The Cult That Snapped

The Cult That Snapped

A Journey Into The Way International

Karl Kahler

Copyright 1999-2011 by Karl Kahler

All rights reserved

Cover photograph by Robi Klee

Smashwords Edition

For the thousands of good people

who have been followers of The Way

Author’s Note

Many of the names in this book have been changed and many have not. Those I did not change belong to current or former leaders of The Way at the Area level or higher, most of them nationally known figures in the ministry. The names I did change belong to people who led Branches, Twigs or nothing at all, and to those who were not members of The Way. This is not a dividing line between the guilty and the innocent, only between public figures and private individuals.

Yet all names are real in the chapters devoted solely to the history of The Way: Chapters 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12 and 14, except where noted in the text. My own name is spelled Karl Kahler throughout, though it was Carl Collar until 1987. I adopted the original spelling of my ancestral name, pronounced exactly the same, the year I left The Way.

I owe a debt of thanks to John P. Juedes, whose research and reporting on The Way are unparalleled. I’m grateful to Steve and Sandi Heefner, Jim Doop, Del Duncan, Peter Wade, Glenda Sue Maxwell, David Anderson, Wendy Ford, John Schoenheit, Ralph Dubofsky and other former members who spoke to me candidly of their experience, some of whom did not wish to be named. I’ve also relied on a great many newspaper and magazine writers, not to mention Way publicists, and I’m indebted to their diligence. Any errors of fact or judgment are my sole responsibility.

The word snap has been used in cult literature to mean the sudden personality change experienced by people who join cults. In their book Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change, Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman define snapping as a phenomenon that occurs when an individual stops thinking and feeling for himself, when he breaks the bonds of awareness and social relationship that tie his personality to the outside world and literally loses his mind to some form of external or automatic control.

Deprogrammer Ted Patrick uses the word of the reverse process, the point at which brainwashing breaks down and independent thought is recovered — when the person just snaps out of it.

The word also, of course, means to break apart suddenly, or to go insane.

In every sense of the word, I think of The Way as the cult that snapped.

Table of Contents

Chronology

1. The Dead Man Speaks

2. A Lot of Stuff, Kids

3. The Summer of Love

4. He Did It His Way

5. First You Believe

6. The Hippies Turn On

7. The Greatest Thing You Can Give

8. The Teeth of God’s Love

9. Apprentice to a Tyrant

10. Rows and Rows and Rows of Weapons

11. Inside the Lockbox

12. Way World

13. The Master Student

14. Mission to Nowhere

15. The Death List

16. License to Sin

17. Judgment Day

18. Purge, Mark and Avoid

Epilogue: I Do Not Believe

Postscript: Millennium

Glossary: Wayspeak

Chronology

1916 Victor Paul Wierwille is born in family farmhouse in New Knoxville, Ohio.

1937 Elopes with Dorothea Kipp, a childhood friend, now a nurse.

1938 Receives bachelor’s degree from Mission House College and Seminary in Plymouth, Wis.

1941 Receives master’s degree in practical theology from Princeton University, is ordained by the Evangelical and Reformed Church and becomes pastor of St. Jacob’s Church in Payne, Ohio.

1942 Begins weekly radio broadcast called Vesper Chimes, later changed to The Chimes Hour and The Chimes Hour Youth Caravan.

1944 Becomes pastor of St. Peter’s Evangelical and Reformed Church in Van Wert, Ohio.

1948 Receives doctorate of theology from unaccredited Pikes Peak Bible Seminary in Manitou Springs, Colorado.

1951 Attends Pentecostal rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and learns to speak in tongues.

1953 Teaches The Class on the Holy Spirit and the Gifts of the Spirit, later renamed Power for Abundant Living (PFAL).

1954 Writes Receiving the Holy Spirit Today.

1955 Changes the name Chimes Hour Youth Caravan to The Way and spends eight months traveling in the Middle East and India.

1956 Publishes The Dilemma of Foreign Missions in India, criticizing the ecclesiastical colonization of India by foreign churches. Wierwille’s father dies, leaving the family farm to three sons and a nephew.

1957 V.P. Wierwille and brother Harry buy out the other beneficiaries and deed the 147-acre farm to The Way. Asked to step down by the E&R Church, Wierwille resigns and moves into a rental house in Van Wert.

1958 Wierwille’s name is erased from the roll of E&R ministers.

1961 Harry Wierwille finishes renovating the family farmhouse and V.P. moves in with his family, establishing Way Headquarters.

1965 Australian minister Peter J. Wade attends Way summer school and later agrees to become managing editor of Wierwille’s publications.

1967 Wierwille records the 36-hour Power for Abundant Living class on 16mm film for $34,000; Wade directs, David Anderson raises the money.

1968 Wierwille befriends Christian hippies in San Francisco; Steve and Sandi Heefner attend summer school in Ohio.

1969 Jim Doop and two dozen other Christian hippies attend summer school in Ohio. Doop establishes The Way West in Mill Valley, California; Heefner establishes The Way East in Rye, New York; Way branches thrive in Wichita, Kansas, and Greenville, North Carolina. Nine people volunteer for the First Way Corps, renamed the Zero Corps when all nine quit or are dismissed.

