So, You Want to Join a Cult - Blindness & Brainwashing

Recently, a family member referred to my time in the cult called The Way as "blindly following". Many anti-cult crusaders have referred to cult members as "brainwashed". In my multi-part series "So, You Want to Join a Cult", I thought I had presented pretty clearly why I had gotten involved in The Way, why I stayed involved in The Way, and how, without any help from the supposedly unblinded (no offense to my blind friends, by the way!) family or the equally un-brainwashed anti-cult movement, I extricated myself. 

Most people who are involved in religion begin their involvement because it was their parents' religion. Some embrace their family's faith wholeheartedly, some observe the outward forms, others question it and start to follow a different faith. Of the outward observers, if you never discussed religion with them (it's a taboo subject after all) you might never know they weren't inwardly religious. Of the questioners, some of them give up on all religion, some, for various reasons, pick a new one. Some of those "new ones" turn out to be cults. 

But what makes a cult a cult? Not their beliefs. Every faith has beliefs that seem bizarre to those outside the faith, but seem perfectly normal to those who grew up surrounded by it. The religion that I grew up in believed:

• The creator of the universe somehow caused a virgin to become pregnant with himself
• The resulting child, when he reached adulthood, had to be killed in a blood sacrifice either for atonement, forgiveness of sins or as a sign of his love, or all three
• He rose from the dead after three days
• He physically levitated into the sky after a further 40 days
• This man, God, and the "holy spirit" are all "God", yet at the same time distinct "persons"
• This man and his followers could break the laws of physics at will
• It was possible to break the laws of physics yourself by praying to, not only this three-in-one God, but his mother (who also levitated into the sky without dying) and any sufficient holy followers who were coincidently dead

I could go on and on. Naturally this isn't how a Catholic would describe their beliefs, but it's the way it looks to an outsider. And a majority of the people in this country would subscribe to most of these beliefs. Non-Catholic Christians wouldn't pray to Mary or to saints, but you can't really argue with the rest. The purpose of the previous listing isn't to make fun of Catholics or their beliefs, but to point out that if you're going to make judgments about the "weirdness" of cult beliefs, take a look at your own. 

A related measure of cultishness is whether a group calling itself Christian has beliefs that are in line with Christianity. If you are of the opinion that you can objectively determine whether any group's doctrines are authentically Christian you're likely part of one of those groups that think they have a lock on the truth. The number of mutually exclusive versions of Christianity that exist is staggering. Sometimes the difference is their opinion on church governance - episcopal or by committee? Other times it comes down to the minutiae of Christology, which the rank and file don't understand anyway. And does anyone really understand the doctrine of The Trinity? If the Bible was as clear and unambiguous as "Bible believers" think it is, wouldn't you assume that there would be fewer competing versions? Or are they all Satanic, except your version.

Some people get it right and determine that a cult is a cult because of actions rather than beliefs. But again, they fail to pick the beam out of their own eye, such as the widespread coverup of child rape by the clergy of one major denomination or the ostentatious lifestyles of many ministers running megachurches.

There are a lot of reasons why people join and stay with cults. My reasons are pretty simple. 

As a young man I was dissatisfied with the lack of answers I felt that my church offered. There was too much "take it on faith" for my taste. So I started looking around. I went to services in the churches of other denominations. I read about different religions. I was getting nowhere fast. I was introduced to The Way through a family member who was attending Way meetings. This relative worked in the same office as the local Way leader. I have no idea what her motivations were, what she was looking for, or what attracted her. I do know that she stuck around for a few months and lost interest. So either she was immune to the brainwashing, or maybe there wasn't any brainwashing. I stuck around though. 

Why did I stick around? Because it made sense. They tried to make it make sense. Granted, it was all based on the premise that the Bible was inspired by God, but that was no different than any Christian denomination. There was no "take it on faith". Anything that we were expected to believe was documented in the Bible. This appealed to me. Even though I didn't have the theological background to be able to separate the serious Biblical research from what turned out to be pretty shoddy exegesis, it was more than I was getting from my church leaders. In fact, I gave my parish priest the opportunity to address the discrepancies between Catholic and Way Biblical interpretation. All I received was a reference to 2000 years of history. If I was going to go with longevity I'd become a Hindu. 

