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That's pretty awesome, Rocky. I call to mind that all non-Way material was banned for 3 months after taking one's initial PFAL class. And then discouraged thereafter. On entering the WC training, all non-Way material was banned - permanently. I know a bunch of ex Plymouth Brethren in my local area. The women hated it and are glad to have escaped. The men can't understand why the women couldn't have a voice, too (if women had a thought about something, they had to tell their husbands, who spoke for them). Matter of fact, about 40 years ago, in a different area, I used to work with a woman, who would take her packed lunch to the nearby park and eat there. On a couple of occasions, I went to talk to her and she would stop eating. Very strict PB. Sad. Very quiet woman and never spoke up. Now, I realise why. There are a number of faith schools opening up in this country. Faith might be Christian faith, or it might be Islamic, or any other faith. They can set their own curricula within guidelines. Fine - but do encourage children's critical thinking. It should be possible to examine good literature and draw from it. For example, Shakespeare's plays endure because they continue to deal with enduring human problems - jealousy, lust, ambition. Some of those themes could be considered in light of what could be done to overcome, say. jealousy. Like, learn to communicate better. The more open communication we have amongst ourselves, the better, in my opinion.

IMO, that's too pat an answer. I think it's all of the above possible reasons you gave, Patriot. Different people have different reasons. A few of them might have even bought into the "we're the faithful remnant" crap that RFR has peddled. Since you referred to the low pay a couple times, I assume you're talking about people at HQ. (As for the person sitting in someone's living room studying the Bible and singing songs, I still run into people who are "out" but in a splinter group who don't [or won't] believe bad things about twi or VPW because they don't want to "think evil.") I left HQ staff in early spring of 1986. I resigned, and I was never so happy to leave a place in my life. I hated the mandatory meetings, Rosalie's micromanaging, the rampant hypocrisy, etc. I never regretted getting out of there. In contrast, a couple years later, when I had severed my ties with twi completely, I had a long talk with someone who was still "in," a friend who was a member of the president's cabinet and had held very high positions. He was fully aware at how flocked up things were and what Rosalie was like. But he, who was younger than I was and better educated and better equipped to change careers, said, "If I left, how would I support my wife and child?" I was astounded. It was the fear in the heart of that man! Re: the low pay: If you're debt-free and living in that neck of the woods, you don't need much money to live comfortably. My rent in NK was very reasonable for a nice apartment, and my utilities were next to nothing. Lunch in the OSC was mandatory (gag, gag), so I only had to buy food for 2 meals a day. For people approaching retirement age, as the older staffers must be, if they've stuck it out this long they probably think it's an okay gig. But they'd better not get sick, or they'll become someone else's "burden," and off they'll be sent with no retirement fund, no social security check, nada. For those who have the type of personality that allows them to tolerate mandatory meetings and syrupy-sweet smiles from a "president" whose grins hide daggers, and all the other BS, twi is just the place. God bless 'em. All those things gave me a headache and a heartache.