1970 A new First Way Corps is established, with Del Duncan as director. Peter Wade founds The Way, Inc., in Australia.

1971 Life magazine publishes The Groovy Christians of Rye, New York, about Heefner’s explosive teen outreach. At the first Rock of Ages festival, 11 Word Over the World (WOW) ambassadors are commissioned. A reported 2,100 people take the PFAL class.

1972 Wierwille ousts Doop as leader of The Way West and Heefner resigns as leader of The Way East; all ministries associated with The Way are placed under Wierwille’s legal authority except in Australia.

1973 L. Craig Martindale graduates from the 2nd Way Corps.

1974 Wierwille acquires The Way College of Emporia, Kansas, and 1,033 WOW ambassadors are commissioned.

1975 Wierwille publishes Jesus Christ Is Not God. Martindale is named Way Corps director. Total Fitness Institute trains Corps leadership in California, playing war games by locking people in cages. Wierwille sends 48 Political WOWs to Maine to get involved in politics and support the state Senate reelection of Way follower Hayes Gahagan.

1976 The ministry acquires The Way College of Biblical Research in Rome City, Indiana, and The Way Family Ranch in Camp Gunnison, Colorado. Gahagan loses his district seat and embarks on a failed run for the U.S. Senate with The Way’s support. The Way buys a propjet Convair 580 from Exxon of Libya for $750,000 and names it Ambassador One. The Way reports $5.8 million in assets.

1977 Wierwille convenes a meeting of the national leadership in Emporia to warn that a communist takeover of America is imminent; the Corps stockpile dried foods and weapons in preparation for apocalypse, and Corps trainees at Emporia are taught how to shoot weapons. Don Wierwille becomes vice president; Howard Allen becomes secretary-treasurer. Wierwille posts a large sign reading Jesus Christ Is Not God on the doors of his boyhood church in New Knoxville on Reformation Sunday.

1978 The Way acquires the LEAD Outdoor Academy in Tinnie, New Mexico. Way assets reach $10.1 million; 275 graduate from the 6th Corps, and 16,000 attend the Rock of Ages.

1979 PFAL Advanced Class is filmed in Athens, Ohio. The year after Jonestown, The Way tells the press it has discontinued weapons training at Emporia.

1982 The Way tries to establish an International Corps in London, Ontario, but is denied permission by the London City Council and Canadian Cabinet, which cite The Way’s weapons training and mind-control tactics. Close to 3,100 WOW ambassadors are commissioned, an all-time high. Wierwille retires as president and anoints Martindale as his successor.

1983 The Way reports 2,657 Twigs and 14,000 PFAL graduates this year, for a total of over 100,000 grads.

1984 Chris Geer establishes International Way Corps in Gartmore, Scotland. The Way reports $27.1 million in income.

1985 Wierwille flies to Scotland to talk to Geer, head of The Way of Europe; Wierwille flies back to Headquarters and dies at the age of 68. Athletes of the Spirit, a dance production starring Martindale, debuts at Headquarters and is performed throughout the summer. Most of the leadership and several hundred followers go on two-week Biblical Research Tour of the Bible Lands in Israel. The Way reports $30 million in income. The IRS revokes The Way’s tax-exempt status for financing political campaigns in the 1970s and making improper loans to members.

1986 Geer reads The Passing of a Patriarch at Corps Night, claiming that Wierwille was deeply disappointed in the entire Board of Trustees. Yak Twig addresses problems in the ministry and adds two men to the Board of Trustees. Geer convenes four days of meetings at Headquarters, reads Patriarch and says the ministry has lost the centrality of the Word; at Corps Week he reads Patriarch again and says the trustees murdered Wierwille. John Schoenheit is fired from the Research Department for writing a paper saying adultery is wrong.

1987 John Lynn, Ralph Dubofsky and three others distribute 500 copies of a 37-page letter accusing the trustees of gross dereliction of duty. Geer disavows the rebels yet withdraws from Headquarters, closing the European Corps and canceling European subscriptions to the ministry’s magazine and tapes. The Way’s tax-exempt status is reinstated, but the Ohio Department of Taxation still seeks $156,990 in sales taxes. Over 360 graduate from the Way Corps, an all-time high.

1989 Martindale publicly repudiates Geer and records Leaders tapes, telling members to have nothing to do with Geer followers. Martindale starts dismissing thousands of staff and Corps who fail to write him a letter declaring allegiance to him.

1990 Ohio Supreme Court overturns Board of Tax Appeals ruling and declares The Way a tax-exempt church.

1991 Way College of Emporia is sold amid rapidly falling membership and revenue.

1994 Martindale declares open season on homosexuals and cancels the WOW program because of homosexual infiltration.

1995 Martindale’s The Way of Abundance and Power class replaces PFAL. All Way Corps members are made full-time Way employees. The 1996 Rock of Ages is canceled. Rosalie Rivenbark replaces Don Wierwille as vice president. Pregnancy policy forbids children for staff wives under 35.

