After Wierwille, the Breaking of a Ministry

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.