An apology that never came

From the looks of it, the Waymakers had finally bitten off more than they could chew. At best, they had been exposed as being ridiculously thin-skinned after apparently complaining about me telling them off via email. At worst, they had only escaped being racked up for falsely accusing me of harassing them via email.

What was beyond dispute was that as a result of a deal brokered by associate vice chancellor Dean Bresciani, we’d simply agreed not to contact each other. I accepted it because I was under the assumption that they would apologize to me–and there was no defensible reason not to at least give them the chance to apologize.

It seemed like a no-brainer that they would apologize. The Waymakers at least had a defense for most of their outrages. Their hectoring of people about being saved? Well, they believed telling people about Jesus was the ultimate act of friendship, especially considering that they thought the person’s spirit, not the person, was making him or her cuss them out or blow smoke in their faces. Their continued loyalty to Pastor Ron even in the face of irrefutable evidence that he’d lied about his Maranatha past? Well, they thought that since people were being saved at Carolina, that was all that really mattered. And on, and on, and on.

You could easily tear these defenses into confetti. But it’s one thing to have a bad defense. It’s quite another to have no defense at all. And there was absolutely, positively no defensible reason for them to complain about me simply telling them off via email without making any effort to de-escalate matters first. I figured that Morgan Bates was sober enough to see this. His theology may have been ugly, but I got the impression that he, like Perry Burkholder, had some sense of restraint.

That’s why it was a surprise that when I got a letter from Bresciani about the agreement in my Spanish class roughly two weeks after my sit-down with him, there was no mention of an apology. As days turned into weeks, it soon became apparent that no apology was forthcoming.

I knew that the Waymakers’ moral compasses had been severely warped. For instance, on what planet was I supposed to be happy for someone going 200 percent rabid fundie after being relentlessly hectored about being saved? But this was beyond even what I expected, even after “Operation Trojan Fundie” showed that this bunch was even more unhinged than I suspected. This was a breach of every standard of basic decency and civility that was known.

Did they believe that they hadn’t done anything wrong, and therefore felt there was nothing for which to apologize? Or did they hate me so much that they felt I didn’t deserve an apology? Neither scenario was a good look. And these were people who could potentially have influence on other college kids, and were likely being groomed for leadership at KPIC and Morning Star. Perry, remember, linked up with Waymaker during his student days, and was now KPIC’s youth pastor. Rita Handler had joined the campus ministers’ staff right after graduating. I later learned that a number of my fellow now-juniors were leading Bible studies.

To think I’d once considered these people my friends, my brothers and sisters. If I needed another reminder that I was not and could not be like them, this was it. Looking back on this two decades later, I see a lot of parallels with two very infamous cases in literature of good people turning horribly evil–Darth Vader and the lawyers at Bendini, Lambert and Locke in “The Firm.”

Vader, remember, had been lured to the dark side after Palpatine convinced him that the Sith were on the side of good. The influence of the dark side twisted him so much that not long after turning, he was already killing younglings on Palpatine’s orders without so much as batting an eyelash. By Episode IV, he was already presiding over the wipeouts of entire planets and systems who had dared raise their hands against the Empire. It was much like how Pastor Ron had convinced the Waymakers that all that mattered was that people were being saved–and then not batting an eyelash at behavior the rest of us would consider harassment.

The lawyers at the Bendini firm had a similar reaction. Yes, the firm was mobbed up to the hilt. But they were making more money than they would have ever seen anywhere else, and didn’t want to give it up. Eventually, they were deeply immersed in a massive money laundering/tax fraud scheme. Worst of all, the most senior partners knew that they were sending Mitch, and before him Kozinski and Hodge, to their deaths–and didn’t even blink at telling them to get on the firm Lear.

In hindsight, I was seeing a similar case of moral corruption with the Waymakers. It made it all the more sickening that, on paper, they may have skated close to the line, but hadn’t gone over it. There wasn’t enough–yet–to blow the whistle to their parents or to school officials. I didn’t know it at the time, but it turned out they actually had gone over the line. Several miles over it.

To sue or not to sue?

As my sophomore year wound down, there were a lot of reasons to be optimistic. I was finally getting into the meat of my major–and a few steps closer to fulfilling my dream at the time to be a sportscaster. More importantly, though, I felt like I’d finally been able to enjoy myself in Chapel Hill after having a good chunk of my freshman year stolen from me by the Waymakers.

There were also a few reasons to be disappointed. Any chance of a third straight year of the campus jumping from fall through spring evaporated when, in rapid succession, Antawn Jamison and Vince Carter gave up their senior years to enter the NBA Draft. With Antawn and Vince, the Tar Heels would have been an odds-on favorite to win it all in 1999. Even now, many Tar Heel fans of my era think back to what might have been. Had everyone stayed when they were supposed to have stayed, we could have had a starting lineup in my freshman year of Jerry Stackhouse, Rasheed Wallace, Antawn and Vince. It’s probably just as well. That lineup would have been against the law.