1998 Cost of employing the Corps leads to financial crisis; emergency cost-cutting measures ban pets and other frills. John Reynolds replaces Howard Allen as secretary-treasurer.

1999 Way College of Biblical Research in Indiana is sold for $750,000.

2000 Two lawsuits accuse Martindale of forcing women into sexual relationships. Martindale resigns, is stripped of his clergy and Corps status and is placed on spiritual probation. Rosalie Rivenbark becomes president, Harve Platig becomes vice president and Don Wierwille dies at the age of 60.

2005 Dorothea Kipp Wierwille, V.P.’s wife, dies at the age of 90.

CHAPTER 1

The Dead Man Speaks

We were sitting in razor-straight rows, maybe 500 of us, the men in suits, the women in dresses, cologned and perfumed, a holy spirit dove over every heart. We were assembled in an upper room, in our seats ten minutes early because if we got to our seats nine minutes early we were one minute late. It was Corps Night, April 23, 1986, and the research head of The Way International was going to teach II Thessalonians on a live phone hookup from Headquarters in Ohio.

Usually we heard first from Craig Martindale, the president, who might joke around, maybe tell us what he’d been teaching lately, maybe even get fired up and yell. Then he’d list all the people dialed in tonight from all the campuses and the field, and he’d give the temperature in each place, and we in Emporia, Kansas, would laugh at how cold it was out at Camp Gunnison in Colorado. Then Martindale would turn the lectern over to Walter Cummins, who would take an hour and a half to expound a half-dozen verses of Thessalonians, one Greek word at a time.

Headquarters came on, its static breathing into the room through the speakers in the ceiling. But instead of the familiar introduction, an anonymous voice informed us that there would be no tape recordings tonight. My heart picked up a beat. Our A/V man quickly shut down his equipment. Craig wants to yell, I thought. The only time I’d ever seen tapes shut down was when Craig wanted to yell and name names. But on Corps Night? What good would it do to shut down the tapes on something that was being broadcast to a couple of thousand people?

But Craig wasn’t even mentioned. The speaker reminded us that Dr. Victor Paul Wierwille, founder of The Way, had gone to Scotland a year ago to visit Chris Geer, head of The Way of Europe. Immediately after that visit, Wierwille came home to Ohio, and a week later he was dead. Geer had flown in from Scotland tonight to communicate some very urgent information about that last meeting with Dr. Wierwille.

My heart was thumping now: this was bigger than Craig yelling. Dr. Wierwille was the man of God, our father in the Word, the man who founded this ministry and built it into what it was today, what the newspapers called the second-largest cult in America. I knew Doctor had gone to Scotland before he died, but I didn’t know why he went or what he did there. His death in May 1985 came as a shock to me, since I didn’t even know he was ill. The ministry never announced the cause of death, and if he had any last words of guidance, no one ever passed them on.

Geer I knew little about. I knew he was Doctor’s driver, aide and bodyguard for years, and when those years were over he was put in charge of Europe. When the appointment was announced, half the ministry said, Chris who? He wasn’t a well-known personality or a teacher of big crowds. He had spent most of his career in the shadows, but the shadows were those thrown by Dr. Wierwille, and he had thrived in them.

He was sent to Europe to found a Corps training locale, of which there existed previously only five, all in the United States. He founded the European Corps in Gartmore, Scotland, and was now its coordinator. But he had never been a member of the inner circle that ruled the ministry, and in the United States he was by and large an unknown.

Our fellow Corps at Headquarters applauded when he took the stage — not the uproarious welcome that was customary, more of a nervous ovation.

Geer said he had something to read to us. He called it a letter but gave it a title, The Passing of a Patriarch. He said it was a distillation of some 36 to 40 hours of conversations he had with Dr. Wierwille just before his death a year ago. He gave us a definition of patriarch — one regarded as a father, the founder of an organization, institution, school of thought or the like.

And so, he said, I’ll just begin to read.

And so he did, lighting the fuse that would blow The Way International to pieces.

Son, what would you say if I told you I was going to die? (1) Wierwille asked Geer as they sat parked in a Land Rover on the edge of a meadow that bounded the property in Scotland.

Sir, Geer quoted himself as answering, every day that I have been with you I have always been mentally and physically prepared to accept and deal with your death. ... I have also pushed my mind to accept and carry any last-minute instructions that you might give me. I have known that they may be the last directions for the ministry.

Just the person Dr. Wierwille was looking for.

He told me what he wanted me to do was to draft the gist of a statement to be released to the ministry around the world, said Geer.

I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. Why weren’t we told before? Wierwille was almost a year in the ground, lost to us forever, and here he was being quoted verbatim, as if he had come back from the grave with one last thing to say.

Son, you are the only one I have to come to, to talk about this, Geer quoted Wierwille as saying. "No one else believes me. In the end I am almost alone. I am reminded of Paul. My last days have been so lonely.

You see, son, I have two earthly sons. Today I cannot talk to either one of them. J.P. is a nice guy, but spiritually he just doesn’t have it; he’s weak.

