Over winter break, I had some time to absorb what I’d seen during my foray back into Waymaker. If I hadn’t known it before, I knew it now–I had dodged a dumdum bullet a year earlier.
It was now clear that had I become the Darrell the Waymakers wanted me to be–excuse me, the Darrell God supposedly wanted me to be–I would have had to accept things that were, to put it mildly, out to lunch. I would have had to believe, for instance, that critical thinking could potentially get you away from God. Any sort of criticism in that world was an act of persecution. But first and foremost, I knew that the Waymakers were perfectly fine with Pastor Ron out-and-out lying about his Maranatha past, and were still willing to do his bidding.
I had hoped from the start to get enough evidence to either turn them in to the student attorney general’s office or alert one of more of the Waymakers’ parents. Theoretically, I had enough already to alert parents. After all, any parent with any kind of love for their son or daughter would have hit the ceiling upon finding out that they were in a group with this sort of mentality.
But then I ran into the very question that ultimately led me to “go nuclear” and burrow back into Waymaker. That is, did I have enough to even get these parents to listen? Remember, I initially found it hard to believe that a Christian group could behave this way. I suspected that a number of parents would be of the same mind, and I would have a hard time even getting my foot in the door.
It would have been another matter had there been any of my friends from Myers Park been sucked in. Most of the parents knew me, and would have at least been willing to listen. Ditto for any of the other schools in south Charlotte, both public and secular private. The kids there moved in many of the same circles as my Myers Park friends, and someone would have been able to vouch for me. Had this been the case, I probably would have gotten in touch with that family over the break.
Granted, I had learned there was another Charlotte guy in there, Reggie Roberson. You may recall that I knew him from INROADS. But since we went to different schools and moved in different circles, I didn’t think I had enough to sound the alarm with his parents just yet.
Even without that to consider, I had to weigh the possibility that what passed for leadership in Waymaker had known about Pastor Ron’s Maranatha ties before I’d stumbled onto them. Granted, it was a remote one, since it would have almost certainly meant that Perry Burkholder and Morgan Bates had hidden it from their then-fiancées, Danielle (Arsenault) and Loretta (Tyson)–an extremely risky move on paper.
But I had seen far too many outrages from the Waymakers that I’d initially ruled out as implausible–only to find out that they had indeed happened. Given the circumstances, even though on paper it was unlikely, I had to at least find out if Perry and Morgan had indeed hidden Pastor Ron’s Maranatha past from us. In essence, I would have been saying that Perry and Morgan’s marriages were fraudulent. If I was going to make an argument like that, the evidence had to be nothing short of ironclad.
At the very least, I knew that the Waymakers had found out about KPIC’s Maranatha past when I told them, and essentially said “so what?” That by itself proved just how depraved this outfit was. It would take me until late 2016 to find conclusive proof that the Waymakers didn’t know about Pastor Ron’s Maranatha past until I told them about it. But the mere possibility that this was merely the best-case scenario said a lot about them.
So all things considered, while I had enough to prove the Waymakers were indeed up to their eyeballs in deceit, I still needed more before I blew the whistle. As I got ready to return to Chapel Hill, I suspected that it wouldn’t be too long before I had enough to do so.
Child of the Truth 