Unmasking another case of Waymaker deceit

I knew I had dodged a dumdum bullet almost three years earlier when I walked out of Waymaker. I already had some idea what I might have become had I let them bend my brain. But for at least the third time, one of my former compatriots had taken advantage of a desire to maintain something approaching a normal friendship.

That was the only plausible explanation for how Elaine Danielson blatantly lied to me about how she’d been quoted in an article for the DTH. It looked like she’d assumed I’d simply take the word of a fellow Spirit-filled believer. If that was the case–and it sure looked like it was–then at some point Elaine had stopped seeing me as a friend and seeing me as a potential notch in her Bible. In other words, she’d fully embraced the prevailing mentality in Waymaker.

Whenever I saw examples of this, I thought back to something that happened the first time I set foot at TCF/KPIC. We had loaded up Perry’s van to get ready to head back to Chapel Hill when Perry had to break up a fight between two of his charges in the youth ministry. He spent somewhere around 10 to 15 minutes talking with them.

It was a sign Perry cared about them individually. Rather than simply bundle them off to their parents and let them handle it after a cursory conversation, he actually took the time to talk to them. That was what made his dismissive attitude about Pastor Ron hiding his Maranatha past hard to understand. You would think a guy who cared enough about the well-being of the kids in the youth ministry would know that continuing to do Pastor Ron’s bidding put the Waymakers’ futures at risk–and in turn, put him, Danielle, Morgan, Aaron and Rita in great legal danger.

The Waymakers’ “so what?” reaction to Pastor Ron’s deceit was the first of many signs I’d seen during my sophomore year that they took a transactional approach to friendships and other interactions. It looked like they saw nearly every opportunity under the sun as a potential chance to preach at someone, slip them a tract, etc. And apparently all was fair in doing so.

A week after Labor Day, I got a revealing reminder of just how deep this mentality ran. I spied a printout of an email near the Undergraduate Library, but when I was about to throw it away, I noticed it was an email to the Waymakers’ listserv. Marina Delton had forwarded a message from Denise Mason about a new program to help foreign exchange students find friends at Carolina. Denise giddily mentioned how this was a potential bonanza to win them to Jesus.

The implication was obvious–they saw this as a possible opportunity to funnel these kids into Waymaker and KPIC. I knew that they saw telling people about Jesus as the ultimate act of friendship. But to take advantage of internationals in this way? They were no different from vultures.

Fortunately, the contact information for the program was in the email. I wasted little time setting up a meeting with the person in charge of the program. She assured me that this was not something that she intended her program to be, and assured me she would nip it in the bud. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when Denise walked into a meeting, only to find her own words essentially wadded up and thrown at her.

To my mind, this was yet more evidence this bunch had to be taken down. This was as blatant a case of deceit as I’d ever seen from them.  If all went well, I was now just a few weeks away from starting the process of effectively putting Waymaker and KPIC out of business.

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.

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.

Big Tommy comes to Carolina

Well, it’s been awhile since I posted here. But between the Stoneman Douglas shooting and some other things, I’ve been squeezed.

When we left off here, I was trying to find a way to keep the pressure on the Waymakers even after I’d burrowed back in and discovered just how crazy they were. I initially thought about reaching out to some of the more reasonable “brothers” and “sisters” in that bunch in hopes of getting them to turn on the others.

But when I learned that a number of my new friends in Campus Crusade had their own concerns about the Waymakers, it made me wonder if their six-year attempt to pull a fast one on Carolina’s student body was about to run aground. After all, despite their efforts to portray themselves as a smaller version of IV and Crusade, a number of my Crusader friends had seen and heard things in that bunch that they didn’t like.

Between this and the lunacy I’d seen first-hand, I figured that I wouldn’t have to reach out to the more reasonable folk in the Waymakers’ number. The way things were going, they were bound to veer into something that would eventually make a few Waymakers bail out. So I thought I’d just sit and wait.

In the meantime, the Waymakers tried to make more noise on campus. Not long after the case against them fizzled, they brought Carolina Hurricanes defenseman Adam Burt to speak at their Monday meeting. Burt had apparently become a charismatic Christian before the then-Hartford Whalers had moved south for the 1997-98 season, and had joined KPIC soon after the move. But it turned out to be a non-event. I walked by Murphey Hall after getting off from my shift officiating an intramural indoor soccer game, and the crowd was about the same size as it was for a regular Waymaker meeting.

