The Word and the Way according to Victor Wierwille

“WOUSA [Word Over the U. S. A.] by 1976.” The Word is the Bible as interpreted by Victor Paul Wierwille, 58, a former United Church of Christ minister and founder of The Way International, based in New Knoxville, Ohio, and the slogan heralds the goal of his zealous followers. If enthusiasm and rate of expansion are indicative, a lot of Americans are going to get the word about The Way in the coming months.

In 1957 Wierwille, a Princeton Seminary graduate, resigned his Van Wert, Ohio, pulpit to launch an independent ministry. Two years later the work was moved to the family farm near New Knoxville, and during the intervening sixteen years the movement gained an estimated 20,000 adherents, distributed among all fifty states and thirty-three foreign countries, say its leaders. (The Way has no official membership, and officials consider the estimate conservative.) Circulation of The Way magazine has increased fourfold, from 2,500 to 10,000 over the past 3½ years. Last year 1,033 “WOW [Word Over the World] Ambassadors” were dispatched to the midwest, south, and southwest sectors of the nation for a year of missionary service. More than twice that number—2,077—were commissioned in August for duty in eastern United States, Canada, and Germany, and 104 “Minute Men” (seasoned troops) received western U. S. assignments. Outside observers say Wierwille’s group did not begin to grow appreciably until he began foraging for leaders among Jesus-movement converts in the late 1960s.

Students for Wierwille’s video-taped PFAL (Power For Abundant Living) course reportedly are being recruited at the rate of 1,000 per month—at the going rate of $85 for the twelve three-hour sessions. This fall, The Way College of Emporia (Kansas) opened with more than 400 students. Administered by Wierwille’s son Donald, a former elementary school principal, the institution is offering a curriculum in biblical studies, without accreditation and without the authority to confer degrees. The Way failed in its effort to transfer the accredited status of the school when it was purchased from United Presbyterians last year (see December 20, 1974, issue, page 28). Leaders are negotiating with nearby schools in hopes of achieving accreditation through some sort of tandem arrangement. When renovation projects are completed in another year or two, The Way will have invested $2.5 million in the Emporia facility, say spokesmen.

The first “Rock of Ages Christian Music Festival,” a sort of national convention of the movement, was held at the New Knoxville farm in 1971 with an attendance of 1,000. In 1974, at a county fairgrounds, there were 5,500 full-time registrants plus several thousand part-timers who attended evening sessions. At last month’s four-day edition of “Rock of Ages,” held at a fairgrounds in nearby Lima, more than 8,300 attended (admission: $25). The faithful came in chartered buses and planes and in all varieties of motor vehicles from most of the fifty states and a dozen foreign countries. Area motels were jammed, and hundreds of truck campers and brightly colored tents accommodated the overflow. Although 80 per cent were young people, adult attendance was up significantly over previous years, according to publicity director David Craley.

Critics have accused The Way of fostering a permissive life-style. But although cigarette smoking was prevalent, alcohol, drugs, sexual permissiveness, and profanity were not in evidence. A mood of love and joy characterized the gathering, and “God bless you” or simply “Bless you” were standard greetings. Informal one-to-one sharing sessions and prayer huddles were frequent. Non-uniformed security guards were posted at strategic locations; they were particularly in evidence at the area circumscribed by The Way’s “company cars”: four mobile homes, a shiny new black Cadillac limousine, and the renowned Harley-Davidson motorcycle on which “Doctor,” as Wierwille is affectionately known, tools around the country. Bumper stickers and slogans adorned many vehicles; one truck was inscribed with the title of Wierwille’s most recent book, “Jesus Christ is NOT God.”

The freewheeling daytime schedule provided options for every age group: supervised activities at the children’s center, a coffeehouse for teens and young adults, and an adult pavilion for over-thirties. Two dramas played to packed houses each morning and afternoon. Exhibits, films, and a well-stocked bookstore attracted hundreds of browsers, and several bus tours departed daily for the New Knoxville headquarters.

Evening meetings featured the 500-voice Way Chorale Internationale, gospel-rock musicians, special dramatic and musical events, and a number of speakers (including Lima mayor Harry Moyer, Maine state senator Hayes Gahagan, and Wierwille—whose expected Sunday-night crowd of 10,000 was greatly reduced by heavy rain showers).