During my early days in The Way it was obvious that my family disapproved. Almost 50 years have gone by, so it's difficult to ascertain exactly what they disapproved of. The most obvious thing earning their disapproval was that I was leaving the church. All branches of my family that I am aware of have been Catholic for many generations. In addition to the religious devotion, Catholicism was cultural. Our particular neighborhood was made up mostly of White Catholic ethnic groups. I don't think I was aware of Protestants until I was in high school. My own parents were very religious - my father attended mass every day if possible. I still remember the look of anger/disappointment on my Dad's face when I told him I was no longer going to mass since I no longer considered myself a Catholic. The theological grounds for disapproval were probably related to the disapproval of simply being not-Catholic, but since most Catholics were not steeped in the myriad details of the Bible they were unable to address my confident (or arrogant) assertions that I now was in possession of The Truth. It's possible that they were swayed by the long shadow that had been cast by The People's Temple mass "suicide" in Guyana a year after my initial involvement. A group that had been labeled a cult had done something heinous, therefore, in the minds of the general public, any group labeled as a cult was equally dangerous. Unfortunately the cult appellation had been applied without any subtlety, usually slapped on any group that differed doctrinally from what was perceived as the mainstream. Down deep, I think what made my parents think I was "blinded" or "brainwashed" was their perception that I had somehow "changed".

There's nothing like the enthusiasm of the newly converted. Whether it's religion or politics or the newly sober, it's the new recruit who is loud and in your face about it. And I sure was in everyone's face about it. It started out during the three-week introductory class. I'd come excited about some new thing I had learned and want to talk about it. To be clear, this wasn't some doctrine spun about billion year-old space aliens storing souls in a volcano, or Jesus appearing the the native Americans, this was stuff that you could trace directly to a Bible verse or two. Of course I was excited, this is what I had been searching for: answers! In response to the obvious discomfort that my parents had with what I was sharing, my mode became less excited and more arrogant that I had The Truth and they didn't. I suppose I had changed.

What my parents didn't know that in addition to my search for spiritual truth, I was also kind of drifting. I had no real goals, was doing poorly in school (not due to lack of intelligence, but lack of ambition) and was drinking a lot. I wasn't taking any hard drugs, but it's likely that I would have gone that path if not for The Way. Being involved in The Way gave me a sense of direction that came of being intimately involved in something greater than myself. I had a mission, I had purpose that I didn't have before. Making "moving the Word", i.e. proselytizing, maybe my priority seemed weird to my family, and evidence of an unwelcome and unhealthy "change", but I don't want to see that alternate history where I didn't have that set of goals. 

After a year I moved into a series of "Way Homes" with other Way people, and a year later left the state as part of the missionary program called Word Over the World (WOW). I had planned on entering the Way's leadership program, The Way Corps, but was unable to put together the tuition. A lot of people, including my family thought that my wanting to cut ties and move to another state as a WOW was prima facie evidence that I was in a cult. The truth was that only a small percentage of Way members at any given time were part of any of their programs, and some never were involved beyond the twice-a-week "Twig" meetings. The heavy involvement was mostly people my age (19-22 at the time) - people with children at home, or retirees, or men and women with professional careers tended to live normal lives. In my early days I saw few attempts at controlling the daily lives of Way members by the leadership, and there was no concerted effort to keep people from leaving. (People left all the time)

After one year as a WOW I elected not to return to New York and got married, getting two stepsons in the deal. I lived pretty normally for a while, even dropping out of Way involvement (but not Way beliefs) for a few years. When my wife and I returned to active involvement we found that The Way's founder had died and that a power struggle had broken out. When the broken glass had all settled, the founder's designated successor was still in charge, but 80% of the members and leadership and split off to start their own groups. The leader, having survived the coup attempt, became increasingly paranoid and instituting greater and greater controls. Public pronouncement's became more and more unhinged and practices and doctrines became more oppressive. There were purges. I stayed through all of that. Why?

Why does anyone stay in an uncomfortable, or even dangerous, situation? Why do people stay in crappy jobs or women with abusive husbands? I had decided, at least early in that ten-year period, that an accurate "true" teaching of the Bible was worth something. Right or wrong, I thought that The Way taught the Bible correctly, and I didn't know of any church which taught it any better. Certainly not the church of my youth, my return thereto being the subject of many family prayers. The abuses and attempts at control didn't come all at once, like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water, and it was a while before they came for me. For me, I was balancing the pros and the cons every day. Eventually the cons outweighed the pros. 