Soon after we returned from spring break, I started seeing flyers on campus saying “Big Tommy is coming!” Later, I saw a more detailed flyer revealing that “Big Tommy” was Tom Sirotnak, a longtime member of the Power Team, a troupe of Christian muscle men who frequently appeared on TBN. He also had close ties to Victory Campus Ministries, Waymaker’s parent organization.

I knew how this script was going to run. Big Tommy was going to perform some feats of strength–like bust a few bottles or rip a phone book–then conduct a huge altar call in the middle of campus. Essentially, a larger-scale version of what they wanted to do when Bret Holman came to Chapel Hill in November. So how to change the script?

I mentioned this to a few of my friends on the Ex-Tian list. One of them mentioned that the phone book routine was actually a parlor trick. Apparently the phone book was partly ripped beforehand, making it easier for Tommy to rip it clean in two on stage.

Tommy showed up about two weeks after we returned from spring break. He was originally supposed to be in the Pit. I initially thought he was going to be in for a rather, shall we say, unpleasant reception. After all, Carolina’s students didn’t think much of stereophonic preachers.

But it turned out that another group had reserved the Pit that day. So much for that, I thought. But just as I was walking back to Granville for lunch, I heard the downbeat of Audio Adrenaline’s “Free Ride” blaring from Polk Place. To my surprise, the Waymakers had set up a stage near South Building, the main administration building. There was a decent-sized crowd gathered there.

Tommy took the stage–and started out with the phone book trick. At that point, two years of pent-up fury came boiling out. I yelled, “Fake, fake, fake! Parlor trick! He ripped it earlier before he got here!”

That threw Tommy for a loop. A few of my former “brothers” and “sisters” were stunned as well. They were trying to shut me up, saying, “Darrell, what are you doing?” and “You’re embarrassing yourself!” Perry Burkholder came over and told me to cool it if I wanted to stick around. But it was too late. I figure I planted a few seeds of doubt.

Apparently this gathering was a non-event as well. Not many people were talking about it during the week. It was just as well. With all the hype, you would have thought they would have moved their Monday meeting to a bigger venue. But it was in Murphey Hall again.

Would I have played it this way now? Probably not as vociferously. I probably would have crafted a Facebook and Twitter page after I burrowed back out of Waymaker, and used it to organize some sort of counter-demonstration.

It was the second time I’d caused a Waymaker function to go sideways, and the first since Operation Trojan Fundie. Somehow, I suspected it wouldn’t be the last.

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 5

When I decided to take the plunge and burrow my way back into Waymaker Christian Fellowship, I had a hunch things were bad. However, I was willing to accept that it might have been far worse than what I had seen previously. After all, the level of fanaticism that I’d seen from this group just from a distance was troubling. These were people who had no problem with their church’s pastor lying about his past in a group that was, for lack of a better description, a cult.

It took only one week to find out that this outfit was even more out to lunch than I first thought. For one thing, they seemed to think that my criticism of them was only driven by my sinful nature. Moreover, I’d only walked out on them because I’d relied too much on my intellect. Nope, if I wanted to live a “victorious Christian life,” I had to rely on my heart. To top that off, I learned that they viewed me in the same way as the Apostle Paul. Translation–my speaking out against them was no different from having Christians executed.

If I hadn’t seen and heard it for myself, I wouldn’t have believed it. From the looks of it, KPIC had changed its name from Triangle Christian Fellowship to avoid confusion with Triangle Church, the local chapter of the International Churches of Christ (also known as the Boston Movement), an outfit that had also gained infamy for cultish practices. The irony was obvious. A church changed its name to avoid being confused with a Christian cult–when, by any reasonable standard, it was a cult as well.

That impression was underlined by a Sunday service that looked like something out of TBN. After a heavy dose of manufactured enthusiasm–telling us when to raise our hands, practically ordering us to applaud after every song–there was a “ministry” session that saw people falling down like flies. Every time I think about this service, I think about how we were told that we could yell and scream for God if we could do the same at Kenan Stadium or the Dean Dome. I saw more real enthusiasm in one minute of my first home football game as a student–a 45-0 manhandling of Clemson in my freshman year–than in that entire two-hour-plus session at KPIC.