But I had more immediate worries than worrying about the fortunes of the basketball team. I knew that the Waymakers had stormed through an economy-size loophole. Apparently a student group could not lie to university officials, but it could actively deceive students. Somehow, that didn’t add up.

I wondered–had I run out of options for holding them to account, short of shouting from the rooftops about their deceit and hopefully finding enough to alert their parents? But the more I thought about it, there probably was an option–suing KPIC.

Considering what I’d learned over the last two years–especially this year–a lawsuit was very doable. Remember, at the very least, I could prove that Pastor Ron was blatantly lying about his past in Maranatha–almost certainly to avoid getting the third degree about Maranatha’s atrocities in the 1980s. At the very least, I could prove that the campus ministers were perfectly willing to do Pastor Ron’s bidding even after learning this information.

I had to remind myself that this was the best-case scenario. At worst, it was entirely possible that the campus ministers had known this for some time before I told them and couldn’t be bothered to disclose that minor detail. I figured that if this got to trial, I would at least get a definitive answer to that question. But the mere fact that the best-case scenario was that the Waymakers had no problem with deceiving people was very telling.

I know what you’re thinking–why didn’t I haul them into court at some point earlier in the year? Well, you have to remember that I was concerned about them playing the persecution card. But by burrowing back into Waymaker, I had proof that everyone from the campus ministers on down was not only okay with Pastor Ron’s deceit, but were perfectly willing to help carry out this massive charade. That proof would have been enough to add Perry and Danielle Burkholder, Morgan Bates, Aaron Levinson and Rita Handler as defendants along with Pastor Ron.

I also believed it would have been enough to keep control of the narrative–an important consideration when dealing with a fundicostal group. Instead of an innocent Christian group being persecuted, you would have a group that knew it was deceiving people.

As part of that effort to control the narrative, I didn’t let on about my plans to anyone. I didn’t want to chance the Waymakers finding out, and potentially being able to find a way to crawl through a loophole again. I knew they’d been caught unawares when I filed my complaint against them. After six years, and possibly 17 years, of putting kids back on their heels, it was fitting that they were the ones back on their heels for once. I wanted to keep it that way.

The more I thought about it, I believed I could force them into an out-of-court settlement. After all, the campus ministers were of fairly limited means. Perry and Morgan were newly married, and Morgan was married to Loretta, who still had two years to go at Carolina. Moreover, it was hard to argue with a Website run by Pastor Ron’s former friends at Maranatha.

That would also free me for my other junior-year ambition–running for student body president. The more I thought about it, these legal proceedings would be over rather quickly, so it wouldn’t hamper my campaign. When I first considered a suit, I thought I’d have to choose one or the other–and if it had come to that, I would have chosen the lawsuit, if only to make sure that KPIC couldn’t hurt anyone else again.

So as I returned home for the summer, I had every reason to believe that when I returned a couple of months later, Waymaker would be on borrowed time.

Operation Trojan Fundie, part 8

When I finally decided to burrow back into Waymaker, I had already decided not to stay in much longer than necessary. After all, I was doing this solely as a last resort, and it made no sense to expose myself any longer than it took to get enough evidence to sink the ship.

By the time I came back to Chapel Hill for the start of spring semester, I had a hunch that moment wouldn’t be too long in coming. After all, what I had seen early on was not unlike what happens when a mobster becomes a made member of the Mafia. Wiseguys who watch their words around associates begin talking very openly about internal family matters once that associate becomes a “friend of ours.” I was stunned to hear how quickly my “brothers” and “sisters” suggested the wariness I’d had about them in my freshman year had been due to my sinful nature, as well as relying too much on my mind. I’d known I was dealing with a fanatical bunch, but this was off the charts.

The first service after the start of classes gave me some idea just how far gone this bunch was. Pastor Ron preached that day. He claimed that there was a major transfer of wealth underway that would result in the wealth of the unrighteous winding up in the hands of the righteous. As he put it, “God wants you to move from not enough (pause) to almost enough (pause) to more than enough!”

The theology was chilling. God was likened to a mob boss who was waiting to rub out his opponents, then divvy up their interests among his allies.

The following night was the first weekly Waymaker meeting of the new semester. At that initial meeting, one of the guys talked up a candidate for student body president, Lacey Hawthorne, who was a Christian. He was working on her campaign, and was already drumming up the vote.  Morgan spoke that night on telling people about Jesus, and how to go about it when people aren’t willing to listen at first.

I happened to see one of my friends from the Young Democrats at that meeting. Afterwards, I ran into her and told her that I was actually spying on them. I told them a little bit about what they had done to me a year before, and also directed her to my Website.

