A relative of mine was a member of the "Ecumenical Institute" as my grandfather called it. In fact it was started as the Order: Ecumenical and that no longer exists but the Ecumenical Institute is the nonprofit spin off still around. This relative has passed on and yet the impact of this "sect" or "cult" has left its remains....so it's important to know more about it. So the relative's "boys were raised by someone else" - as I am told - because my relative was working all the time in the private sector with the funds going to the cult. So they joined around 1965 - to be trained in this "educational program" I suppose:
https://wiki.wedgeblade.net/bin/view/Main/EmergingGenerationStructures
Joe died in 78 and there was no charismatic leader to take his place. There appeared to be a lot of infighting and turf wars between the communes and the committee style leadership in Chicago with many differing opinions of ways to move forward. Without Joe’s strong spiritual cohesiveness, there was a struggle between the hardcore religious members and those who felt there should be a more secular manifestation in order to work more effectively in the diverse communities around the globe they were already established in.
Part of the religious philosophy of the Order was in performing daily ceremonies and rituals. We would get up at 5 every morning for a ceremony that usually lasted ½ an hour and then there would be rituals throughout the day and before each meal. They also wanted to reconstruct the role of the family. It was touted as a family order and parents with children were encouraged to join. By doing so the parents gave up some control of their children and the children were many times left in the care of adults who did not have their best interest at heart. They wanted to the Order to be one big family where everyone shared the responsibility of raising the kids. There was abuse, physically, sexually and mentally. Not all kids experienced this, but enough that it has continued to impact hundreds of peoples lives, and many have dealt with the trauma through addictions and therapy. Some continue to be confronted with the trauma and are still trying to deal with it and heal from it. We have an ongoing support group of second-generation Order members who communicate through newsletters, emails and reunions. One of the ways’s the Order attempted to reconstruct the family was by creating a tradition where the children were taken away from their parents after sixth grade. (I never lived with my parents after I was 11 until I was an adult and lived a couple of times with my mother.) They were gathered in Chicago and sent on a 6th grade trip together that usually involved some kind of rite of passage ceremony, and then they were kept in Chicago for two – three years for an intensive brainwashing type program in community living called the student house. As in any situation where 7th and 8th graders and in the early years 9th graders are kept against their will there is going to be a lot of rebellion and this was sometimes dealt with very harshly through physical punishment and beatings.
So this separation of the children from their parents - is definitely the sign of a cult.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28499745-grits-green-beans-and-the-holy-ghost
The members of the Order were self-sustaining. Some members were assigned to work in private industry so that their income could support the entire group. I went on several development calls to raise money for Order projects. I was always the junior partner, brought along to provide a local connection. One of the selling points was that the Order was self-sustaining so that 100% of all donations would go to the mission. I did not fully understand at the time the stress this put on Order families, particularly with regards to child care.
This book provides an inside look at the intense strain that the Order rules put on children and parents. After sixth grade, children were assigned to the “Student House” in Chicago so parents could dedicate all their time to the mission. Later, the children were typically assigned to one of the many Religious Houses around the world. Only rarely would the children be assigned to the same location as their parents after sixth grade.
The author of this well-written memoir is Carol Poole, a psychotherapist living in Seattle. Her family joined the Order when she was in fifth grade, having skipped fourth grade. That was 1974. In Fall, 1975, she was assigned to the Student House, and the adventures begin. The author does an excellent job of telling about the upsetting and traumatic events without compromising other’s privacy, and without dwelling too much on the impact on her own life.
One early event occurred in 1971 when she was sent to a summer camp run by the Order. The camp was named “New Jerusalem,” and was located on the Gulf of Mexico, somewhere near New Orleans. Part of the purpose was to provide child care while the parents participated in a four-week research assembly in Chicago. There were about 400 children. On the tenth day of camp, children began to get sick with dysentery caused by the Shigella bacteria. The outbreak affected the entire camp, and the health department quarantined it.