Little did I know that more of the same was in store in Tuesday, when I joined my “brothers” and “sisters” for a Christmas party at Perry and Danielle Burkholder’s apartment in Durham. It started out normally. Bret Holman, the guy whom I’d publicly sliced, diced and julienned a month earlier, was about to become a dad, and Perry and Danielle sent around a card to sign. Feigning reluctance, I claimed that I didn’t feel right signing it given how I had laid into him. But they persuaded me that it no longer mattered–so I signed.

Later on, I chatted it up with Rollan Fisher and Barbara Dean. Rollan, you will recall, had been a member of my covenant group a year earlier. I asked them to pray for me. One thing that jumped out was when Rollan prayed that I turn away from the stuff I bought into when I was “in the world.”

We headed back to Granville after maybe two hours. Perry gave me a Kirk Franklin CD as a “welcome back” gift.

When I made it back to my room, my thoughts immediately went back to when Rollan and Barbara prayed over me. It was the strongest confirmation yet that he and the others wanted me to become someone I didn’t really know–and probably wouldn’t have liked.

I kept thinking back to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Their idea of being saved essentially amounted to going to sleep–and waking up as someone else, completely devoid of individuality. It was yet more proof I had dodged a dumdum bullet. But more was to come as the week wore on.

 

 

 

 

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.

Operation Trojan Fundie, part 2

For some time, I’d known that the Darrell the Waymakers wanted me to be–excuse me, the Darrell God wanted me to be–was not a person I would have liked very much. It had taken a mere hour to receive confirmation. Supposedly, my sinful nature was what made me speak out against my “brothers” and “sisters,” and had kept me from doing what I needed to do to lead a “victorious Christian life.” But I suspected that further confirmation would not be long in coming. And it came from an expected source.

After I got out of my last class, I joined the Waymakers’ email listserv. In the obligatory introductory post, I thought it was as good a time to play the role of “New and Improved Darrell” to the hilt, and prove that I had been assimilated. I talked about the dream that had led me to ask Jesus back into my life, and how I couldn’t believe the things I had said and done in the past.

Surprisingly, the first reply didn’t come from one of my fellow sophomores–but from a girl named Elaine Danielson, who said we’d talked before a few times in Granville. She was positively giddy to hear that I had gone to sleep and awakened as a new person.

That didn’t compute at first. She seemed far too nice to fall in with a bunch like this. But I quickly reminded myself–if they’d nearly gotten someone like me, they could get anybody. Somehow, I had a hunch that I had another source of motivation for this push–and I was right. Elaine happened to be in the lab, and I asked if that was her. It was. It turned out that earlier in the year, I’d run into her while she was filling out an application for Heels to Heaven, a contemporary Christian choir. One of the questions concerned an applicant’s testimony, and I was taken aback by it.

Elaine told me that not long after joining Waymaker, she’d started attending the girls’ Bible study on North Campus, where most of my “sisters” now lived. She’d mentioned running into me, and the other girls recalled that I’d once been in Waymaker and they were praying hard for me–so she joined in.

Later that night, I got my first reply from someone who had been in Waymaker with me, Denise Mason. She told me something absolutely staggering–from where she was sitting, my critical thinking faculties had been responsible for pulling me away from Waymaker. I still remember what she said even now, more than two decades later.

Darrell, the Lord has blessed you with a powerful intellect. I know that Satan used it to intellectualize you out of a relationship with God. But as you probably know by now, Christianity is not something you do with your mind, but something you do with your heart.

This sounded very familiar. It seemed like a throwback to one of Maranatha’s loonier teachings–the idea that our minds can’t be trusted at all. As it turned out, the Waymakers had tried to peddle this line with me a year earlier, when they tried to make me think my wariness was a demonic trick.

But they’d been more subtle about it then. Now that I was supposedly fully committed to a “victorious Christian life,” they weren’t even trying to hide it.

As if I needed a further reminder, one came the next day from a freshman, Dervin Dhaliwal. 

I’m so glad you realize Jesus is your Savior. Rational minds cannot comprehend the simple truths. Our minds cannot see God, that is why the world is so blind because it uses not the heart.

Even now, this is absolutely staggering. Remember, folks, we’re talking about kids at a “public Ivy”–a school that has more or less a permanent spot among the nation’s elite universities. And yet, they were being told that thinking critically was a bad thing–and that if you didn’t trust your heart, it could be an open door for the devil. In their world, getting saved essentially meant going to sleep and waking up, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” style.