Rather than following along blindly, or being pitifully brainwashed, I made decisions every step of the way. Were some of these decisions based on false information? Absolutely. The Way's founder wasn't the great Biblical researcher that he made himself out to be. Were some of them based on wishful thinking. Also absolutely. Are "cult" members unique in making decisions that turn out to be bad, or get involved with and stay in bad situations? No. 

Don't assume that us ex-cultists are somehow different from the rest of you.

Managers Part IV - Reward & Coercion Based Management

In Part III we listed the Five Sources of Management Power:

1. Legitimate Power: The ability to influence other due to one's position, office or formal authority
2. Reward Power: The ability to influence others by giving or withholding rewards such as pay, promotions, time off, etc.
3. Coercive Power: The ability to influence others through punishment
4. Expert Power: The ability to influence others through special knowledge or skills
5. Referent Power: Power that comes from personal characteristics that people value, respect or admire

We looked at #1, "Legitimate Power". Like the name suggests, it's indeed "legitimate", but at some point the rookie manager will realize that the title and the name tag that goes along with it is pretty ineffective by itself at influencing people. A few managers skip these next two methods, but most do not and employ the carrot and stick method of management: Rewards and Coercion. Some amateurs combine both methods, but most enjoy the coercive source of power due to the many opportunities for yelling.

Bosses who lead from the giving side of Source #2 (we'll refer to it as #2a) are often thought of as "good" bosses by many employees. They are free with praise, give them whatever schedule that they want, don't assign them any tasks that they might find unpleasant and generally give employees free reign to do whatever they want. The problem with this kind of manager is that not only is he allowing the employees to manage him but this kind of leadership inevitably generates employees who will take advantage of the #2a manager's "good nature". This engenders feelings that some employees are "teacher's pets" and "get away with murder". Many years ago I worked for one of these managers. He was the head manager and I was the assistant manager. One of the more frustrating aspects of working for him was that he would lay down rules, schedules, expectations, but would not follow up to make sure that his directives were being followed. He was great with the carrot, but never used the stick. To this day he is loved by most of his employees and would be rated a "good" manager by many...but not by all.

The giving or withholding rewards such as pay, promotions, time off, can be an effective tool of management. The expectations and standards for receiving these "rewards" should be clear and attainable and administered consistently. Every employee should know what the standards and expectation is for receiving a raise. The process for promotions should be as transparent as possible (demotions too!). Most employees aren't working their jobs simply because they love the industry they're working in. They need a certain level of pay with reasonable expectation for increases; they want a schedule that works well with their other responsibilities; they'd like to be able to take paid time off -- they have requirements that need to be fulfilled in order to continue working at their job. Providing all of these things is what the manager needs to do for the employee in exchange for the employee following the manager's instructions and meeting their expectations. Ideally the employer-employee relationship will be mutually beneficial and not even look like the exercise of power. 

There are many types of punishment that can be meted out to create the atmosphere of fear that some managers believe is necessary to compel obedience. The "write up" and it's good buddy the suspension, assigning "crap jobs" to trouble-makers, and the ever popular yelling. Rewards are listed as a separate source of power, but the withholding of rewards goes hand-in-hand with coercion. Managers who lead from Source #3 and the withholding portion of Source #2 are universally rated by employees as "bad" bosses, but for all the raised voices and threats, these managers have little more success than Source #1 managers at getting people to do what they want, in addition to the normal slacking off, you now have added employees who will actively undermine and sabotage the boss's efforts.

The problem with depending on either #2 a or b, or #3, as a source of authority is that it's essentially either bribery or blackmail. These managers are not teaching their subordinates to do their jobs well because it's their job, but because they are either getting something (a bribe) or are being threatened with punishment (blackmail).

Since the confluence of the Covid pandemic and low unemployment the last few years, the power dynamic has shifted somewhat. Employees have leveraged their manager's fears that a position will remain unfilled if they quit by allowing employees to get away with not doing the requirements of their jobs without consequences. There are still theoretical standards, but there is no enforcement of those standards. This creates a race to the bottom, where "bad" employees still receive the rewards (regular pay increases, promotions, time off requests) while the "good" employees see no up side to following the rules and eventually become "bad" employees as well. 