This essay, written by a Professor of Literature, describes well life in a cult and how ideas break down the walls of isolation build inside the mind of members by cults of many varieties. From Literary Hub July 6, 2017 by Rebecca Stott When my father won the English prize at his grammar school in 1946 his teachers gave him a copy of Arthur Mee’s Book of Everlasting Things. He was seven. Though only certain books were allowed in Exclusive Brethren homes, my preacher grandfather examined the volume and pronounced it acceptable. “This was a serious mistake,” my father told me. “It would have been far safer to let me read Rover and Beano.” “I knew there was a world outside the Brethren,” he said, referring to the closed Puritan sect into which he had been born, “but I’d seen nothing like this. The Brethren line was that literature, sculpture, painting and secular music—even human imagination itself—were all mischievous, frivolous and seductive distractions from the scriptures. The only important thing to God, we were told, was your reborn self in the Spirit.” To my father’s surprise, sin, repentance and being-born-again weren’t mentioned in the Book of Everlasting Things. “A door opened up in the wall that had been built between me and “the world,”’ he said, “and I slipped through it.” I have my father’s copies of Mee’s books on my bookshelves. They smell musty. The pages have yellowed. The Book of Everlasting Things, 352 pages long, contains extracts from great literature and art. The American Declaration of Independence sits next to Matthew Arnold; Henry Vaughan next to George Eliot. Later in the book there’s the best part of The Ancient Mariner, twelve pages of In Memoriam, nine pages of Samson Agonistes, Gray’s Elegy, five pages of Paradise Lost, the whole of Adonais—“in which, at the age of eight, I almost drowned,” my father wrote—a long passage from Robinson Crusoe, Shelley’s To a Skylark and Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, whole speeches by Demosthenes and Pericles, eight pages from The Odyssey, Cicero’s Essay on Old Age, Plato’s account of the death of Socrates, Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubábaiyát of Omar Khayyám, five pages of the Areopagitica, eleven of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and several passages from his plays. My father, seven years old, was enthralled. He began to memorize the Shakespeare speeches anthologized there, rehearsing them in his bedroom when his parents were out—Julius Caesar’s “That was the noblest Roman of them all,” Twelfth Night’s “Make me a willow cabin at your gate,” “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” from Macbeth and “Come let’s away to prison” from King Lear. He fell in love with Emily Bronte, he told me on his deathbed, 40 years after he had left the Brethren, his eyes glistening with tears. “The words of remarkable men and women,” he said, “began to swarm inside my head. Other feelings, other judgements, other passionate beliefs opened up to me as I read,” and then he quoted the lines from Keats’ “On First Reading Chapman’s Homer,” as he would do again many years later, often weeping: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.” “Soon I had a small library of pieces in my head,” he told me. “I could go there at any time, even when I was in a Meeting. I had a secret, non-Brethren compartment inside my head.” By the time I was born in 1964, the fourth-generation of the Stott family to be born into the Brethren, my father had become a preacher. He had been to Cambridge, studied literature under C.S. Lewis, written poetry, watched Ingmar Bergman films, been reprimanded for his worldly ways and prayed over. Then things had changed. The new leader, a New York linen merchant, they called him the Man of God, had begun to turn the Brethren from a strict separatist Puritan sect into a cult. He had introduced hundreds of new rules that governed every aspect of Brethren family life: no pets, no wristwatches, no cinemas, newspapers, television, no eating with non-Brethren, no restaurants, no sports, no trousers for women, no skirts above the knee, no unions, no professional associations. If you didn’t comply you’d be excommunicated and then you’d never see your family again. Thousands of Brethren had left. My large extended family stayed in. There were suicides, breakdowns even, in one tragic case, a whole family murdered because the father wanted to save them from Satan. We lived in a world of fear and surveillance. So there were no books in my house when I was growing up either. The family bookshelves contained ministries in shelves of color-coded volumes and a single set of encyclopaedias. All the books my father had bought in his university years were now long gone, burned on the garden bonfire or delivered to the local charity shop. Though those Shakespeare soliloquies were still echoing in his head, I did not know about them, or know even that such a man as Shakespeare had existed. We were living in Brighton in the 1960s. None of us had ever heard the Beatles or seen the footage of the moon landings. I was compliant—girl children had to be. I was subject. I wore headscarves when I was told to. I kept quiet in meeting. Women were supposed to be seen and not heard, sit at the back, follow orders. But I was not compliant inside. I seethed with rage but also prayed to be delivered from the rage I felt. I was curious but there was no where to get answers to any of the questions I wanted to ask. Fascinated by the man I’d heard my father and grandfather preach about who he said had been sent to earth by Satan to lead men from the Lord by telling them they were descended from monkeys, I went to look Darwin up in the family encyclopaedia volumes. I was six. Where the entry should have been there were only the stumps of two razored-out pages, pages my grandfather had excised as soon as the volumes arrived. We were not supposed to go into the library at the ordinary preparatory school I attended. Our teachers, following my parents’ instructions, sent us out of most lessons so we did worksheets in corridors. When I was seven I crossed the threshold into the school library during school assembly, curious about the walls of books I had glimpsed there. I snatched a copy of Enid Blyton’s The Secret Island, hid the book away and read in stolen moments, about Jack, the young boy drifter who escaped with the three orphaned children to the secret island. Jack was outspoken, brave and bold. He told the children that grown ups were not always right. He taught them to trust their instincts. He persuaded me to trust mine. Over the following years Jack became a secret interloper inside my own head. He lead me to other stolen and secret books. By the time my family left the cult after a sexual scandal involving the cult leader in 1970, and learned to live in the outside world that we had been told was run by Satan, my father and I had much to share: books, stolen, mused over, secret loves. We spent years telling each other about the treasures we had discovered and stored away in our heads. By the time my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer I had become a professor of literature and was beginning to write novels of my own. My father had been to prison for fraud and embezzlement because he had developed a gambling addiction but he had also written four plays, volumes of unpublished poems, made films for the BBC and had performed in many amateur Shakespeare productions. On his deathbed he decided he wanted to watch all Ingmar Bergman’s films through “one last time.” There were fifty-eight. He managed to only eight. A few days before he died he asked me to read him Eliot’s Four Quartets and recited, barely conscious, a series of poems by Yeats and, to my surprise, he asked for a favourite passage from a Salman Rushdie essay I had given him years before. “Literature tells there are no rules,” I read, barely able to speak for tears. “It hands down no commandments. We have to make up our own rules as best we can, make them up as we go along. And it tells us there are no answers; or rather it tells us that answers are easier to come by and less reliable than questions. If religion is an answer, then literature is an enquiry, great literature, by asking extraordinary questions, opens new doors in our minds.” School libraries, school prizes, teachers, Shakespeare, Jack, books. If I am a professor of literature now, if I have the privilege to write books of my own, it is not to question religious truths, or to preach scepticism, it is to make a plea like Rushdie did, for us to find ways to keep those doors open in our minds and those of the children we raise. __________________________________ Rebecca Stott’s Darwin’s Ghosts is available now from Spiegel & Grau.

