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Poof! Gone Are FREE Copies of Undertow | Charlene L. Edge (charleneedge.com)

Just a note to say thank you, Greasespotters, for your support of Undertow over the years. It's out there doing a good job waking people up to the problems with high-control groups. To celebrate YOU, I thought I'd re-publish part of a post I wrote back in 2016 on my website. This came out before Undertow was published. Cheers! Good People I Met At The Way Greetings, subscribers and other readers who stumble across this website. By now, you have probably noticed I have a book in the making. It’s my very personal story of seventeen years in The Way International, a biblical research, teaching, and fellowship ministry that became one of the largest fundamentalist cults in America in its heyday of the 80s. I met many good people at The Way and you’ll meet some of them in my book soon. Ever since I launched this website in March 2015, I’ve written many posts about cults and fundamentalism. Today, I just want to make some points clear for those of you who have never come in contact with any Way people before. Good people in The Way First, not all Way followers treated outsiders or insiders badly, at least while I was in the group. Most people who left, however, were considered influenced by the Devil. Not all Way people tricked recruits into joining just to get their money, either. Most of us really believed The Way had the methods of getting the right interpretation of the Bible (termed “the accuracy of the Word”) and offered great fellowship with loving believers, so we genuinely recruited others from a good place in our hearts. The most loyal of us believed we followed “the man of God for our day and time,” Victor Paul Wierwille. He died in 1985. Most Way folks had good intentions about helping people, many desired to serve God in every way, and others sought a godly cause to live for. However, I now consider even the most sincere of Way followers (then and now) as misguided, deceived, and in some cases … gulp … brainwashed. Myself included. Thankfully, with help from many folks, I’ve learned to sort the good from the bad over the years, and am still doing it. My book, Undertow, tells a lot of my story. But the sorting and learning will never be over, even after Undertow is published, which will be soon after the elections next week. In my book, Undertow, you will meet many good people I knew at The Way. Some who have left are still my friends. Believe me, I’m more than grateful for this chance to tell my story (many others cannot or will not or just don’t know how to do it). I’m also unimaginably thankful I chose to publish it myself (that’s another story!) with the help of talented experts. Question: What is one major problem that caused me to leave The Way and that persists to this day, since The Way is still around? Here’s my answer: The Way insists that the only way to know God, at least their notion of who or what God is, is through knowledge of the Bible. Therefore, the more Bible knowledge you have, the better you know God. Problems with that answer involve issues like, what are we really referring to when we say the word God? Which version of the Bible are you talking about? What do we know about the material in the Bible and who wrote it? Isn’t the Bible written by and for people who lived long ago? Is the Bible true? What is truth? Does the Bible really have to be “perfect?” like Victor Paul Wierwille, founder of The Way, said? What parts of the Bible are still good-to-go, if you’ll pardon the expression? I do not know the answers to all of those questions, but I think they are worth asking. They were part of my journey out of The Way. Undertow not only tells my personal story, it sheds some light on those issues, especially in the last part of the book. END The above content is from this post: Good People I Met At The Way | Charlene L. Edge (charleneedge.com)