This notion is out to lunch on several counts. From a secular perspective, the problems are obvious. If you can’t trust your mind, your instincts, what can you trust? It’s an open door to brainwashing. From a Christian perspective, it ignores the fact that God gave us our minds.

Disturbing as this mentality was, it was even so when I considered the likelihood that Perry and Danielle Burkholder were peddling this to KPIC’s youth as well. In effect, they were telling kids to shut down part of their minds. As if I needed another reason why Perry and Danielle would be the last people I would want influencing my kids if I were a parent, here was another.

For years, I couldn’t get my head around how you could be at a school where critical thinking was not optional, and yet be told that using your mind was a bad thing. However, one close friend helped shed some light on this. She had spent nine years at a church in Wadesboro, east of Charlotte, that was at least as abusive and controlling as KPIC. She told me that based on her experience, when deception is standard operating procedure, it can literally go past your brain. The so-called leaders actively work to turn a person’s vulnerabilities against them, and use those vulnerabilities to reel them in. In her case, the pastors at this church used her desire to seek and serve God to lay the guilt on thick when she stepped out of line.

This makes a lot of sense. Early on in my freshman year, the Waymakers figured out that I wanted to be accepted more than anything. It soon became apparent that a condition of being fully accepted by them was to check my critical thinking at the door–something that I simply could not do. And now, I’d been told in capital letters that you couldn’t trust your mind at all. It took me awhile to realize it, but it was because they wanted it that way. Now that I supposedly stopped using my mind as a filter, I was now part of their collective.

It makes even more sense when I compare KPIC to my current church in Charlotte. KPIC is located in the middle of one of the most educated metros in the nation, and then as now draws a significant portion of its base from three of the most prestigious schools in the South and the nation–Carolina, Duke, and State. My church, a low-key charismatic church outside downtown, has a large number of people with college degrees–close to half, by my reckoning.

And yet, despite near-identical demographics to KPIC, my church’s mentality could not be more different. We’re actually encouraged to weigh things up, to make sure it really is from God. But at KPIC, thinking about matters like this could let the devil edge his way in.

After only 48 hours, I had solid confirmation of something I had suspected for some time. There was no way I could have possibly become the kind of person the Waymakers wanted me to be and still be Darrell. But in the next few days, I got more proof of just how far out to lunch my “brothers” and “sisters” were. More to come on that later.

Encounter in the Pit

For much of the first semester of my sophomore year, I was in a bit of a bind on how to expose Waymaker and KPIC. On paper, the evidence that Pastor Ron had blatantly lied about his past in Maranatha would have been enough by itself to file a complaint with the student judicial system and get his “ministry” kicked off campus. But that would have almost certainly brought groups like the American Center for Law and Justice, the Alliance Defense Fund, and Liberty Counsel rushing pell-mell to Chapel Hill.

There was only one way I believed that school officials would have the political capital to withstand the inevitable howls of outrage about those pointy-headed libruls in Chapel Hill persecuting innocent Christians. I had to find a way to prove that they were engaging in behavior that was not protected by the First Amendment. Increasingly, I wondered if the only way to do so would be to pretend I’d been “convicted” and had become just as fundified as the Waymakers. But I decided not to go that route unless there were no other options.

In early November, something happened that made me think the first domino was about to fall. That week, the campus was abuzz with what was shaping up to be the biggest football game in school history. As expected, Carolina’s football team had roared through the regular season, rising to fifth in both media polls. They were set for a collision course with second-ranked Florida State. A win would make Carolina an odds-on contender for the national championship.

As I left my last class on the Wednesday before the game, I, like most everyone on campus, was already thinking about the game–and admittedly planning for the all-but-certain party on Franklin Street if we won. But I was jarred back to reality by seeing a crowd gathered around the Pit. I thought the Pit Preacher was taking advantage of the hype to pay us a visit.

Someone was preaching in the Pit, all right–but it looked like it was the Waymakers. Perry Burkholder and Aaron Levinson were there, but they weren’t the ones preaching. The actual speaker was another 20-something guy whom I didn’t recognize. He was going on about sin, and how we needed to turn to Jesus. He then started mocking evolution. 

I had a bunch how this script might end–a mass altar call in the Pit. Time for a script change, I thought. Just as it seemed like he was really rolling along, I challenged him to prove that evolution was bogus. His only argument was that it ran counter to the Bible. Needless to say, it made him look foolish. 