J.P. was John Paul Wierwille, Doctor’s youngest son, a former member of the long-defunct Way Police, never a leader in the ministry.

The hardest to face, though, is Donnie.

That was Dr. Donald Ernst Wierwille, the eldest son, vice president of The Way. Don Wierwille was one of the three men on the Board of Trustees, the ruling body of the ministry. He rarely taught the Word, and when he did talk it was usually about finances, projects, growth.

Despite everything that I have tried, said his father, he is not a spiritual man. ... He is governed by facts, sense knowledge, and has basically neglected the spirit of God in his life. Perhaps he has done more to harm this ministry than any other single man in its entire history.

I sat still as a statue, stunned by these words. I had never heard Don Wierwille criticized by anybody. This wasn’t a ministry in which people criticized the leadership. And now the criticism was coming from the very top, from the father of us all.

He talked about his old best friend Howard R. Allen, the secretary-treasurer of The Way, the man he used to call the greatest layman in the world. Howard Allen didn’t often teach the Word either, but he was a well-loved man, an old-timer who had stuck with Wierwille from the beginning.

Today he is not the man he once was spiritually and certainly not the man he could have been if he had stayed faithful. The infection that has so deeply cut into the life of the ministry has taken my only real friend from me, too.

Chilling words. There went two-thirds of The Way’s top leadership.

And what about the third? Craig Martindale, president and point man, was Doctor’s handpicked successor to lead The Way. Don and Howard might have labored in a closet, but Craig labored on rooftops. His work was teaching, confronting, exhorting, reproving and showing — setting the pace for the ministry by word and example.

With the masses he was immensely popular, a fiery speaker and an energetic leader. Martindale had made a name for himself with teachings like Athletes of the Spirit, which held that believers were not soldiers of the Lord but spiritual athletes, competing in the arena of life with no sense of self-preservation, driven only by the desire to win. A year ago, he had organized the ambitious Athletes of the Spirit dance production, casting himself as the lead. The production debuted shortly before Wierwille’s death, and we’d been told that Wierwille attended one production and was highly complimentary.

Geer had a different story.

I have not been able to stop this ‘Athlete of the Spirit’ thing, he quoted Wierwille as saying. "Let me tell you, it may well end up costing us the ministry. When you forsake God’s Word for the imagery of that Word, you lose the power of God. ... It took me years to convince our people that Christianity was something to be taken seriously. Effectively, we have lost all that. It is just a game again....

"If Craig does not come back to the integrity of the Word, then before too long he will begin to blame others around him for lacking spiritual perception and will begin to blame the loss of power in the ministry on others. I’ve seen it before and I see it in the Word. He will start to lash out wrongly. It will hurt so many. It will sound genuine, but it will not bring deliverance to those who follow what he says....

Sure, Craig was up against a lot. Right before the inauguration Donnie really pulled in all the strings. Craig was up against a stacked deck; I know that. But, he chose to discipline himself for the ‘Athlete of the Spirit’ thing and not for the presidency. Today the seat of the president is basically vacant. Craig took a portion, the authority, without the responsibility.

I wondered where Craig was, what expression he had on his face as these words were being read. How would he ever recover from this?

And more to the point, if our top leader had forsaken God’s Word, where did that leave the rest of the ministry?

We are losing this ministry to facts, putting facts ahead of God, said Wierwille. We have walked away from God, and His hand of protection will be off us. It’s just a matter of time. You can’t run the ministry without God, you just can’t. ... I have watched men that I have fought for ruined.

And what about the Corps, the program I was in, the one that produced virtually all the ministry’s leadership?

He talked about how Emporia was dying, said Geer. Emporia, where I was sitting now. He talked at great length about how the leadership of the Corps was turning into a group of administrators and not spiritual men and women, and how the effects were more and more becoming visible in the Corps. The way that he put it was that there was basically no one in the leadership of the Way Corps who could be trusted spiritually.

And what about the rest of the leadership?

Our finest men, Wierwille said, men I had poured out my life for and who really loved God, have been systematically destroyed. Today there aren’t many left standing for the truth. ... Today the same Headquarters that I worked so hard for and bled out my life for, the one that we gave to the ministry, has only a handful of people that are spiritually trustworthy. Most have been turned. Today it harbors more hypocrites than believers. There are only a handful left, and very few of them are in top positions. ... I would say that there is almost no one at the top levels that you could really trust.

And what was to be done about it?

Geer didn’t say.

The only hint lay in this quote:

In my heart there were only two men who could handle the presidency, you and Craig, Wierwille told Geer. Right now there is only one man who can save the ministry, that’s you.

Geer closed with four Points for Consideration, which asked and answered questions like: What makes you think that Dr. Wierwille was still sane?

Dr. Wierwille was not insane, said Geer, but he was deeply hurt emotionally. He was a very strong man mentally, but if there were one phrase that I could use to describe his demeanor it would be ‘broken-hearted.’ He carried it very well and to the best of his ability kept it from view to all; he even tried to hide it from me. He was crushed and very lonely and alone. He was hurt deeply. He felt that before his days were over, what he had stood for was basically lost.