Before we get to Sources #4 & #5, let's summarize the first three:

Legitimate Power, #1, is theoretical, in other words, it exists on paper, but doesn't get exercised in practice unless there are some of the other sources to strengthen it. Sources #2 and #3 are methods by which a manager can motivate employees to excel, but they must be applied evenly and fairly, with expectations, consequences, and benefits all communicated clearly. Employees have power too -- they can withhold their labor by quitting, they can push management to honor a union contract or standards laid out in the employee handbook. But once hired, the employee and the manager have agreed to the terms of employment.  

Start with Part I

Continue to Part V

Managers Part III - Sources of Power

Managers have power over their subordinates. How they choose to exercise that power determines whether or not they are a "good" or "bad" manager. Here is a listing of some sources of power and brief definitions:

1. Legitimate Power: The ability to influence other due to one's position, office or formal authority
2. Reward Power: The ability to influence others by giving or withholding rewards such as pay, promotions, time off, etc.
3. Coercive Power: The ability to influence others through punishment
4. Expert Power: The ability to influence others through special knowledge or skills
5. Referent Power: Power that comes from personal characteristics that people value, respect or admire

Some of these are related - for example, Reward and Coercive Power are two sides of the same coin. Both of these to some extent flow from Legitimate Power. 

Before looking at some of these categories, I want to emphasize that the ability for a manager or leader to exercise power depends to a certain extent upon the degree to which an employee allows the manager to have that power. For instance, I don't play the lottery, or gamble at all for that matter, but I used to joke that if won the Powerball, I wouldn't quit my job like so many people do, but I would continue to come to work but simply refuse to do anything that I didn't want to do! Some of these categories of power won't work if the employee doesn't really need the job, or has the ability to change jobs quickly. 

Source #1, Legitimate Power is kind of like an unspoken contract - the manager gets to tell you what to do simply because of the title, you have to comply due to your lack of one. However, this source of power is largely theoretical. A manager who is relying solely on Source #1 will likely only get people to follow directives when physically present. Employees who are dealing with a manager who leads predominantly from Source #1 will be the kind of employees who "milk the clock", who sneak extra cigarette breaks, who look really busy while not actually getting anything done. Managers can use "because I'm the boss" as an argument ender, and this may end the immediate argument, but it rarely solves the problem. 

The amateur manager believes that the title is all that it takes to  make one an effective manager. The Source #1 Manager isn't necessarily "bad", usually just inexperienced. 

Leading from Source #1 isn't illegitimate, it's actually called Legitimate Power, but it can't be exercised in a vacuum. It's true, that a business owner has delegated to the manager the responsibility to get things done, including directing the work of non-management employees, but getting things done is going to require the cooperation of everyone. As we look at the other sources of management power, we'll see how that cooperation can be earned. 

Start with Part I

Continue with Part IV

Managers Part II - The Purpose of a Business

Before we look at the qualities of a manager, let's look at the environment in which a manager functions - a business. The first thing to remember about a business is that it exists primarily to make money for the owners or shareholders of the business. Whatever charitable impulses that an owner may harbor, no matter how much he donates, none of that would be possible without turning a profit.

A few years ago I attended a shareholders meeting for the company that employed me. The company had what is referred to as an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). The way it worked was that a certain percentage of the profits were set aside as profit sharing to most employees, allocated according to their salaries. The company president, the son of the company founder was talking about this program as if it was an example of his father's care and concern for his employees. The founder himself, at that time pushing 90, was in attendance. He was asked what his reasoning was for setting up the ESOP. He responded that he thought it was a good way to legally lower his tax liability and still have use of the cash. A pretty honest answer, one that his son apparently wasn't honest enough to give. The point is, that maybe your company's owners do care about you on some level, but the bottom line is money. Many people who have seen their jobs migrate out of the country have found this out. (Since I first wrote this, the company in question used the windfall from the 2017 tax law change to buy back all the employee-owned stock) 

In a perfect world, businesses would figure out what needed to be accomplished and when it needed to be done, calculate how many people it took to do it and hire the exact number of people they had determined they needed. They would set a pay rate that was sufficient to draw in enough people who had the skills needed. People would apply for those jobs because the pay and the schedule were what they needed and the requirements were within their abilities.

