What did the Waymakers know, and when did they know it?

Never in my wildest dreams did I believe that the Waymakers would be at all okay with Pastor Ron hiding his ties to Maranatha. But incredibly, they were–even though there was no possible good-faith explanation for Pastor Ron hiding his ties to this Christianist cult. Considering the circumstances, they did absolutely the worst thing they could have possibly done.

Perry, Danielle, Morgan, Aaron and Rita either didn’t know or didn’t understand that they were putting themselves–and KPIC–in astronomical legal danger. The way things were going, I believed the Waymakers would eventually do something that would get one or more of them expelled. If that happened and the parents found out that the campus ministers had known about Pastor Ron’s deceit, KPIC could potentially be sued out of existence–and the campus ministers could potentially be sued into poverty.

The thought that people with the sophistication to get into Carolina could continue to follow this guy led me to wonder how this could have been even remotely possible. It sounded like something you’d see in a crime novel or an action movie. It made me wonder how this could have happened. It took me almost two decades to find out that the fact they simply did nothing after I told them about Pastor Ron’s deceit, as vanilla as it may have sounded, was more than likely what happened.

I kept replaying my conversation with Perry in my head, and it didn’t seem to make any sense that Perry sounded okay with Pastor Ron’s deceit. It wasn’t just because of the presumption that he had a functioning BS detector. Remember, he also doubled as KPIC’s youth pastor. Appearing to condone the fact that your church was descended from a “campus cult” didn’t exactly sound like the kind of example I’d want to set for kids.

It led me to wonder–had Perry, Morgan and Aaron known that KPIC had once been part of Maranatha all along? Had they hidden that minor detail from us when we arrived in Chapel Hill? On paper, it was easy to ask, “How could they not have known?”

But there were two very plausible reasons why it was possible that they may not have known. And their names were Danielle Burkholder and Loretta Tyson. In order to assume that Perry, Morgan, and Aaron had known about KPIC’s Maranatha past before I told them, I would have had to believe that Perry hid it from Danielle until they started getting serious. Ditto for Morgan and Loretta.

I hadn’t seen anything from my interactions with Danielle and Loretta that would suggest they would have reacted any differently from most other women when their men hide something this critical from them. It doesn’t seem likely that Danielle Arsenault would have agreed to become Danielle Burkholder if Perry had known about the Maranatha past and hidden it. And it doesn’t seem likely that Loretta Tyson would have even considered becoming Loretta Bates if Morgan had hidden this minor detail from her.

It went beyond the normal newlywed dynamic. Many charismatic churches consider a woman who is married to a pastor to be his “ministry partner,” even if she isn’t formally ordained. In many of these churches, including the one I currently attend here in Charlotte, the pastor’s wife is effectively co-pastor even if she doesn’t officially have that title. That is one of the few things I will say for KPIC. That church talked the talk and walked the walk on letting women have a role in ministry.

There was also another factor to consider. Loretta had almost three more years to go at Carolina. I suspected that her parents had raised her pretty conservatively. This was a black woman from Charleston who voted for Strom Thurmond, for God’s sake. I also suspected that her parents would not have reacted very well had they found out that Morgan deceived them and deceived their daughter. Since the Waymakers were still keeping up the charade of being just another run-of-the-mill Christian group, it didn’t seem very likely that Morgan would have put himself and Loretta in that position.

And yet, I had to consider past experience. Remember, this was an outfit that found it acceptable to deceive people about who they really were so as not to scare them away. And as I’d now learned, this was an outfit that had no problem with a pastor deceiving people about his past in an outfit that was essentially a cult. For that reason, I filed the prospect that the campus ministers knew about KPIC’s Maranatha past before I told them in the section “unlikely, but can’t be ruled out.”

It would take me until late 2016 to rule it out, by way of conversations with two former campus leaders of two other chapters of Victory Campus Ministries, Waymaker’s mother organization. VCM, now known as Every Nation Campus Ministries, is the campus outreach of Every Nation, the network of charismatic churches of which KPIC is a member. Every Nation was founded in 1994 as Morning Star International, and was built around most of Maranatha’s remains. It’s currently led by former Maranatha pastors Rice Broocks and Steve Murrell. KPIC has always been one of EN/MSI’s most important churches.

Had there been a cover-up of Maranatha’s past, the campus leadership would have almost certainly known about it. But the two leaders with whom I spoke only found out about the Maranatha past after they left.

So in the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, my former “brothers” and “sisters” in Waymaker–including the campus ministers–almost certainly learned about KPIC’s Maranatha past when I told them about it in September 1997. And when they learned that information, they did absolutely nothing. All that mattered to them was that people were being saved. 

The fact that it was even possible this could have been the best-case scenario still makes me shudder. If there is any difference between that mentality and how the religious right bowed to Donald Trump, I don’t see it. After all, the religious right would have had us believe that Trump’s numerous outrages on the trail and in office, as well as the “Access Hollywood” tapes, didn’t matter because he’s pro-life and anti-marriage equality. 

But let’s move back to 1997. Even though I wasn’t sure when the Waymakers knew about the Maranatha connection, I knew that they were of the mind that all was fair when getting people saved. But how to expose them? That was a question I spent much of that semester trying to answer. More on that to come.