Religion: Fellow Traveling with Jesus

The Jesus Revolution (TIME, June 23) includes preachers of hellfire and promoters of love, fundamentalist Christians, mainstream Protestants, and even some Roman Catholics. Most, however, at least share a common belief in the basic tenets of Christianity: the triune nature of God, the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Gospels as the cornerstone of faith. But some so-called Jesus freaks really subscribe to exotic creeds all their own that to orthodox Christians are close to what used to be called heresy. And not only to traditional churchmen: even many inside the movement look suspiciously on these fellow travelers with Jesus as distorters of the true Gospel. Two such eccentric groups are The Way and The Process:

The Way

Externally, The Way looks like any other branch of the Jesus movement: its adherents are mostly bright-eyed, smiling teenagers, ecstatically exchanging “Bless yous,” telling of drug cures, perpetually thumbing their Bibles. There is also the ubiquitous music drumming across Gospel messages, sometimes to the beat of hard rock. In mid-August, more than a thousand young followers descended on The Way Biblical Research Center in New Knoxville, Ohio (pop. 850), for a weekend of spiritual study almost continuously backgrounded by rock. Musical groups of Way believers with names like The Dove, Cookin’ Mama, and one from Long Island called Pressed Down, Shaken Together & Running Over, belted out the sounds.

But it is The Way’s message, not its music, that is offbeat. That message is preached by the movement’s founder, Victor Paul Wierwille, 54, a trim, tanned, fast-talking six-footer who likes to wear Western-cut suits with a scarf around his neck and tool around the countryside on a big Harley-Davidson. A former minister of the United Church of Christ who has studied both at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Princeton Theological Seminary, Wierwille is now a crackerbarrel theological promoter who grandiosely claims to have done the only “pure and correct” interpretation of the Bible since the First Century. He has been working on his theology for about 25 years, ever since he shucked his academic background by burning more than 1,000 religious books “to clean myself out” before starting his own research.

Wierwille argues that the Bible as a whole is not relevant to all people of all times. Every word of Scripture is equally inspired by God, he says, but different books were addressed to different audiences. The Old Testament and the Four Gospels are for the Jews and Gentiles; the rest of the New Testament is for the “Church of God” of “born-again believers.” But Wierwille and his Wayfarers concentrate mainly on the nine Epistles of St. Paul to the early churches, especially the letter to the Ephesians, which, he insists, distills nearly everything important in the Word of God.

Wierwille dismisses the doctrine of the Trinity as a throwback to paganism, because it proposes, he says, “three Gods.” To him, Jesus is “the Son of God,” but not God the Son. “You show me one place in the Bible where it says he is God,” Wierwille thunders. “I don’t want your rapping, your doubletalk, your tripletalk; all I want is Scripture.” And the Holy Spirit, says Wierwille, is just a synonym for God. Wierwille’s theology is propounded in pamphlets, a magazine, and books, but mainly in a filmed and taped “foundation course,” into which he has unloaded 36 hours of rambling, folksy lectures on the Bible. The title of the course—which costs $65 per head: “Power for Abundant Living.” Carrying Norman Vincent Peale’s pious optimism a good bit further, Wierwille promises that right “believing” will keep away sickness, ensure prosperity, and even protect soldier converts from Viet Cong bullets. Poverty is seen as a result of imperfect faith: the Good Life is a proper reward for believers.

Most of Wierwille’s converts come from just that Good Life: comfortable middle-or upper-class families in predominantly white suburbs. Sometimes parents have followed their youngsters into the fold. Although Wierwille founded his research center in 1953, the movement around it has started to grow only in the past few years. He keeps no records and gives only the vaguest estimate of the number of his followers—”5,000, maybe 10,000,” in “most” states and “nine, twelve, 15 countries.” There is a vigorous chapter in Wichita, Kans., and strong groups in Rye, N.Y., and in Mill Valley, Calif.—which are called The Way East and The Way West. All conduct meetings where they listen to Wierwille’s recorded words and offer extemporaneous prayers. Attendance is also good at the sermons that Wierwille delivers in person at New Knoxville. His brother Harry, 64, the treasurer of the center, claims that Sunday services take in as much as $10,000 a night. The money, say the Wierwilles, is being used for a $3,000,000 building program to expand The Way still further.

The Process

The polite, earnest, uniformed “Messengers” of The Process Church of the Final Judgment are hard to miss these days if one walks up Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue or Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. The points of their collars are decorated with red three-horned goats’ heads; between the horns dangles a large silver cross. Satan and Christ? Yes. And more. If the followers of The Way have trouble accepting a Trinity, the Processeans emphatically do not. But their “Three Great Gods of the Universe” are jealous and warring deities who battle among themselves in an eternal “game” for control of men’s souls.

The three gods of their bizarre theology represent “three basic patterns of human reality.” One of them is Jehovah, a “wrathful God of vengeance and retribution,” who demands “discipline, courage and ruthlessness” from his followers. The second is Lucifer, wrongly confused with Satan, they say. He is the “Light-Bearer” who urges humans to “enjoy life to the full, to value success, to be gentle and kind and loving.” The third is Satan, “the receiver of corrupted bodies and transcendent souls,” who impels humans both toward a subhuman life of depravity and a superhuman life of asceticism. The Processeans see Christ as a transcendent “unifier” who ultimately reconciles all three of the competing gods.

The Process was founded only eight years ago in London by a former Anglican named Robert de Grimston, now in his mid-30s, who is known as “the Teacher” to Processeans. De Grimston has no permanent base, but conducts a will-o’-the-wisp peripatetic ministry, communicating with his followers in letters they call “brethren information.” Occasionally he drops in at a Process chapter to teach the “brethren” in person.

Weird though it may be, his message seems to be spreading. Although the London chapter is closed, there are others in Toronto, Chicago, New Orleans, Cambridge, Mass., and soon, the Processeans hope, in New York City. So far the followers are few in number—about 500—but extremely zealous. Members of the sect with outside jobs are expected to tithe. Those who choose to become full-time Processeans help support the movement by hawking on city streets paperbacks about its message and goals. In keeping with the vaguely clerical garb often worn by members, the Processeans are strict in their ethical teachings: unmarried adherents, for example, are expected to remain chaste.

Many of the Processeans come from the same drug-strewn, rootless backgrounds from which the Jesus people have fled. But The Process preaches more psychological self-realization than faith. One of the movement’s key practices is a weekly telepathy session in which “contact and communication” are emphasized in much the same way as they are in encounter therapy. At the core of Processean psychology is the gloomy and negative conviction that human enterprise is a futile escape from the painful contradictions of a world in which most men are pawns in the game of the gods. Only by facing the bitter reality of that situation and taking his own full responsibility for his actions can a Processean escape the game. Christ, the unifier of forces, is his ally in the struggle.

The telepathy sessions are supplemented by Saturday-evening services that seem rather mild for a sect that includes Satan among its gods. The services consist mainly of prayers, spontaneous dialogues and hymns, punctuated by guitars, gongs, drumbeats and incense. In the candlelit worship room, the goat’s head and the cross share equal prominence. Christ’s enmity with Satan, say the Processeans, will eventually be overcome by Christ’s own dictum to “love thine enemy.” For Processeans, that eventuality is near at hand, for they believe in the imminent end of the world.