What happens in reality is that a business first determines what percentage of sales they will spend on payroll. This percentage tends to be fairly consistent within industries. Now this obviously means that as sales fluctuate, what a business will spend on payroll will also fluctuate. This, despite the fact that many things still need to be done even if no customers walk through the door. Managers are expected to manage their employees' schedules to conform to these percentages. Managers who can't do this usually find out fairly quickly that they are no longer managers.

So, what we're talking about here is that the manager, who is first and foremost a representative of the business and not your buddy, is being paid to make sure that the company is making as much money as possible. How that manager maximizes profits will determine whether the employees think he or she is a "good" manager or a "bad" manager, but make no mistake about it, Priority #1 is always to turn a profit. Anything that gets in the way of that, even you, will eventually be eliminated.

This is the environment in which your boss operates, every day.

Start with Part I

Go to Part III

Managers Part I - What Makes a Good One?

For most of my working life I was a manager or a supervisor. Even my last job before retirement, while not classified a supervisory, had many supervisory responsibilities. Eventually I became an effective manager after unlearning many bad habits. In the nineties I took a one-week management class called Managing Management Time, which gave me a lot of insight into what a manager was really supposed to do. During my time as a Retail Grocery Store Director I taught many of these principles to my department managers. I'm revisiting this series, which I started in 2016, since the relationship between management and managed has changed since the Covid pandemic of 2020-2021. 

First off, I'm not going to engage in the trendy supposition that being a leader is different than being a manager or a "boss". A manager is a job title, or it can be viewed as a skill or career path. Leadership is a quality that one can have, whether or not one is in a position of "official" leadership. "Boss" is simply a colloquialism for "manager". I will use these terms more or less interchangeably.

A manager, in simplest terms, is someone whose main job responsibility is to "get things done" by way of managing, directing, coaching, analyzing and planning. A manager has goals and objectives that he or she is tasked with achieving and usually has a group of people that assist in achieving those goals. What makes a "good" manager versus a "bad" manager? Sometimes that depends on who you ask. A front-line employee might view a good manager as one who steps back and lets everybody "do their job". A front-office director might view a good manager as one who get results. The problem with those viewpoints is that they each ignore the other. What an employee might see as "doing her job" might just be what is convenient or "the way it's always been done", while the front office's focus on results often ignores the fact that there are real people achieving those results. A good manager balances both sides of the equation.

What I am going to explore over the course of several blog posts are the qualities of a "good" manager, with reference to examples of "bad" management. Some of the characteristics we will look at are:

• The Purpose of a Business
• Delegation
• Influence
• Respect
• Knowledge
• Empowerment
• Teaching & Coaching
• Accountability

I may use examples of leadership in politics, the military and sports, but I will be focusing on the role of managers in business.

Hopefully these posts will give a good overview of management as more than just people telling other people what to do.

Go to Part II

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part V

When I first agreed to take the Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class I was unaware that the Bible study that I had been attending was part of a larger organization. Up until that point I had not attended "branch" meetings, or met any Way people outside of the group that met at Tom & Joe's apartment.

The PFAL class would be taught in approximately three hour increments on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday over four weeks at a home in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens. As I have mentioned in earlier installments, the PFAL class had been taped in the late sixties, but at the time I did not realize I would be watching a recording. Wierwille was talked about as the "teacher" of the class. I had also heard about someone named Jerry, who was mentioned as the class instructor. Unaware that The Way called someone who coordinated and oversaw the running of a PFAL class an instructor, I conflated "instructor" and "teacher" and thought a guy named Jerry Wierwille from Ohio would be teaching the class in Flushing. What was actually happening was that Jerry McSherry (his real name) would be in charge of running the class for me, my cousin Kathy and seven other students. He would be assisted by several other graduates of PFAL who had responsibilities such as parking, refreshments, and audio-visual (actually just audio). We would be listening to cassette tapes of Wierwille. (A video version, on Betamax of all things, was only run if there were 12 or more students.) Charts and illustrations that would ordinarily be part of the video, would be shown to us by a class crew member who sat up front with a flip chart.

As I mentioned, each class session was approximately three hours. Two hours of teaching, a break, and a third hour. The first few sessions were pretty hard to get through. Imagine trying to sit through that much talking without even anything to look at other than some cheap flip charts. But part of what kept us going through those first few sessions was that we had paid for it. $100 was a lot of money for a barely employed college student in those days. We lost one student halfway through, but the rest of us stuck it out. 