thanks for posting that essay Rocky ! I love that one line i highlighted in bold red....so appropriate for Grease Spot....makes me think of all those things our mind accumulates - things outside what is "approved" by TWI - and when some crisis hits - or we merely reach a tipping point - we leave

I see what's going on here. 1) You are convinced I am a wayfer, a wafer of the wafers, in fact. 2) I leave the intellectually superior "Way" section and came to the basement. 3) You followed me to the basement. How humiliating that must have been for you. Why would you have done that? 4) The only conclusion is: you must be a closet Wafer that needs to read all the way doctrine I write. You can't get enough. Why not just go back to Ohio and sit at the feet of queen riverbark and let her tickle your ears with her doctrine? That's clearly what you want. I know it now. You are a phony. You don't belong here at gsc. Sorry to out you dude, but you'll feel better as time goes on. You'll finally be able to express the true wafer you. The closet is a dark place.

Just for this post.... Let's set aside the argument whether TWI was legit or corrupt from the beginning. My deep confusion is with many of the very long-standing staff or leaders in TWI today. Let's take it from, say the 70's, 80's and 90's. They saw the way TWI was in the past. Huge groups of people. Huge events. Huge WOW and Corps training groups. Classes all over. Secular recognition (although not usually positive) as a rapidly growing ministry (cult). Every state having work in it. Huge international and military outreach works. Generally speaking, a lot of 'stuff' going on. To say that things today are a shadow of what they once were is a huge overstatement. I'm pretty sure that even those TWI long-time insiders would agree. So what keeps them there? Are the same guys playing piano & organ? Same angry guy yelling at everyone doing AV? Do they not remember the past 'glory' and honestly wonder 'why not now?' What is it they 'really' think? So, is it The Kool-Aid effect has never worn off? They are living in fear of leaving 'the true household'? They are afraid of leaving the lifestyle they are accustomed to (can't be the pay)? They are afraid of losing the status, position, prestige that they now have (can't be the pay)? They really believe the apparent 'dry spell' will eventually subside, and the former 'glory will return? They are afraid of leaving what they are used to, and for some, being paid for, and not knowing what to do for a job? So, in essence, they've seen the difference between before, and current. What are their thoughts? Anyone? Anyone? Buller?