It turned out that there was a photographer from the DTH on hand. I gave him my name and headed back to Granville thinking, No wonder they haven’t tried this sooner. I’d seen some of them trying to witness to passersby in the Pit, but they’d never done anything on this scale before.

The next day, my picture made the front page. I also learned that the guy with whom I’d tangled was Bret Holman, the national director of Victory Campus Ministries–this making him Perry, Danielle, Morgan, Aaron and Rita’s boss. So they’d brought in the heavy artillery–dnd a lowly sophomore had carved him up like a Thanksgiving turkey. Surely more than a few people would start asking questions. 

But in the next few weeks, I didn’t get a single call or email from anyone at the DTH who wanted to know more. I’d hoped it would lead to a story that would give me a chance to tell more about how I’d been burned, as well as reveal the extent of Pastor Ron’s snowjob. 

By mid-November, I felt like I was back to square one–and that I was running out of options short of playing “Trojan fundie.” As reluctant as I was to go that route, I didn’t know if there was any other way to expose this bunch. But it didn’t come without a lot of brain-racking. More to come later.

Figuring out how to fight a cult

I knew I had dodged a dumdum bullet when I left Waymaker. But by the time the first month of my sophomore year was out, I had learned this was merely the tip of the iceberg. My former “brothers” and “sisters” were perfectly okay with Pastor Ron hiding the fact that KPIC had once been part and parcel of Maranatha Campus Ministries, a notorious 1980s “campus cult.”

 

Their decision to continue doing Pastor Ron’s bidding was at once both disheartening and infuriating. It boggled my mind that they were willing to risk throwing their futures away, since it seemed to be only a matter of time before they did something that would get them suspended or expelled. Were they willing to carry that albatross around them for the rest of their lives?

At the same time, I realized that they never really cared for me at all. If they were even remotely okay with Pastor Ron’s deceit just because people were being saved through his ministry, it meant that they saw me not as their “brother,” but as a potential notch in their Bibles.

All things considered, I had come to believe that this outfit had to be brought down, and brought down hard. But how to do it?

I initially mulled filing a complaint about them with the student judicial system, with a view toward getting their status as a recognized student organization yanked. But I wasn’t sure if I had enough evidence to make a case–at least, not at the outset. Contrary to what Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell tell their followers, officials at public schools and universities are very skittish about teeing up religious groups due to fears they could appear to be trampling on their First Amendment rights.

On paper, I had an easy answer to that. The strongest First Amendment protections of freedom of religion and free exercise of religion could not possibly give a campus ministry carte blanche to deceive people about who they really were. But how to prove they were deceiving people? That was the $64,000 question.

While I tried to figure out the answer, I focused on trying to pierce the Waymakers’ veil of anomynity–the one thing that allowed them to continue to pull their snow job on campus. It turned out that they were already fairly active. My roommate, a freshman, told me that one of his friends had told him there were some people he should meet. Those people turned out to be Perry and Danielle Burkholder; it was a Waymaker gathering.

They also organized a “See You at the Pole” event–something I thought was just a high school thing. I happened to be on my way to my first class when I ran into Barbara Dean and Allison Millstein. I was still stewing over how they had tried to wheedle me back in. I told them that I was not at all appreciative of it, and if God operated like that, I wanted nothing to do with him.

Allison pulled out a tract that suggested that a life without God was a life full of lack and unfulfilment. I burst out laughing. After all, I’d experienced more freedom and more fulfillment since walking out on Waymaker than I had in several years. I couldn’t believe that two girls could get into Carolina and sound that ignorant.

Barbara didn’t think I should be laughing–after all, they never laughed at me when I told them that, at least for the moment, I wanted nothing to do with God. I wondered why they pushed so hard, and they said they were only doing God’s work. Before I walked off, I scoffed at them, “Why don’t you do something more productive–like studying?”

As I walked away, I realized I’d gotten another reminder of what I probably would have sounded like had I become the Darrell they wanted me to be–er, the Darrell God wanted me to be. I also wondered–if they were already this active, had I made a mistake in not warning my Myers Park friends about this bunch?

But the earlier question remained–how to fight them and expose them. I knew at the very least that they had breached every standard of decency that was known. But how could I prove that they were indeed engaging in deceitful behavior, and thus engaged in behavior that was not protected by the First Amendment? It would take me awhile to figure out what seemed to be a solution. More to come later.