Needless to say, seeing a push to support a specific candidate for student body president piqued my interest. It made me wonder if they were already starting a push to take over the campus. At the Young Dems meeting on Tuesday night, I mentioned this to a few of my friends. One of them was also working on Lacey’s campaign, and told me that Lacey did not in any way think like them–and that it was very unlikely that she’d be a puppet for that element.

I had a look at her Website, and she was a staunch supporter of abortion and gay rights. Conventional wisdom suggested that those should have been non-starters for a hyperconservative outfit like Waymaker. Then again, it wasn’t all that surprising. If they were essentially shooting for the moon by getting an “in” with student government, I suspected they’d have an uphill battle on their hands. After all, there were very few people on campus who thought like them.

But believe it or not, that wasn’t the most staggering thing I discovered that week. I learned just how far some of them were willing to go in getting people saved. More to come on that later.

Operation Trojan Fundie, part 7

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.

Operation Trojan Fundie, part 4

(names in italics are pseudonyms)

When I walked out on Waymaker, I knew it was bad news, but suspected that it may have been far worse. After all, it was no secret that I didn’t buy what this bunch was selling. It led me to wonder if they were hiding things until I was somehow “convicted” and became one of them.

It only took a few days as a “Trojan fundie” to discover that my hunch was even more right than I suspected. For instance, I’d learned that my “sinful nature” had been the only thing driving my criticism of Waymaker. I’d also learned that I couldn’t trust what my mind was telling me. After all, it could potentially keep me from seeing the simple truths that only my heart could see. The devil had supposedly taken full advantage and used my mind to pull me away from God.

On top of all of that, I was told that my swing from criticizing my “brothers” and “sisters” to being one of them was a lot like the conversion of the Apostle Paul. In other words, merely speaking out was no different than having Christians put to death.

There were a few times in my freshman year that I heard or saw something from the Waymakers that made me ask, “Did this just happen?” The first was that creepy feeling I felt when Morgan Bates and several other guys prayed over me. Later, I was essentially told that in order to be a Christian, I had to become a hard-right, anti-abortion conservative. And when I asked my supposed friends in Waymaker for advice on how to read the signals I thought I was getting from a girl–only to be told that they needed to ask God what he thought about it.

I’d started to wonder if the vise that had been on my mind back then had kept me from seeing more, particularly when it was apparent that the Waymakers had no problem with Pastor Ron’s deceit. Now I was sure of it. In less than a week, I’d heard three things that, by any standard, were completely unhinged.

As I got ready for church that Sunday, I was well aware that there was very likely to be more where those came from. Little did I know just how right I was.

I rode to church with Jo Rumsey, a fellow sophomore, and Pat Dionne. As we walked into the sanctuary, I noticed that while the name on the top of the building read “King’s Park International Church,” the sign on the door read, “Triangle Christian Fellowship Sanctuary.” It was a sign that the only thing that had changed about this place was the name.

When I walked in, I heard a familiar voice chirp, “Hi Darrell!” It was Susan Van Arsdale. Just as I was about to wonder if she’d seen my email, she hugged me and exclaimed, “Praise God!” She explained that she wanted to welcome me back more formally, rather than via an email reply.

It didn’t take long to see that things hadn’t changed a bit–aside from Ron Lewis being there in person. The same lyrics repeated two or three times. Telling us when to raise our hands. Practically ordering us to cheer and applaud after every song. Whenever they told us to applaud, I stuck the middle finger of my right hand inside my palm and clapped. I’d once read that during the Stalin era, a person who had soured on Stalin had done this as a quiet gesture of dissent. He appeared to be applauding normally.

The song count reached three songs, four or five. How do they bear it? It was sometime between the third (fourth) and fourth (fifth) song that a woman stepped to the mic and prayed for a revival to start in the Triangle, just like what was happening in Toronto and Pensacola. Pastor Ron came behind her and declared that she had just mentioned the very thing that today’s speaker was going to mention.

Later on, while we turned to greet each other, I got a few pats on the back. One of them came from Marty Lawson, the only white dude in our covenant group. He was usually a relatively quiet and reserved fellow. Not today–he gushed that my seeming return to the fold had “made my year!”

Another came from a guy I’d met at INROADS Charlotte, Reggie Roberson. This was a very pleasant surprise. Now I had one set of parents I could contact when the need arose–and I had a realistic chance of getting my foot in the door, since I had been an INROADer.

The speaker, an old friend of Pastor Ron, didn’t disappoint. He talked about what it takes for revival to happen–sound doctrine, spiritual gifts, and a lot of other things. He then announced that there would be a time of ministry and prayer. Unless I’m very wrong, hardly anyone left the room.