The first three or four nights were variations of the theme of "the Bible is true". He really hammered into us the premise that what the Bible said was the standard for everything else. I sort of already believed that, despite not knowing much about the Bible. Toward the end of the first week, two things got my attention and piqued my interest. One was that the Bible interpreted itself. You didn't need someone to interpret it for you, because if you just read what was written, in context, the meaning would be crystal clear. The other was that by the end of the class, Wierwille would provide undeniable proof that Jesus Christ not only existed, but rose from the dead. After that I was all in.

In retrospect, the approach was brilliant. Even if you didn't believe that the Bible was divinely inspired before you took the class, twelve hours of verses on the subject was bound to wear you down. Looking back, it was pure circular reasoning, but he wasn't trying to convince the skeptical. His oratory wasn't going to convert an atheist, but if you had any tendency toward a Bible-based mindset, his teaching was going to sweep away any doubts about the heavenly origins of the Bible, and therefore it's veracity. And that set the stage for the second week, when things really got serious.

Now that we "knew that we knew that we knew" that the Bible was true, we were ready for some crazy stuff. In the midst of all the "The Bible is the Word of God" stuff, we were admonished to read what was written, not only right in the verse, but in the context, how words were used before, how words were used when the King James was written, and be aware of customs in Biblical times. This made sense, you really couldn't argue with it. But Wierwille then started showing us parts of the Bible where what we had always been taught was wrong...according to him. 

He started out by simply pointing to a plain reading of the text where it contradicted what "everyone knew" about the Bible. He started off with some fairly innocuous things, where the "accurate" reading didn't make much difference in how we lived our lives, or even touched on contentious doctrinal issues. This was brilliant. Since we had already been convinced that the Bible was true and accurate, how could we argue against what we could read right there in the pages of the Bible?

Eventually, however, the stakes got higher. After several sessions of having much of what we always thought we knew shown to be false, any confidence in what our priests or ministers had been telling us had been undermined. Ostensibly, this was to show us that we had to read the Bible as written and allow it to interpret itself. The real reason, as I saw much later, was to set up Wierwille as the authority, despite the encouragement to read and study ourselves.

The final week of the class was devoted to what Wierwille called "the manifestations of the spirit", which most denominations called "the gifts of the spirit". The most well-known of these was speaking in tongues, although other "manifestations" were touched upon. Wierwille billed speaking in tongues as proof of the truth of the Bible. 

For most of the third week we were regaled with instances of speaking in tongues in the Bible culminating with a group speaking in tongues session right at the end of the final session. In contrast to the dry pseudo-intellectual tone of most of the class, this final session was emphatically emotional. Wierwille asked the class rhetorically, just before we were "led into" speaking in tongues, "don't you want to speak 'the wonderful works of God'?" before having us stand and, in unison, and backed by the crew and other graduates of the class loudly speaking in tongues themselves, speaking in tongues as Wierwille's recorded voice encouraging us. 

For many people, including me, it sealed the deal. Not only had I been led, step by step, through an intellectual shedding of previous beliefs and acquisition of a new perspective, but it all came together with an emotional capstone. 

The Way had successfully got me to change what I believed about God and the Bible, but I still wasn't committed to regular involvement. I wasn't in a cult...yet.

One of the words you hear associated with cult involvement (not just religious!) is "brainwashed". Those who have not been involved in a cult (or believe that they haven't) picture cultists who have been made to accept new, obviously wrong beliefs against their will through some kind of mind control. It's more complicated than that. People who are in cults always choose to change their beliefs and choose to elevate the cult leader's ideas above what they previously thought. This article lays out how The Way set the foundation for cultish control through a step by step appeal to logic and rationality, even though its conclusions wouldn't stand up to close scrutiny. For more on brainwashing, see this article. 

Start from the beginning: Part I

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part IV

I re-posted Parts I - III last week. I will be reposting these regularly. You can start from the beginning, here: Part I

By 1970, Wierwille no longer had a loose association of Bible Fellowships and Sunday night meetings at his farm, he had an organization. The "hippies" as some labelled them, provided the raw material, the enthusiasm and the field leadership that he needed to expand his influence. Once he gained legal control of the associated entities of The Way East and The Way West he continued to consolidate his control. Even though he had legal control over his Power for Abundant Living class and its distribution, the organizational chart was still quite loose in the early to mid-seventies. Local fellowships tended to grow organically as people started taking the class and continuing to meet in regular Bible Studies. Leaders of the home fellowships tended to be chosen by local consensus, as well as availability. Two things changed that dynamic: the WOW Program and The Way Corps.