According to a publicity folder, The Way “is not a church, nor is it a denomination or a religious sect of any sort.” Yet the organization’s fifty ordained clergy (five of whom are women) are authorized to perform marriages. Way doctrines combine forms of biblical literalism (“The Word of God means what it says and says what it means”), evangelicalism (salvation is entirely by grace—through faith in the Virgin-born, crucified, resurrected, and ascended Son of God), Calvinism (once a person is saved he cannot become unsaved), dispensationalism (the Gospels belong in the Old Testament; only those New Testament epistles addressed to the Church apply to believers today—although the remainder of the Bible is “for our learning”), and Pentecostalism (the nine spiritual gifts of First Corinthians are operable today; tongues and healing are stressed).

Wierwille agrees with Jehovah’s Witnesses that the Trinity doctrine is contrary to Scripture (Jesus is the Son of God but not God; the Holy Spirit is a designation for God—and “holy spirit” is the power conferred at Pentecost). He teaches that human beings do not have immortal souls; they remain dead upon physical death until the final resurrections: the first is the resurrection of life, when Christ comes for his saints (only believers during the church age—after Pentecost—will be saved); the second is the resurrection of damnation, when Christ comes with his saints (after the millennium).

With Herbert W. Armstrong (who also denies the Trinity, the personality of the Holy Spirit, and the immortality of the soul), Wierwille teaches that Christ was crucified on Wednesday and raised on Saturday. He adds Matthew’s two robbers to Luke’s two malefactors and gets four crucifixions in addition to that of Jesus. He concurs with the Witnesses and with Armstrong in the teaching that the victims died upon stakes rather than crosses. The “new heaven and new earth” of Revelation 21 will occur when Paradise is restored upon the earth.

The Way International observes no special day of worship, although Wierwille holds forth at the headquarters chapel each Sunday night. Meetings are held in homes and borrowed halls. Water baptism is not practiced (unless requested), and is replaced by Holy Spirit baptism. The Lord’s Supper, however, is observed. Christmas and Easter are relegated to secondary status, while Pentecost is celebrated as the most important of the Christian festivals.

Wierwille has defined an apostle as “one who brings new light to his generation.” Since he himself claims to have received audible communications from God, presumably he fulfills this role. He is apparently viewed as such by his followers. Paradoxically, at Lima he both encouraged and discouraged the apostolic image—the former, by riding to the opening session in a golf cart, which delivered him amid the tumultuous cheers of his disciples to the elevated box constructed for his family; the latter, by declaring to the audience (at an impromptu session in the grandstand when the open-air meeting was rained out on the second night), “I don’t want you to be ‘Wierwillites’—I want you to be God’s Lights!”

Elena Whiteside in The Way, a book published by the organization in 1972, quotes one convert as saying, “I see Dr. Wierwille as the next man of God to rise up after Paul’s death.” Another believer remarked, “Nowhere else can you get this knowledge of how to read and understand God’s Word.” Wierwille himself, she asserted, related the circumstances of his call in this fashion: “I was praying.… And that’s when he spoke to me audibly, just like I’m talking to you now. He said he would teach me the Word as it had not been known since the first century if I would teach it to others.”

Critics say they don’t know whose voice Wierwille heard, but they assert their certainty about something else: the word according to Wierwille was not known in the first century either.

RED LIGHT EXHIBIT

Evangelistic worker James Hayes didn’t stand on a box and preach hell-fire-and-damnation at the recent fair in Carroll County, Maryland, but he got the point across anyway—through modern technology. Hayes, who managed an evangelistic booth at the fair, administered an electronic test to the curious who visited the booth. The test consisted of five questions on the New Testament. If all were answered correctly, sky-blue lights came on spelling “Heaven.” If there was one wrong answer, fiery red lights flashed the word “Hell,” ending the test.

Only twenty out of 220 persons passed the test, Hayes told Washington Star reporter William F. Willoughby. That means a lot of people are going to hell, he commented.

Willoughby suggested that maybe God isn’t using the same computer.

PEDAL PUSHING

On October 13, 1974, four young men active in the American Lutheran Church departed Detroit on ten-speed bikes in a cross-country project aimed at supporting a special ALC mission offering. On August 5–297 days, 8,334 miles, and 120 flat tires later—they arrived in La Paz, Bolivia. They had to fly between Panama City and Cali, Colombia, because there are no roads, and they drove the last thirty miles by bus after a damaged wheel on one of the bikes collapsed. The youths, who handed out Spanish-language tracts as they traveled, said they better understood the church’s mission and themselves as a result of the trip. They also commented about the warmth and acceptance they received from people along the way.

The four are: John Cross, 24, and Jim Oines, 25, both seminarians at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota; Peter Crane, 21, of Ventura, California; and Jeff Stoopes, 22, a worker with Lutheran Youth Alive in Los Angeles.