Then the lunacy started. The speaker came up to Aaron Kinson and had him raise his hands. He then blibbered in tongues before blowing on him–that’s right, blowing–Benny Hinn-style. Aaron went down with a sag of the knees. He did the same with Susan. Down she went–all 5-4 of her. He then did the same with Charlie Kiefer, a fellow intramural ref whom I’d learned was in Waymaker shortly after my public humiliation of Bret Holman. Down he went–nearly crushing Susan’s legs in the process. People had been falling down all over the place before then.

Through it all, I stood there, hand in the air, lips going about 80 miles an hour. As things started winding down, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Rollan Fisher. Later, I caught the eye of Perry and Danielle Burkholder, who both congratulated me on my return. I also spotted Morgan Bates and his soon-to-be bride, Loretta Tyson; they were going to tie the knot the following Saturday. Morgan told me that everyone knew I’d just been rebelling, and it was only a matter of time before I would come “home.”

As we drove back to campus, I talked some with Jo, who had been one of the few Waymaker sophomores I hadn’t known that well at the time. I noticed that it was almost 1:00, and wondered if this would put a crimp in studying for exams. She replied that God would give us the time we needed since we honored him by spending time with him in church. In the back of my mind, I wondered, What planet is this from? 

Jo then asked me a surprising question–“Darrell, do you ever just praise God out of nowhere?”

“No, why?” I replied. That wouldn’t have been unusual–after all, as far as they were concerned, I was a “baby Christian.” But in truth, I was surprised that she’d ask this out of the blue. Remember, given my Presbyterian roots, a lot of the charismatic and pentecostal thing would have been a little jarring to me even in an outfit that wasn’t as off-the-wall as Waymaker.

Jo told me that it was something she did all the time. “You have no idea how much praising him will do for your soul,” she said. She then offered to let me borrow some praise music.

Just to put out feelers, I asked if secular music was still okay–again, not unusual from someone who was supposed to be a baby Christian. She replied that we should try to only listen to music that lifts us up. At least two of my favorites, Sarah McLachlan and Melissa Etheridge, wouldn’t have made Jo’s cut. She’d listened to some of McLachlan’s work, and believed it was obvious she wasn’t “living for God.” Etheridge? She was a lesbian.

When I finally got back to my dorm, I heaved a sigh of relief. I couldn’t believe what I had just seen, especially how people were falling down like flies. While I’d seen this a lot on television over the summer, mostly on Hinn’s “crusades,” seeing it in person was another thing altogether. However, I got the same impression that I got from Hinn’s act–the whole thing was so canned.

Not only that, but I had more confirmation of what I had long suspected–the Waymakers were not people who were used to being told “no.” After all, they were so convinced that I’d come crawling back to them that when I showed up, it wasn’t a surprise to them in the least.

That chat with Jo was particularly revealing. It reminded me of how Eric wagged his finger at me for staying home to study for exams last year. How in the world could you pull something like that off? I suspected the only way to do so was to not have a life outside of church. It only proved what I suspected for some time–the only way a group like this can survive on a campus like Carolina was to stick people in a bubble for four years.

At this point, I suspected that at the very least, it wouldn’t be long before I had enough to contact one or more parents about the goings-on in Waymaker. And all this in just a week–and just two weeks before exams.

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.

Finding out that lying and deceit are just peachy–if it’s for the Lord

When I discovered the extent of KPIC’s connections to Maranatha, I concluded two things. First, Pastor Ron hid this from us when he had no possible good-faith reason to do so. The other was that I had to let the Waymakers know that they were being played.

I gave Waymaker senior Pat Dionne a raft of articles that I’d been sent by a former Maranatha member, and he sounded very willing to listen. I thought I knew what would happen next. Pat would forward this to the campus ministers–who now included Rita in addition to Perry, Danielle, Morgan, and Aaron. In turn, Perry, Danielle, Morgan, Aaron and Rita would march to Pastor Ron’s office and demand an explanation–one that, based on the available evidence, he wouldn’t be able to give. They would then thwack their resignation letters on his desk and walk out.

The loss of Waymaker would have had a devastating effect on KPIC–and not just because of the symbolic effect of the campus ministry at its birthplace cutting ties.  From what I was able to tell, KPIC’s model depended heavily on Waymaker and its sister ministries at Duke, State, and Central funneling people in. However, if the Waymakers pulled out, it would only be a matter of time before one or more of the other outreaches followed them out the door. It would be like sawing a leg off a barstool–eventually, it would collapse. That collapse would almost certainly be hastened by people walking out once they learned that their pastor had been lying to them.

So you can probably imagine how surprised I was when Pat came back about a week later. He said that no one in Waymaker–not the campus ministers, not the rank-and-filers–had a problem with Pastor Ron hiding this information. After all, people were being saved through this ministry.

That prospect hadn’t even been a factor in my calculus. After all, there were only two possible reasons why Pastor Ron could have hidden his past. Either an atrocity had happened in the 1980s on the order of what happened at the University of Waterloo or Kentucky, or he just wanted to avoid the inevitable scrutiny that would have occurred once it got out that he had been part of Maranatha.

The latter seemed more plausible at the time. Had an atrocity happened in Chapel Hill, it would have likely been statewide news. If Pastor Ron had tried to set up shop on campus and an atrocity had occurred a decade earlier, the public outcry would have driven him out almost as soon as he’d arrived.

So that left the prospect that he simply wanted to hide his past. He would have had very good reason to do so. After the CRI ad hoc committee report, Maranatha came under renewed criticism from the secular and Christian press, as well as college administrators. That criticism ramped up to a fever pitch after the Chronicle of Higher Education published a scathing article about cultish practices by Maranatha and other Christian outfits. Not long afterward, Maranatha dissolved.

Apparently Pastor Ron didn’t realize that he would have actually looked a lot better had he admitted that he had been part of Maranatha and renounced that controlling garbage. He would have been a hero. But instead, he chose to hide it.

The thought that anyone would even find this remotely okay sounded nonsensical–so much so that I thought maybe it hadn’t been explained to Perry properly. I decided to do so myself by calling him.

Unfortunately, he essentially parroted what Pat had told me a few days earlier. He was also incredibly condescending to me, and tried to get me to stop speaking out against them.

I couldn’t believe it. A youth pastor, finding out that his pastor had hidden his past in a borderline cult, and he’s okay with it? Yeah, I’d want my kids around someone like that. But this situation would have been outrageous even without that factored in.

The closest parallel I can think of is what happened in “The Firm” when the lawyers were told that they were actually working for a Chicago crime family. And yet, seemingly without batting an eyelash, most of them went right along with that family’s massive tax fraud and money laundering scheme.

The same thing happened with the Waymakers. At the outset, it looked like their sense of right and wrong had been badly warped, so I believed proof that Pastor Ron was up to no good would knock the scales off their eyes–much like what happened when Darth Vader turned on the Emperor while he was electrocuting Luke. But they were still willing to do his bidding.

A more recent parallel is Harry Markopolos, the man who spent more than a decade alerting the SEC about Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. He didn’t just tell the SEC, “I don’t think this adds up.” He told them, “He is not trading. He cannot possibly be trading. Here’s the proof.” He gave them enough evidence that they could have shut Madoff down inside of half an hour.

Likewise, I had given the Waymakers detailed evidence of Pastor Ron’s deceit. I wasn’t just telling them, “I think there’s something wrong here.” I was telling them, “There is something wrong here. He’s been lying to you all along–here’s the evidence.”

The thing that angered me then, and still angers me now, is that I had given the Waymakers information that would have led any reasonable person to conclude that Pastor Ron was bad news. And yet, their reaction was essentially, “So what?” They were still willing to follow Pastor Ron like the rats following the Pied Piper. And to think that I was nearly sucked into this as well. Even now, it makes me want to retch.

So now I knew that I was dealing with evil. How else can you describe an outfit that finds this sort of deceit acceptable, no matter what the ends may be on paper? But that left me searching for another way to blow the lid on this outfit. More on those efforts to come later.

 

 

Uncovering the Maranatha connection

As much as it wounded me, I now realized that I didn’t have any real friends in Waymaker. None who were still enrolled at Carolina, that is. June McLeod, the only person in that bunch who seemed to accept me for the Darrell that I was rather than the Darrell they wanted me to be, had graduated.

I took it pretty hard, in part because then as now, I was girded in the notion of peacefully coexisting with those who didn’t think like you did. I really wanted to stay friends with them–and they had taken advantage of it. It made what I already knew was going to be a bumpy task even harder–exposing both them, and their church.

Usually, when I know what I have to do, I can easily figure out how to go about doing it. However, I initially drew a blank on how to go about exposing Waymaker and KPIC. Then I remembered–TCF/KPIC claimed to have grown from a campus ministry that started at Carolina in 1981. That meant that in one form or another, they had been on campus going on 16 years. Surely others had been chewed up and spit out by this bunch in that time.

KPIC also had outreaches at Duke, North Carolina State (or simply State, as we call it) or North Carolina Central (or simply Central). Between those four schools, the odds were pretty good that a lot of people had been burned–but had been afraid to speak out about it for fear of the proverbial lightning bolt coming down.

The Internet, however, changed everything. In the days before social media was even a pipe dream, message boards and email listservs were the primary means of exchanging information. Nine times out of ten, I suspected there was either a message board or a listserv for walkaways from TCF/KPIC and its previous incarnation as a campus ministry at Carolina. If I could compare notes with them, hopefully I could encourage some of them to join me in speaking out.

I set about searching for those groups one Sunday night in September. I did a random search for “King’s Park International Church” on Yahoo–which, at the time, was the search engine. One of the top results on the list was a page called “Post-Maranatha.”

That name immediately rang a bell. One of the books I’d read about spiritually abusive churches, Churches that Abuse by Ron Enroth, mentioned an outfit called Maranatha Campus Ministries. This outfit gained infamy in the 1980s for highly abusive and controlling practices that led it to be branded as a Christianized version of the many “campus cults” that victimized students in the 1970s and 1980s, like the Moonies and Hare Krishnas.

Among other things, Maranatha members were not allowed to date. Instead, they submitted the name of a prospective spouse to your campus pastor. Once the pastor confirmed it and God supposedly spoke to that person, you sought permission to get married.

I was initially skeptical. After all, when I was in Waymaker, I counted no fewer than two boyfriend-girlfriend combos. Nonetheless, my journalist’s curiosity got the better of me, so I clicked the link. It took me to a list of “friends and former members” of Maranatha, hosted on the Website of The Forerunner, a Christian magazine that had once been Maranatha’s mouthpiece publication.

I scrolled down–and there was a listing for KPIC, complete with mailing address, phone and fax numbers, Website, Pastor Ron’s name, and email. I was stunned. For the first of what would be many times, I was confronted with evidence that proved something I’d initially ruled out as implausible was very true. It was now clear that “campus ministry” was Maranatha–and KPIC had once been Maranatha’s Carolina chapter.

Recalling what I’d read about Maranatha in Churches that Abuse, I noticed a number of parallels with what I’d seen in Waymaker and TCF. Besides the ban on dating, Maranatha taught that due to Eve eating the forbidden apple, our minds had been so corrupted that they are completely unreliable. Enroth interviewed a Maranatha walkaway, Karen White, who recalled that her skepticism was chalked up to “mind idolatry.” It reminded me of how the Waymakers tried to make me think my uneasiness was just the devil screwing with my mind, and using my flesh to pull me away from God.

Karen also recalled seeing an overemphasis on outward stuff like “holiness, faith, victory, (and) ‘overcoming.'” I saw a parallel with how unbalanced Waymaker’s idea of a “victorious Christian life” was in practice. There is something very wrong when going to a basketball game that happens to be a Monday night makes it appear that you aren’t wanting to “spend time with God,” or wanting to stay home from church to study is frowned upon.

Weighing all of this, I was able to conclude two things right away. For starters, I now understood why a group that, on paper, should have been a force for good on campus ended up being bad news. At the time, they were the only even remotely racially integrated group at Carolina, and it was clear that they talked the talk and walked the walk on racial reconciliation. Now I knew why they had turned so toxic–they had been planted in contaminated ground. From the looks of it, what I had seen was a watered-down version of how Maranatha did business in the 1980s.

I also realized that if this was true, I couldn’t stay mad at the Waymakers anymore. And that included the campus ministers as well. As I saw it at the time, they were victims, just as much as I was. Indeed, it seemed that Perry, Morgan, and Aaron were victims even more than I was, since they’d given most or all of their adult lives to this outfit.

How was that possible, you ask? Well, I had fully expected them to bombard me with phone calls and emails after I walked out. From what I knew about outfits like this, this sort of thing was standard operating procedure. But they didn’t. It led me to conclude that while their philosophical outlook was nothing to look at, they were still decent people at bottom, and sincerely believed they were doing good. That was what made my sophomore colleagues’ attempt to wheedle me back in even more disheartening.

You have to consider that in this part of the country, kids are usually taught early on that their pastor is a person they can trust. This was particularly true in the evangelical world–something that had me scratching my head, having been raised as a Presbyterian.

From what I could tell, Pastor Ron abused that trust to warp the Waymakers’ sense of right and wrong. They really didn’t know that their tactics could potentially be hurtful, or that they were deceiving people. That was what differentiated them from Hitler’s underlings. Many of them openly admitted on the stand at Nuremburg that they knew or at least suspected that Hitler’s orders were illegal. However, they didn’t feel it was their place to speak up, but only to obey.

For me to stay angry at Perry, Morgan, and Aaron, I would have had to assume that they somehow knew or suspected Pastor Ron was deceiving them, and yet felt compelled to obey because he was their pastor and shepherd. At the time, that notion sounded downright laughable. Students at one of the elite public universities in the nation following a pastor like lemmings over the cliff, even after finding out about his past in an abusive outfit that could only be described as a Christian cult? No one would have believed that. At the time, there was nothing that even suggested that would have been the case. Moreover, from what I had learned about fundamentalist culture, there were certain questions that simply were not supposed to be asked.

Ditto for Rita Handler. It would have seemed that she would have known better, or at least wondered if I’d think she had more in mind than friendship, having not been raised in a pentecostal/charismatic environment. But I couldn’t in good conscience hold that against her in light of what I now knew.

There wasn’t even a debate about the next course of action. I had to somehow warn the Waymakers and give them a chance to get out while they could. Unfortunately, it didn’t go quite how I’d hoped or planned. More on that later.

My ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ cross the Rubicon

Needless to say, I was a little shaken to discover that Christina Roland, who had apparently replaced me as Waymaker’s “problem child,” had become a 200 percent rabid hypercharismatic. It didn’t add up at first. She was a journalism major, I was a journalism major–how did I escape, while she got sucked in?

Then I realized there was one variable present in her case that hadn’t been present in mine–Christina was from the Philadelphia suburbs. That meant that in all likelihood, while the Waymakers were turning her head with their nonsense, she didn’t have anyone close by who could counter it. In contrast, I not only had my many Myers Park friends, but the people I’d already met at freshman camp and at summer orientation.

That led me to realize–it was no coincidence that I could count the number of people in Waymaker who were from Charlotte, the Triad (Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point and surrounding towns), the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill), and other major North Carolina metro areas on one hand. The great majority of those I’d met in Waymaker were either from out of state or from small towns in North Carolina. They probably didn’t have nearly as many outside ties (friends, etc.)–so it made it all the easier to pull them in. After all, groups like this can only survive by putting you in a bubble for four years–and the fewer outside influences you have going in, the easier it is to cut you off. In hindsight, I’d dodged a dumdum bullet. After all, I could have been completely brainwashed like Christina.

This seemingly validated my initial view that my fellow sophomores in Waymaker were victims as much as I had been. After all, when that outfit imploded–and I still believed at the time that was inevitable–they’d need someone to talk to. Sadly, it took only a week after discovering Christina had been completely sucked in for those hopes to be shattered.

On Labor Day, I got up early to attend the first pregame press conference of the 1997 football season–officially starting the run-up to the season opener against Indiana. That afternoon, I walked to Davis Library to file my report. Sitting in the lobby was Allison Millstein, a member of Waymaker. We talked for a bit, and I mentioned that I wasn’t even a Christian anymore. No thanks to the craziness the Waymakers put me through, at the time I wanted nothing to do with anything that even sounded Christian. It would take me some time to get back to God for real–but that’s another story.

Just as I was about to leave, Allison asked me for my number. As if everything I’d said had gone in one ear and out the other, she actually said she wanted it in case I wanted a ride to KPIC sometime. For the next few days, something about that conversation seemed to leave a bad taste in my mouth–but I couldn’t figure out what it was. After replaying it a few times, I remembered–she asked for my number right when another Waymaker, Kim Hoon, came up to us.

Having done some homework over the summer, I had an idea how this script was supposed to run. Allison supposedly felt led by the Holy Spirit to ask me for my number even though I’d just told her I wasn’t a Christian of any sort anymore. Sooner or later, I’d feel convicted enough to go–and I’d be on my face at the altar. But Allison gave the game away. She could have made that offer at any time–and instead, just happened to do so when Kim showed up. Pretty exceptional timing, wasn’t it?

It was possible that there may have been another coincidence. Remember, this was less than 24 hours after I ran into Christina. I haven’t been able to nail that down for sure. What I knew for certain, though, was that I’d witnessed a clearly scripted attempt to wheedle me back into Waymaker.

When I put the pieces together on Friday night on the way from a women’s soccer game, I was appalled. I would have never manipulated them, or any of my Christian friends, in this way. While I may have disagreed with their beliefs, I respected their right to hold them. Apparently they didn’t.

I now saw things more clearly than I had at perhaps any point since coming to Carolina a year earlier. It was as if they only saw me as a potential notch in their Bibles. I’d had that impression about them almost from the beginning, when it became obvious I didn’t buy what they were selling. Now I was sure of it. It was also clear that at some point, my former “brothers” and “sisters” had crossed the line from mere joiners to actually helping out in Waymaker’s effort to get people turned onto their horribly unbalanced idea of a “victorious Christian life.”

After I calmed down some, I called Allison’s dorm, intending to let her have it. She didn’t answer, but one of her roommates, Barbara Dean–or “B,” as we called her in Waymaker–did. I let her have it, telling her that I was not at all pleased with how they had manipulated me. As outraged as I was, I’m surprised even now that I managed to avoid cussing.

A week later, Carolina took on Stanford in a night game. I happened to look at the row below us, and I thought, No–it can’t be! But it was–Morgan Bates and Loretta Tyson. I was nervous, thinking that another showdown was at hand. Fortunately, the game was too exciting to have to worry about any run-ins. Carolina ultimately won, 28-17–mainly on the strength of a blocked punt returned for a touchdown.

After the game, Morgan said hi to me. “I don’t want to talk to you,” I snapped. “Why, what’s wrong?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I replied. “You lied to me, tried to brainwash me, guilt-trip me.” Morgan could only answer, “Jesus is Lord!”