The WOW (Word Over the World) Program was basically a missionary program. People would commit a year of their lives to spreading "the Word", setting up fellowships and running Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) classes. The idea was that a group of four WOW "Ambassadors" would be sent to an area that did not have an existing Way presence. The WOWs would take a part-time job, but would spend the bulk of their time "witnessing". The goal would be that at the end of the year a local fellowship would be established, or an already existing one would be strengthened. The WOW program was wildly successful. By the end of the decade there was a strong Way presence in all 50 states as well as a number of other countries. The annual gathering at Wierwille's farm, called The Rock of Ages, was when the new WOWs were "commissioned" each year, and the previous year's group "welcomed home". By 1980, several thousand were going out as WOWs each year.

The Way Corps was a multi-year program where people were groomed to be the leadership in The Way. It was initially a two-year program spent at the Way headquarters, but eventually an apprentice, or preparatory, year spent in the candidate's home city, was added, as well as an interim year "in the field" to practice what was learned before graduation. The number of Way Corps graduates increased from a dozen or so the first few years, to 500 or more by the sixth year of the program. The local fellowship leaders who had developed naturally were supplanted by Way Corps graduates appointed centrally at most levels of the organization. When I became involved in 1978, there were nine "branches" of 7-10 fellowships each on Long Island. Neither the leaders of the branches, nor the "Area Leader" who oversaw all of Long Island, were Way Corps graduates. Within a few years this would be reversed, and even some local fellowship leaders were replaced by Way Corps graduates. This changed the makeup of The Way from a loose confederation of home Bible Studies to a rigid hierarchy with branch leaders leading 7-10 "twigs" (what home fellowship were called, based on a "Way Tree" analogy), Area Leaders overseeing multiple branches and "Limb Leaders" overseeing an entire state.

A bureaucracy was also developing at The Way headquarters as well, with leaders over the "Trunk" (all of the United States), International Outreach, a Way Corps Director and multiple departments responsible for everything from publications to vehicle maintenance. The Way Corps was slowly morphing from a program of voluntary service to a lifetime commitment to go wherever The Way sent you and do whatever they told you to do. The WOW program, even though it was only a one-year commitment, was a program with a lot of rules and expectations, its rigidity solidified the expectation that leaders were to lay down rules and expectations, rather than altruistically serving. In a short 10 years, the structure of The Way changed from people freely attending local fellowships without many, if any, demands placed upon them, to a rigid hierarchy and more onerous rules and requirements to attend meetings and classes, including those in far away cities and at The Way's headquarters in Ohio.

It was around this time that the epithet "cult" began to be attached to newer religious groups, and The Way was included. The tragedy of Jonestown occurred just as The Way was peaking in membership and influence. Family members of Way followers started getting concerned. "Deprogramming" became, if not common, then at least not unheard-of. Books on cults often included The Way, and occasionally Way members would be kidnapped by "deprogrammers" hired by the family. Some left The Way after this experience, while others escaped and returned. The presence of deprogrammers in conjunction with hostility toward The Way by families of Way members and by many churches helped to foster and "us vs. them" mindset among the Way rank and file. Wierwille stoked the fires by teaching that opposition to "the ministry" was opposition to God, and that Satan was stirring people up in order to attack "God's people". For many Way people, this was a vicious cycle: outside opposition encouraged defensiveness and an isolationist mindset while that very attitude fueled opposition. Parents could not understand why their children, who had been faithful members of the local church, were now preaching that The Way was the only place where God's truth was being told, not seeing how their opposition was a catalyst, feeding the stridency of Way rhetoric.

The Way never retreated to an isolated "compound", cutting themselves off from the world, even though they had several "root" (there's that tree symbolism) locations that were self-contained communities. The majority of Way members lived and worked among non-Way people, held regular jobs and met in private homes for their weekly meetings. They seemed normal. But something very different was going on beneath the surface.

Start with Part I

Continue with Part V