Hi Chockfull, Just a note to offer one major correction about publishing my book Undertow. On my website I have written about how, after rejections from publishing houses (every author knows this process takes a long time) I created New Wings Press, LLC and "self-published" the book. I hired professionals to edit and design it. I gathered promotional blurbs from experts, other former Way followers, and authors in the field. The print-on-demand company I used is IngramSpark. They have dependable distribution channels around the world. So, in essence, I did what a regular publishing company does, but paid for it myself. And now it is up to me to also do the marketing. Thanks for the mention here. I hope Undertow reaches many former Way folks. It is now available in e-book, too. That cost me a bundle for Ingram to make, but every penny spent on this project was worth it the moment I got the first of many emails telling me it helped that person heal. My intention was exactly that ... for it to heal and inform. I describe this process on my website, http://charleneedge.com Cheers, Penworks a.k.a. Charlene Edge

Well written and insightful. Thanks, Rocky.

A) I Samuel 1 covers Samuel, not David (who may not have been born yet.) B) God warned Israel at length that having a king was an awful idea for them, before acquiescing to THEIR insistence that THEY wanted a king. (All of I Samuel 8.) The first king was Saul, the second was David. Both seemed ok to some people's views, but both were disastrous for Israel, each in his own way. C) "things wouldn't be going very well for him and Israel from now on." That's remarkably understated. "But David immediately repented and so God completely forgave him". Actually, God promised David's punishment would be PUBLIC (II Samuel 12:12), that strife would never depart from David's house (II Sam 12:10). and that he'd lose from his house (II Sam 12:11), and that his future son FROM this sin would die (II Samuel 12:14.) You make it sound like God blew off David's punishments. David wasn't killed for it, but he suffered the losses he earned. D) David repented, and is mentioned in Hebrews 11. Then again, Gideon's also mentioned in Hebrews 11, and he's hardly the poster-boy for bravery. E) The top leader of all Israel had sex with another man's wife-and the power dynamics in play make this coercive by virtue of him being able to have her killed or everyone she cares about killed if he feels like it, so she MUST comply. David attempts to cover it up by arranging to have an innocent man murdered and made to look like an accident (the fortunes of war, but he was set up to be the only man behind enemy lines and thus certain to die.) David was unrepentant UNTIL Nathan confronted him directly with what he had done, and God's Judgement upon him for it. THEN David repented (he'd been caught and was going to be punished.) That's no better than any little kid who's not sorry UNTIL HE'S CAUGHT. THEN he's "repentant." David served his full sentence, and repented. THEN God forgave David-but David still had to live out his well-earned punishment first (as much as could happen "first",anyway- the sword never left his family during his lifetime.) F) Present-day Christendom is not a political entity like Israel, nor a country like Israel. Furthermore, it's not a country ruled by God Almighty. So, this really doesn't seem to go anywhere close to a reasonable comparison.

John, I never heard that joke before, but I love it!! Thanks for posting it!!!