I later found out there was a reason Morgan and Loretta were hanging out together–they were engaged. They would actually be Waymaker’s second couple; over the summer, Perry had married Danielle Arsenault, a senior who had graduated early in January. She and Morgan had been at the Waymaker table during 1996 summer orientation. If Danielle and Loretta’s parents only knew what they were marrying into …

So now I was faced with a dilemma. I knew I had to expose this outfit, but was drawing a blank on how to do it. It wouldn’t be long before I got an unexpected assist–one that explained a lot about why this outfit was such bad news. More on that later.

How I got in

(names in italics are pseudonyms)

Early in the afternoon of August 8, 1996; I’d just settled into my dorm at Carolina after arriving from Freshman Camp. This really was happening, just nine months after I got an early Christmas present in the form of my acceptance letter. Now I was on my way back to campus to get my books. I had a lot on my mind–whether I’d see any basketball players,, how soon I’d run into my old friends at Myers Park High School.

But just as I was heading out the door, I heard a voice jar me back to reality. “Excuse me, what is your name?” It came from a guy named Perry Burkholder. He introduced himself as a campus minister with Waymaker Christian Fellowship, an outreach of Triangle Christian Fellowship in nearby Durham.

We struck up a little bit of a conversation. He was a Charlotte guy, I was a Charlotte guy. Along the way, he threw a curveball–he said he knew God had a plan for me. I was a bit flabbergasted. “How’d you know?” I asked. “God told me,” he replied. That should have set off a red flag right there–here was this guy who I hadn’t even met before, and he seemed to know more about me than I did. I didn’t think too much of it at the time. But there was something else–I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was as if something just wasn’t right about this guy. That apprehensiveness was enough to keep me from taking him up on his offer to go to TCF on Sunday morning.

Later that day, I was rummaging through my stuff, and saw a brochure I’d picked up from Waymaker at summer orientation. One thing stuck out–the two people sitting at the table were the only ones to notice my name tag. It made me wonder–was my initial nervousness misplaced? After all, when you go to a school like Carolina, you know out of the gate that you’re going to be a number. The fact that someone took the time to notice my name tag stuck out.

So I went to a picnic they had on campus that Monday. It so happened that Perry was there, along with one of their other campus ministers, Morgan Bates. I also ran into a lot of the rank-and-file guys and gals. They seemed like nice, sincere people. Maybe I was wrong, I thought.

The following Sunday, I attended TCF for the first time. Midway through the service, I saw the girl next to me raise her hand in the air and just…hold it there. I noticed a bunch of other people, Perry and Morgan included, doing the same thing. What the heck is this? I wondered. Having grown up as a somewhat buttoned-down Presbyterian, I found it somewhat jarring. Making me feel even more uneasy was how the guys on stage were telling us when to raise our hands, and practically ordered us to cheer after every song.  It felt so phony, so stage-managed. The wariness came back. What I wouldn’t give to get out of here… I thought.

While the rest of them went to lunch at a Chinese restaurant on Franklin Street, I begged off. For the first time, I took a look at their statement of faith. It was deeply fundified. Right then and there, I said to myself, That’s it, I’m never going back there again. But at that moment, I was seized by an intense feeling of guilt. It was as if there was a giant vise on my mind–and the moment I thought about walking out on them, it squeezed.

That feeling would come and go a lot over the next few weeks, particularly with the constant drumbeat on Monday nights about how others hated us “because of what we believe.” Something about that made me feel uneasy. Not only that, but it seemed that the opposite was true in my experience–people looked down on you if you weren’t a Christian. I didn’t see it quite as much in high school during my freshman and sophomore years, when I tilted agnostic. When I got saved–or so I thought–early in my junior year, I tried my best not to look down on my non-Christian friends.

The closest I came to walking out again came when we started worshiping, and Perry made us start all over again because we weren’t getting hyped up enough. I can still hear him now, 20 years later–“All right, we’re starting again. And this time, we’re giving him the praise he deserves!” I was thisclose to grabbing my bookbag and just leaving–but it was as if my feet had grown roots.

I couldn’t shake the impression that something was a bit off about these guys–but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I did notice, however, that they were the only even remotely racially integrated Christian group at Carolina–something like 70 percent white, 20 percent black, and 10 percent other races. I gradually joined a covenant group that reflected this. There were four of us in there. Three were black–Rollan Fisher, Aaron Kinson, and myself. One was white, Marty Lawson.

A few weeks later, Morgan talked about being filled with the Holy Spirit. At the end, I went up front, and the members of my covenant group laid their hands on me. They asked me to raise my hands. I did–but wished I could flap them and take off. Something about it felt just–odd. Something in me sensed that I was going to be overwhelmed, so as they were praying I kept one eye open to help me keep a grip on reality. They started blabbering in tongues–very much a new thing for me at the time. As I left, I wondered, What just happened in there?

I tried to keep up a good front, but deep down, I couldn’t shake the impression that there was something wrong here. Little did I know just how accurate that impression was. More to come this weekend.