Silent night

When the transmission ended, we sat in stunned silence. The document had taken two and a half hours to read.

Several minutes passed before anything happened. The first person to move was the organist, who walked out, sat down and began playing what might have been a funeral dirge. A few minutes later our Corps coordinator, Michael Fort, walked slowly to the front of the room. He stepped up to the lectern, faced us squarely, put his chin up and started talking. The gist of his short statement was that we should go to the Word for an understanding of what we had just heard. All activities for the rest of the night were canceled.

We exited the building in surreal silence. Usually we left Corps Night buzzing with talk, but not a soul was talking now. People were barely even looking at each other.

I walked straight to my room and changed into my Corps sweats. In the semiprivacy of the dorm a few people started talking. I didn't want to talk to anybody, I just wanted to be alone.

I walked out to the track, but before running I paced up and down in the parking lot beside it, and I asked myself one question.

Am I in this ministry because of men or because of God?

If it was because of men, then I should leave now, because every living man I looked up to had just been discredited by the man I looked up to most of all.

But if it was because of God, then I should stay, because the failure of men is no discredit to God.

It had to be the latter. It had to be.

I had joined because of men — not to forget women — but that was not the reason I was here today. I had internalized what those men and women taught me, which was putting God first. If all three trustees resigned in disgrace tomorrow, it would blacken God’s eye not in the least. Men come and go, God abides forever.

I stepped onto the track and started running.

There was another runner on the other side on the track, I couldn’t make out who. I didn’t want to catch up to him or have to pass him, I just wanted to run alone. As I ran I kept telling myself that I was in this ministry because of God. What I had heard tonight was devastating, but it would not cripple me. I was not sitting in a corner somewhere weeping over the ruins of The Way, I was running around the track in my Corps sweats at my usual pace, my seven-minute mile.

I saw across the track that the other runner had been stopped by a third figure. I ran on, rounding the curve, until I came close enough to see who they were. The runner was my 14th Corps brother David Scovel, who had been made an Area coordinator, which was the top of the pyramid for in-residence Corps. The other person was Wally Manthey, the assistant Corps coordinator.

Wally signaled for me to stop. I slowed from a run to a jog to a full stop in front of them.

Now, what were you told to do tonight? asked Wally, eyes darting back and forth between us.

Go to the Word, said David.

Right, said Wally. Go to the Word. So what are you doing running?

I looked at Wally with a combination of respectful silence and healthy contempt. Tonight of all nights, he was going to bust us for this?

We had just been told that basically no one in the leadership of the Way Corps could be trusted spiritually. Chris Geer had neglected to mention that Wally Manthey happened to be an exception to this rule.

See, instead of going to the Word, you just want to blow it all out, said Wally. You just want to blow it all out of your system and go running. You think running can bring you some kind of deliverance that God’s Word can’t.

Scovel, who didn’t get to be an Area coordinator by arguing with Corps coordinators, was quick to acknowledge that we were wrong.

Wally looked to me for a like expression of acquiescence. I just looked down.

Men, I suggest you go back to your dorms, get your Bibles, open them up and do what you were told to do: go to the Word.

David and I mumbled assent and were dismissed.

I walked back to my dorm. Now, on top of being generally devastated, I was righteously pissed off. Where did Wally get off thinking I couldn’t go to the Word while I was running? I could go to the Word while running, working, eating or staring into space. Maybe Wally needed his Bible open to go to the Word — or maybe all he needed was a late-night stroll to find two senior Corps people to reprove — but to me, going to the Word didn’t require opening the Bible. I had the damn thing memorized.

What I needed to do was think. Wally, looking for his own understanding of what we’d just heard, thought the problem was people like David and me who weren’t following the letter of our leaders’ instructions. The real problem was people like Wally who thought they held the truth and were entitled by God to dictate it to those they outranked. The problem was authoritarian leadership, the only kind The Way had ever known. The problem was rule by decree, devoid of any legitimate authority. The problem was people like Wally Manthey.

I went back to my room, grabbed my Bible and wandered to a spot on the second floor of Wierwille Library where I found some space to myself. I looked at the cover of my Bible and tried to decide what book to read. I settled on Galatians, since it was a correction epistle. If there was ever a time that cried out for correction, this was it.

I opened to Galatians 3:1:

O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?

Not long afterward, Wally read the Corps a paragraph from an article saying that when the leader of a cult dies, the cult is either torn apart by infighting or it evolves into a religion — a legitimate group organized around common ideals rather than a common dictator.

Although Wally disliked the word religion, not to mention the word cult, he believed that The Way would prove its legitimacy by surviving these trials intact.

It was a hopeful thought. But Wally was dead wrong.

Our cult was about to be torn apart by infighting.

1. Christopher C. Geer, The Passing of a Patriarch (Altrincham, Cheshire, U.K.: European Christian Press, 1986).

CHAPTER 2

A Lot of Stuff, Kids

Dr. Wierwille had a farm, and on that farm he had a cult.

It was a fairly harmless little cult at first, offering Sunday services and Bible classes to pious Midwesterners within driving distance of tiny New Knoxville, Ohio. But in the late 1960s and following, Wierwille perfected a formula for attracting young people with his promise of an abundant life and his tolerant outlook on sin.

The sin he tolerated best was sex, as he demonstrated by seducing a great many of his female admirers, telling them they could get eternal rewards in heaven for blessing a man of God like this.

Wierwille’s followers became a culture unto themselves, greeting each other with a Bless you and a kiss on the lips, excitedly sharing the things God had been showing them lately, roving the streets looking for new people to ambush with the good news, maybe circling around afterward to hear from God by speaking in tongues, interpretation and prophecy.

The odd but intensely loving culture spawned by Wierwille on his Ohio farm spread like seeds thrown to the wind. Pockets of believers sprang up in California, New York, North Carolina, Kansas, and wherever they went, they multiplied. Finding people who were lonely, depressed, directionless or merely bored, the believers offered them love, friendship, divine power and eternal life. Reaching out to a generation fresh from the promise of the ’60s, the believers found tens of thousands of new people willing to give it a try.

The ministry grew so fast Wierwille had to snap up college campuses in Kansas and Indiana, a ranch in Colorado and a mountain-climbing school in New Mexico just to train the leadership.

Thousands came to the yearly Rock of Ages festival, the greatest thing this side of the gathering together. Hundreds of Word Over the World ambassadors were sent out every year to witness full-time in assigned cities around the world. Thousands sent Wierwille 10 percent of their gross income, the amount he said was the absolute minimum you had to give to ensure God’s blessing.

The anticult movement, more familiar with the likes of the Moonies and Hare Krishnas, began paying close attention to Wierwille’s disciples, warning of their seductive love-bombing and their subtle brainwashing tactics. Parents, baffled at first by their children’s newfound spirituality, grew alarmed when they couldn’t recognize their kids anymore.

The personality change was often sudden and drastic, and if the parents didn’t like it, the kids didn’t care. They had found a new family, the family of God, and anyone who opposed it was not of God but of the Adversary.

Parents started hiring professional deprogrammers to kidnap their children and snap them out of it. In the early ’80s, Wierwille’s bunch surpassed the Moonies as the cult reporting the most deprogrammings in America. By then it had more members than the Moonies or Hare Krishnas, and among widely acknowledged American cults was second in numbers only to the Scientologists.

Wierwille’s cozy little flock had become The Way International, a religious empire where one leader ruled supreme over 40,000 followers.

If this is brainwashing, honey, then pass the soap, Wierwille liked to say.

Reveling in notoriety after 60 years of obscurity, Wierwille named his $750,000 private plane Ambassador One, and he had a red carpet rolled down its steps wherever it landed. He performed mass weddings and mass healings, and committed adultery on a massive scale, as one of his top lieutenants would say later.

He sided with neo-Nazis in claiming that the Holocaust either never happened or was grossly exaggerated by pity-seeking Jews. The Jews probably topped the list of people he hated most, although there was plenty of room for the Catholics and mainstream Protestants. He also hated and feared the IRS and the FBI, but his most paranoid fantasies were reserved for the communists.

In the mid-1970s he predicted that a communist takeover of America was imminent, and he had all the believers stockpile bags of dried foods and other essentials in preparation for going underground. When the invasion didn’t happen, he claimed the prayer and believing of The Way had saved the nation from apocalypse. Still, just to be safe, he initiated weapons training for all the Way Corps, and stockpiled assault weapons in secret armories around the country.

In 1982, 40 years after he launched his first radio show, the 65-year-old Wierwille decided his life’s work was essentially complete, and he retired as president of The Way. In his stead he anointed a young but exceptionally talented devotee named L. Craig Martindale. The 32-year-old Oklahoma native made no mystery of the secret of his success: I never forgot who taught me the Word. He was fanatically loyal to Wierwille, stressing that no man could ever fill his shoes. Yet Martindale’s conviction, energy and talent seemed to indicate that few were better equipped to forge ahead with Wierwille’s vision of Word Over the World.

It wasn’t such an empty motto anymore. The Way was in 50 states, six continents and 40 countries, and over 100,000 people had taken the foundational Power for Abundant Living class at costs of up to $200 each.

As many as 20,000 people were coming to the annual Rock of Ages festival, where over 3,000 Word Over the World ambassadors were once commissioned for a year of service. Close to 500 a year were enrolling in the four-year Way Corps, which cost $8,600 to complete. The ministry reported $30 million in revenue in 1985, the same year it completed the $10 million Word Over the World Auditorium at Headquarters, paid for in cash.

With this kind of growth under Martindale’s leadership, Wierwille’s death in 1985 caused barely a hiccup in the ministry. Saddened by the loss but knowing they would see him in heaven, the believers marched on as if nothing had happened.

Just two days after the burial, Martindale presented another dazzling Athletes of the Spirit dance production, starring Martindale as the heroic athlete who vanquishes the evil seed of the serpent in the climactic scene.

Wierwille’s death, if anything, made Martindale stronger. Wierwille had been the man of God, no question, but he was dead now, and he had left no doubts about the succession. Martindale had his own vision to implement, and Wierwille’s death silenced the last person on earth with enough clout to question him.

But in April 1986, when everything was going so well for this Oklahoma boy made good, a ghost came back to haunt him.

It was the man of God.

Chris Geer’s reading of The Passing of a Patriarch sent massive shock waves through the ministry. Wierwille had come back from the dead to report that something was rotten in The Way, starting at the very top. In a ministry in which criticizing the leadership was unheard of, Wierwille’s tirade from the grave against his hand-picked successors stunned and devastated the faithful. It reverberated throughout The Way as a warning that the ministry was in dire danger.

But no solution was offered, no guidance, no advice. Patriarch raised earthshaking questions without providing any answers. The only answers lay in the Word, as everyone already knew, but who could be trusted now to interpret the Word?

The ultimate triumph of Patriarch was to prove that The Way was nothing but a cult, and that its leaders, Geer included, could be trusted to act exactly like cult leaders.

A cult is a dictatorship, an authoritarian organization that manipulates people into blindly obeying a leader whose authority is absolute.

Every cult is a cult of personality, revolving around and subject to the leader, usually the founder, usually a man, who dupes his followers into believing he has special knowledge and powers.

Cults are not organized around ideals, principles, beliefs; they are organized around cult leaders. If there is no cult leader, there is no cult.

When the leader dies, the cult is also in danger of dying. If no successor arises, it can only drift apart or find ways of ruling itself democratically, in which case it becomes something other than a cult.

If there is an unquestioned succession, the cult is safe. But if two or more leaders stake a claim to the throne, and if they refuse to back down while retaining a base of support, the only solution possible is to divide up the world like Alexander’s generals.

That’s what happened to the Hare Krishnas, and that’s what happened to The Way.

When the smoke cleared, the organization controlled by Martindale had lost tens of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of souls. Geer walked away with a mansion in Scotland and the loyalty of a solid majority of The Way’s leadership, both of which he would lose in the decade ahead.

Entire countries were erased from the map of The Way as they bolted to Geer. Revenue fell through the floor, and The Way held a fire sale of properties it couldn’t use anymore, starting with the pristine 41-acre campus in Kansas where I first heard Patriarch.

Then, as if mass defection hadn’t hurt the ministry enough, Martindale cauterized the wounds with fire. He sent a letter to every member of the Way Corps, thousands of people, demanding to know whether they stood with him or not. If he didn’t like their answers he purged them, firing a letter back telling them they had been dropped as active Corps, erased from the mailing list, barred from the household. In one mass mailing, Martindale excommunicated at least two-thirds of The Way’s leadership, most of whom took their followers with them.

Martindale launched a venomous counterattack on Geer and his supporters, calling them a trivial buncha punks and requiring anyone who wanted to stand with The Way to listen to tapes in which he named 16 devil spirits operated by Chris Geer. You don’t coexist with gangrene, you cut it out! he yelled. If you still buy that crap, then you deserve the results of your stupidity.

After the staggering losses of the late ’80s, The Way of Craig Martindale devoted the ’90s to finding people to purge. A ministry once focused on outreach became obsessed with reaching into every corner of its house and plucking out those who weren’t pure enough to stay. Having dismissed the majority of his most talented leaders, Martindale turned his wrath next on homosexuals, telling them in a letter to the Corps: You are an abomination to God. ... You are detestable and despicable and repugnant and worthy of death.

At Rock of Ages 1994, having gotten wind that homosexual infiltrators represented up to 10 percent of the outgoing WOW ambassadors, Martindale canceled the 25-year-old WOW program on the spot.

Two years later he canceled the Rock of Ages itself, the ministry’s main event since 1971. And he replaced Wierwille’s Power for Abundant Living class, the primary outreach vehicle since 1967, with his own The Way of Abundance and Power class.

In the space of two years, he canceled the class, the festival and the outreach program that had defined The Way for its entire existence. The only thing he kept was the Way Corps, which now churned out angry and fiercely loyal clones of Craig Martindale.

And this is The Way?

To where?

Says who?

What in God’s name is going on here?

As Dr. Wierwille used to say: A lot of stuff, kids....

CHAPTER 3

The Summer of Love

Dad would later blame it all on the divorce: if my family hadn’t broken apart, I wouldn’t have gone off to find a new family. Many parents have entertained similar notions, agonizing over what they did wrong, what they could have done better.

It’s an exercise in grossly misdirected guilt. People join cults because they’re conned by the cults, not because their upbringing was imperfect. Parents who blame themselves should take a closer look at the high-pressure, high-persuasion tactics used on their children.

Experts have hammered the point home repeatedly that those who join cults are normal, intelligent people, predominantly middle- or upper-class, primarily white in the U.S., without any factor to mark them as susceptible except that they tend to be young.