(So far, about $36 million in gifts and pledges have been received in the special ALC offering, according to reports.)

Slandered

Evangelist Oliver B. (Jerry) Owen, 62, was awarded $35,000 in a $1.4 million slander suit against television station KCOP in Los Angeles. Owen, who has an Assemblies of God background, is known as “the Walking Bible” for his ability to quote verbatim the 31,173 verses of the King James version of the Bible.

KCOP executive John Hopkins was accused of making defamatory statements in 1969 as an explanation to viewers wanting to know why the evangelist’s program had been canceled. Hopkins claimed Owen was involved in the killing of Robert F. Kennedy and was a thief who burned down churches.

Owen had told police in 1968 that he’d picked up Sirhan B. Sirhan, Kennedy’s killer, as a hitchhiker two days before the slaying, but the police concluded that he had made up the story to seek publicity.

The trial judge said Hopkins was wrong in calling Owen a thief when Owen had been only “accused” of taking goods from a store. The judge also said the church-burning comment ignored the fact that Owen’s arson conviction in the early 1960s had been overturned on appeal.

Owen earlier won $55,000 in a 1972 suit against the northern California district of the Assemblies of God, which he said solicited false testimony to convict him of arson for burning down a Tucson, Arizona, church in 1963, the case he won on appeal. He has frequently been at odds with the Assemblies because of publicity over charges of adultery, shoplifting, and child abandonment.

Texas Roundup

About one hundred years after the first settlers moved into the area and took up cattle ranching, evangelist Billy Graham arrived in town to conduct a spiritual roundup.

In all, there were 7,000 decisions for Christ, half of them professions of faith, according to officials at the eight-day campaign in Lubbock, a city of 150,000 in the heart of west Texas. Crowds averaged better than 30,000 per meeting, and the 47,000-seat stadium on the campus of Texas Tech University was filled for the final Sunday-night rally.

“A great sense of ecumenicity,” observed one reporter in describing how churches of a variety of denominations pitched in to make the crusade an evangelistic success. Teams of speakers and musicians fanned out to jails, shopping malls, club meetings, and the like in a concentrated, cooperative outreach effort throughout the eight days. Pastors spoke of how the crusade had united them for the first time and how they planned to keep the fires of fellowship burning. Many of the 500-plus churches involved in the crusade reported there were new faces at worship services, requests for baptism and membership, and expressions of personal renewal because of the crusade. A large number of persons participated in the 3,000 pre-crusade prayer groups that met in some forty cities and towns across the west Texas plains.

A concurrent school of evangelism sponsored by the Graham organization brought together 1,100 pastors and seminarians and their wives from thirteen states and five foreign countries.

Even though Lubbock was not incorporated until the early 1900s, and despite the independent spirit for which Texans are noted, its citizens are engaged in a number of local projects to honor America’s bicentennial. At one of the Crusade rallies, John Warner, the head of the national bicentennial administration and a former secretary of the Navy, commented briefly on America’s spiritual heritage. Appropriately, said he, July 4, 1976, falls on a Sunday, and he implied that America’s Christians ought to make the most of it.

On August 29, two days before the Lubbock crusade began, assault charges against Graham’s wife were dismissed by a judge in Charlotte, North Carolina. The charges had been lodged by Daniel L. Pollock, 27, who alleged that Ruth Graham took from him a protest sign he was carrying during a May 20 speech by President Ford at a Charlotte park. Pollock, said the judge, failed to prove that Mrs. Graham had assaulted him. Graham said he was delighted by the verdict, and he told how his wife “day after day … earnestly prayed for the young man.”

As Pollock and Mrs. Graham left the courtroom she pulled a brown Bible from her pocketbook and offered it to him. Pollock smiled but declined to take it.

“I’ll be praying for you,” said Mrs. Graham.

Orphan Prevention

Snake-handling and the drinking of poison in connection with religious services were banned by the Tennessee Supreme Court. The five justices ruled unanimously that the state “has the right to guard against the unnecessary creation of widows and orphans.”

Liston Pack, a lay pastor of the Holiness Church of God in Jesus’ Name near Newport in eastern Tennessee, had been barred by a county court from handling or exhibiting poisonous snakes during services in his church. Several people had died as a result of such rites. The high court’s ruling upheld the injunction against Pack.

Satisfied

The stronger a woman’s religious convictions, the more likely she is to be highly satisfied with the sexual pleasures of marriage, a Redbook survey of 100,000 women shows. “The fundamental difference that distinguishes the non-religious from the strongly religious woman is that the non-religious woman is far more likely to be dissatisfied with every aspect of life,” conclude researchers.

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