Staff positions/jobs at the Way in the 60's were much different than they evolved into later - Families like the Randalls, the Allens, Owens - they weren't running down to the Lima Mall every night to witness to people and sign 'em up for PFAL. They lived on the farm there or near by and came in every morning. It was a job, with hours, weekdays and weekends. There was a larger commitment of time than a 40 hour work week yes but they had a a private life and a "work life". They worked there, lived there in most cases and came and went on the property 24/7. Late 60's and most of the 70's that was still true - the "Staff" didn't go to meetings every night, all weekend. As the size of the operation expanded people lived locally and had private and work lives. You didn't hire on at the Way unless you wanted to be involved in the effort more than a punch in and out 40 hour week. You wouldn't work there unless you actually wanted to do other things - help with classes, events, etc. However, you lived and worked and had your family with some distinctions between the two. That obviously changed over time, VPW intended to develop the mish mash of "Corps/Staff" employees he eventually assembled - which really got to be a commitment of all of one's time and resources, all the time. He had a way of separating out the long tenured staffers from the flow of those coming in and out in the Way Corps, if you went to work there in residence or after, fine if not you probably weren't going to have much contact with them. Frankly I think it was to keep the oldies happy, he liked them and didn't want to upset the apple cart, at least for a few years there, but it was a very small group of staffers that met that criteria. Only a certain kind of person is going to do that for their whole lives. Oldsters, like Joe and Linda C maintain a lifestyle that's blended but that revolves around ministry activities. That's what they want to do, that's their lifestyle. (or was - just as example - for decades). It's possible to be committed to goals and ideals without being in the same place, doing the same things with the same people, everyday of the week. Some people will have to do that, some of the time but for an entire lifetime? I believe it's healthier for everyone involved to have change and diversity. I'd assume that anyone who's gone there and been there for any length of time is someone who wants that lifestyle of total immersion. It's not for everyone, under the best of circumstances let alone those of the Way's.

From my experiences, I think it's very individual. I knew people on staff who were still buying the party lines, operating on group think and cliches, and it was if any independent thought was off limits. I knew others who stayed because they didn't have any other viable income options. The folks that have been there the longest get paid higher, have 401k, a lot of vacation days, etc. So there is some incentive when you have nothing else. I am sure there are other reasons as well. There are people who come on staff after retiring from their careers and love it. So I guess it takes all kinds.

Partially off topic, partially on topic. This I suppose, is a tangent. How many of you (and by extension, them) read Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach in high school or early adulthood? We all face fears, more so when faced with challenges to our livelihood and security. But if we live our lives as always reaching for a higher purpose, some door eventually opens through which we can walk and build and grow and have greater impact toward a higher purpose. I think LindaZ painted a fair picture of what many may face. Do they have fears about what if situations? Or do they have something toward which they can stretch out and become? Or be like the bird who learns to fly and in doing soars over the landscape and can see opportunity from a higher perspective? For me, it's genuine involvement in polical campaigns and races, issues and candidates. Develop messages and messaging that inspire positive political action. But it could be anything worthwhile. Establish a manufacturing business for items of which you've had a passion for years. The possibilities are endless. <3

That is a very valid fear. Many Americans are already facing this problem right now, especially those approaching retirement age but have been laid off with no pension or medical insurance. Some have lost housing too. I know three former coworkers who at 60 with a ton of experience and education cannot find any employment beyond part time retail jobs. Often they've been passed over for much younger people who can stand for hours and lift 50-pound boxes. And they are praying Christians, but the answers are slow in coming.

Stockholm Syndrome

Not only were the jokes corny, but like nearly everything else in PFAL they weren't even original! Years later I found most of those jokes in generic "Bible" or "religious" joke books. Nothing wrong with repeating jokes, but many wayfers assumed VP made them up and thought he was the funniest teacher in the world. Another joke I thought was original but turned out not to be was something I heard Johnny Townsend say at the ROA one year. He said he was in a record store and overheard one teenager saying to another, "See! I TOLD you Paul McCartney was in another band before Wings!" It may not have been original but I thought it was cool that Johnny told it.

Then there's the one about the first nicotine fit in the Bible. Acts 16:29 Then he called for a light, and sprang in, and came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas...