille had utilized those keys and had come to certain conclusions, and since Wierwille, by the time of the filming of PFAL, had been teaching those keys for 14 years and had been intensely studying for another 11 years before that, if you came to a different conclusion than Wierwille did, you were wrong. While on the one hand Wierwille taught that we were all to read the bible ourselves and convince ourselves of what it said, as a practical matter it was what Wierwille said that was treated as the final word. If you disagreed you either weren’t properly applying the keys, or you just needed to wait until you one day understood it. [9]This would have been bad enough if one’s connection to Wierwille ended after sitting through PFAL, if PFAL was merely a tool used by bible study groups to help their participants along, if people were still able to study and come to their own conclusions, but what you were being recruited to by taking PFAL was an organization, worldwide in scope, with groups of local bible studies being just the tip of the iceberg. Clusters of these bible study groups were organized into local branches, which in turn answered to a state organization usually led by a graduate of a centralized leadership training program. People in this organization from all over the country and world gathered together once a year to hear Wierwille teach live, they sent their people out on one-year missionary program, they joined the leadership training program, and it was all based on the words of one man.

I guess I was wrong, I did join a cult.

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[1] I’ll never forget the textbook that my kids used during their home schooling days. A section on the Catholic Church started with “A false religion…”

[2] Growing up in a Catholic family, attending Catholic school and not having many non-Catholics in the general neighborhood, I don’t think that I realized that there were so many Protestants out there. Martin Luther was portrayed a bad guy where I came from!

[3] I have since heard this argument from other Christians who point out that Christianity has survived while many of the pagan religions of biblical times have died out. When I point out that Buddhism and Hinduism are still around, the longevity argument is usually quickly abandoned as irrelevant.

[4] As a New Yorker I subscribed to the worldview illustrated in Steinberg’s New York, a New Yorker magazine cover which shows everything west of the Hudson River as uncharted wilderness,

[5] Many people practice some form of “Pascal’s Wager”, wherein you gamble that believing in God is relatively harmless if he doesn’t exist, but not believing can land you in Hell if he does. Of course the wager is a false dilemma and assumes that there only two choices, while there are many alternatives to being a believing Christian that don’t involve being an atheist.

[6] Each segment was 30 minutes, six segments made a ‘session’

[7] This is not to suggest that there is some insidious brainwashing going on, many people get uncomfortable with what is being taught and walk out before the class ends. However, in my experience, very few people were able to challenge what was being taught in any meaningful way - it was just different than what they were used to.

[8] One of Wierwille’s signature moves was to present an interpretation that was not supported by any scripture in any existing text. He then, despite talking incessantly about how any doctrine must be backed up by scripture, decides that there must be a lost manuscript out there somewhere that backs up his position.

[9] He called this “holding questions in abeyance”