Back to campus

When I returned to Chapel Hill to start my junior year, I was looking ahead to a lot. I was getting into the nitty-gritty of working in my major. I was also seriously considering a run for student body president. But foremost on my mind, I believed I was going to have a chance to stick a dagger in the back of Waymaker and KPIC.

At some point in the fall semester once I figured out how my classes were going to run, I planned to approach Student Legal Services about possibly hauling KPIC into court. To my non-lawyer’s mind, it looked like an open-and-shut case. After all, at best, I could prove that Perry, Danielle, Morgan and Aaron were willing to do Pastor Ron’s bidding even after being told that he was lying about his past in Maranatha and had no possible good-faith reason for doing so.

In so doing, they put their church, and themselves, in great legal danger. And in so doing, they sounded a lot like Hitler’s generals did on the stand at Nuremberg, who knew Hitler’s orders were illegal and obeyed them anyway. Likewise, it was inconceivable that Perry, Danielle, Morgan and Aaron didn’t at least ask themselves whether what they were doing was wrong. Unless they could explain why they continued to do Pastor Ron’s bidding despite knowing about his deceit, to my mind they didn’t have a leg to stand on.

Then consider the matter of Loretta’s parents. What would they think if they found out that Morgan had gotten their daughter into a situation like this? Any parent with any kind of love for their daughter would have been on the road from Charleston to Chapel Hill in roughly the time it took me to write this sentence. And that’s before we even discuss the possibility of the parents of my former “brothers” and “sisters” hitting the ceiling once this became public.

As usual, Myers Park was sending a small army to Carolina. Since it was now apparent that Waymaker would be around for longer than I expected, I felt the need to warn them. Looking in the student directory, I was able to find out where the Waymakers lived on campus so I could warn my friends. I also sounded the alarm with my suitemates in Granville, all of whom were freshmen. One of them mentioned seeing an advertisement for Waymaker on the kiosk near the Student Union. While on the way to buy my books for the semester, I took a peek for myself–and there it was.

Admittedly, I still was nervous about pulling the trigger on a lawsuit. But any doubt in my mind evaporated when I learned that Perry and Danielle were no longer leading Waymaker. Instead, they were devoting their full attention to KPIC’s youth ministry. I was appalled. Those two had, at the very least, fostered an environment in which the deceitful and hurtful tactics I’d seen in Waymaker could have even occurred. It was outrageous enough when Perry and Danielle were doubling as both KPIC’s youth pastors and leaders of Waymaker. But to go full time as youth pastors? The thought that they could have any influence on the Triangle’s kids was just obscene. Even with what I knew about fundie culture, it seemed hard to believe that too many of KPIC’s parents would be at all okay with their kids being within an area code of Perry and Danielle once the truth about what happened in Waymaker came out.

So I decided that sometime in late September, I’d have a chat with Student Legal Services and get the ball rolling on suing them. From where I was sitting, I thought this would be over quickly. Little did I know that I wouldn’t even get the chance to make that move.