The Way International

The Way International is a Christian ministry founded by Victor Paul Wierwille, who began his radio teaching in the 1940s and organized the movement more formally over the following decades. Its teaching is distinguished doctrinally by its rejection of the Trinity, a position that places it outside mainstream orthodox Christianity, which regards trinitarian belief as essential, along with a distinctive biblical interpretation set out chiefly in Wierwille's foundational course, "Power for Abundant Living." The movement spread largely through home fellowships and that course rather than conventional congregations, and grew substantially in the 1970s, particularly among young people. After Wierwille's death in 1985 the organization went through significant internal conflict, leadership disputes, and schisms that led to a marked decline and the formation of breakaway groups.

Critics, including former members, have over the years raised concerns about authoritarian leadership and internal control, claims the organization has disputed; these have been aired chiefly through journalism and personal testimony. The Way International continues as a smaller organization. It is discussed in the study of new religious movements as an example of a twentieth-century non-trinitarian biblical movement built on a signature teaching course and a decentralized fellowship structure.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Way International kept no membership rolls. Its founder, Victor Paul Wierwille, built the organization deliberately around informal home fellowships rather than chartered congregations, so that decades later, when scholars tried to reconstruct how large the movement had actually become, there was no register to consult. What survives instead is a proxy: attendance at the Rock of Ages, the organization's annual summer festival held on its property in New Knoxville, Ohio, which is the closest thing to a dated headcount that exists for a group that otherwise left none.

The proxy tells a stark story on its own terms. In 1969, roughly a thousand people attended. By 1983, that figure had grown to about seventeen thousand, the clearest evidence available that The Way had become, for a period of a little over a decade, one of the larger new religious movements to emerge from the American Jesus movement of the 1970s. The growth did not survive its founder. Wierwille died in 1985, and within a few years the organization that had built itself around his personal authority began to come apart: leadership disputes, the exposure of sexual abuse by senior figures including his successor, and a series of mass departures in 1987, 1989 and 2000 each stripped away another layer of membership, with enrollment at the organization's own leadership training college falling from 350 students to 90 within just a few years of the founder's death.

No festival-attendance figure, or any other figure, exists to say precisely how far the decline went, because the informal structure that made a proxy necessary in 1969 never changed. What is certain is the shape of the curve: a decade of rapid growth built on one man's personal following, and a collapse that began the moment he was no longer there to hold it together. The absence of a formal count is not a gap in the record. For an organization built this way, it is the record.

Victor Paul Wierwille died in 1985, having built The Way International from an Ohio radio ministry into a movement whose Rock of Ages festivals drew tens of thousands, and his death opened the most turbulent chapter in the group's history. His successor L. Craig Martindale inherited a ministry already shaken by a 1986 internal paper, circulated by senior leader Chris Geer, that described moral failures at the top, and thousands of members and whole regional branches departed in the years that followed. Former leaders founded a constellation of offshoot ministries, among them Christian Educational Services, later Spirit and Truth Fellowship, and dozens of independent home fellowships that kept Wierwille's teaching style while rejecting the parent body.

Martindale's own tenure ended in 2000 when he resigned as president amid civil lawsuits alleging sexual misconduct, suits the organisation settled, and Rosalie Fox Rivenbark succeeded him, presiding over a smaller, quieter ministry that keeps its headquarters and biblical research programme in New Knoxville, Ohio. Academic and journalistic attention has correspondingly shifted from the group's heresy disputes, chiefly its rejection of the Trinity, to its pattern of authority and schism, a case study in how a founder centred movement survives its founder: by dividing, and by contracting around the institution that holds the property and the name.