To say that people join cults because they’re looking for a cult to join, as some theorize, is like saying women are raped because they secretly yearn to be raped.

People join cults because they cross paths with cultists who single them out for attention, love, a hug, a sales pitch. The recruiters are victims themselves, normal people who were taken in by other recruiters and expertly trained to use the same tactics that worked so well on them.

The spiel that reaches the man on the street, the new person, has been honed by generations of experience at winning and losing new people. The cults know what they’re doing, and their methods work on people from all walks of life.

Yes, I did join The Way at a time when my family was falling apart. But plenty of the people I joined came from happy, caring families never touched by divorce.

And even if my nuclear family was still intact, I still think I would have found the seduction of The Way too much to resist.

Life passages

In the spring of 1980, at the age of 16, three life-changing things happened to me: my father went manic, I dropped out of high school and I picked up a Christian hitchhiker. The maelstrom spawned by the collision of these three things sucked me in and spit me out a completely different person.

I’d had a pretty good life so far. I grew up in Venezuela, Canada, Mexico, Bolivia, Alaska and Arkansas, living in 11 cities in five countries on two continents in my first 15 years. I was fluent in Spanish and making straight A’s in school, though I changed schools every year or two. As a child in Durango, Mexico, which had Western movie sets, I met John Wayne and Dennis Hopper, and I became best friends with Bob Dylan’s son.

My father, Jerry Kahler, was a restless, globe-trotting director of private American schools in foreign countries, or when relaxing a year in places like Alaska and Arkansas, he was at least the high school principal. My mother, Margaret, was an elementary and music teacher who played excellent piano and guitar and was fluent in Spanish. My brother, Paul, two years older, was a rock collector who would go into geology.

My father had a major case of world wanderlust, and he had a doctorate, while my mother was a flexible wife with a master’s. The only thing missing from their résumé was any stability whatsoever, yet that never stopped the next school from hiring them.

The darkest shadow on this happy family was the mania that visited my father at recurring intervals, roughly every year and a half, from the early 1970s onward. For at least 20 years, he experienced severe, psychotic manic episodes that lasted months — he stayed awake for days on end, talking to everyone who crossed his path, starting businesses, growing marijuana, seducing women, racing from the cops.

In 1978, my parents divorced after 17 years of marriage, and Dad, Paul and I flew to Cochabamba, Bolivia. Here in the foothills of the Andes, a mile and a half above sea level, Dad was the new director of the American school, Paul was a senior who would graduate valedictorian, and I was a sophomore class president who learned how to get into discos, how to order a rum and Coke, how to dance like John Travolta, how to kiss a girl.

Dad was completely un-manic in Bolivia, but he was ulcerated and lonely — for the first time in his life he didn’t have a woman to come home to — and after only one year he abandoned Bolivia, the place I loved best. I had no choice but to get on the plane with him.

We landed in Arkansas, where Paul would be attending the university in Fayetteville, I would be a junior at the high school, and we would both be living with my mother, who was pursuing her second University of Arkansas graduate degree. Dad lay down on his mother’s couch in Little Rock and didn’t get up for months.

Mom did her best to stock a home for two teenage sons in a spartan two-bedroom apartment, but Paul soon moved out, leaving me a room to myself and no one to enjoy it with.

On the heels of the best year of my life, I was having my worst. Fayetteville High School was a huge, highly socialized anthill where all the jocks, cheerleaders, actors and other cool people already knew each other, and they weren’t inviting anyone else into their orbit. For the first time in my life, I was completely lost in a new school — my dad wasn’t running it, my mom wasn’t a teacher, my brother wasn’t enrolled. I was completely alone and had no idea how to function.

I experienced exquisite misery at Fayetteville High. All of a sudden I wasn’t smart enough to be sure of an A in Algebra II, and I had never made any other grade except for one disgraceful B in 8th-grade P.E. in Kodiak, Alaska, where I was penalized for not swimming the length of a full-size swimming pool underwater.

I hated Fayetteville High. I had no friends and no idea how to make any. I was rejected by the basketball team, so I turned to the tennis team, where I placed 14th out of 15. I spent my lunch hour consulting with the algebra ladies in the math department on how to do my homework so that I wouldn’t get another humiliating B.

And then Dad awakened from his slumber on his mother’s couch in Little Rock. First thing you know, he’d bought a liquor store in the blackest part of Hot Springs, Arkansas. He moved into a one-bedroom apartment above Spring Street Liquors, and he stacked a bunch of weapons against the wall of his living room to deter thieves. He moved around town easily, betting on the horses, playing pool and poker, flirting with loose women.

Then he decided that gold was the answer to all questions, and he scraped together as much money as he could get his hands on to start a business buying gold and silver from the public. He chose to launch this endeavor in Fayetteville, where he could make one last try at winning back his sons, reuniting most of the family to which he had devoted his life.

He knew how miserable I was in school, and he wrote me that formal education was nothing but little dogs being made to jump through little hoops to a tune composed by non-musicians.

He wanted me to drop out of school to help him rake in our fortune. He knew I was struggling in algebra with the value