Although the outbreak began about halfway through the four-week research assembly, the leaders of the Order did not announce the epidemic to the parents, and the parents did not leave to retrieve their sick children. That is remarkable because the mortality rate for Shigellosis is about 10 percent. That’s rather sobering given that the mortality rate for the current Covid-19 pandemic is around 2 percent.
I knew something about this because I was at the research assembly in that summer of 1971. Afterward, when the children returned to Chicago, rumors spread quickly. The Order was very good at damage control. The Atlanta Religious House Prior told me about it later, anticipating that I might have been upset by the rumor. I was young, newly married, and children were not yet on my horizon. Sadly, I did not pay much attention.
Here is the author’s summary, many years later:
“Even if I can’t quite feel it, I see very clearly that this is one of the ways the Order really was a cult, a group that abused and neglected its children for the sake of an ideology that at times devolved into sheer nuttiness.”
The accusations that the Order was a cult were constantly circulating when I was involved. One of my friends, ex-military, was sure it was and wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Another friend and his wife joined up and moved to Chicago. I only knew the Order from the outside. Carol Poole tells us what this secretive organization was really like from the inside. While parts of this book were painful to read, her story has helped me bring some measure of closure to a very tumultuous period in my own life.
I just watched a series of hour documentaries on cults - on cabletv - one of them was about the Moonies. In a way the Order Ecumenical reminds me of the Moonies - intense rituals with training seminars mixed together and a vow of poverty for the members with the wealth donated to the group. The Moonies were and are a right-wing group whereas the Jim Jones Peoples Temple cult was a socialist marxist Christian cult - based on a similar methodology. The children were also separated from their parents.
https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/March-2018/Growing-Up-in-the-Order/
This was the headquarters of the Order: Ecumenical, as our religious organization was called. We all ate together in a big dining hall on the sixth floor. The food was government-issued. Sometimes, when members of the group from outside Chicago were visiting, we’d get treated to a big French toast breakfast, but most of the time it was processed cheese, white bread, and spaghetti with canned tomato sauce. We ate a lot of spaghetti.
The parenting philosophy in the Order might best be summed up as “total freedom until something goes wrong.” After all, that’s how a lot of the adults had been brought up, too. One of the things that surprise folks the most about my childhood is how much of it was spent far away from my parents. When I was 9 years old, I went by myself to India for four months to live with another family that belonged to the Order, which ran community building projects in countries all over the world. When I was 11, I left home again, to live in Australia. No one thought this was unusual. Going to live abroad at a young age was just what you did.
This also reminds me of the Mormons....
Today the Order: Ecumenical no longer exists as a religious entity. By the late 1980s, it had been formally dissolved, and the work of the ICA was being carried out by former Order families and by new staffers, many with no ties to the religious group.
https://www.realisticliving.org/twentieth/report1.htm
In 1962, Gene’s seminary professor, friend, and mentor Joseph W. Mathews led the creation of a Christian religious order of families rooted in the theology of Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and H. Richard Niebuhr.
Realistic Living is an outgrowth of the work begun by that body of people who called themselves The Order: Ecumenical.
Still earlier roots reach back to the prophetic writings of Søren Kierkegaard, and to the wondrous self-criticism and biblical scholarship that Christian scholars accomplished in the twentieth century.
Gene, his first wife Ruth, and their children joined the Order:Ecumenical in October of 1962. This order grew in its first few years from a group of nine families in Evanston, Illinois to a body of over 1200 adults and their children in 101 places around the world. It established two nonprofit corporations: the Ecumenical Institute and the Institute of Cultural Affairs. The former worked with local Christian congregations and trained leadership from many denominations throughout the world. The latter was involved in more secular work: town meetings, community development projects, and methods-training programs. A wide movement of people and activities came into being through the initiative of this religious order.
https://www.realisticliving.org/PDF/0Next/3LastDays1010.pdf
https://interiormythos.com/video/joseph-mathews-a-man-without-a-name/
Video about the "leader" of the Order: Ecumenical Cult - Joe Mathews
https://geon-history.blogspot.com/2011/11/ecumenical-institute-summer-1974.html
He was in Austin originally - he sounds like a Southern evangelical preacher to me.
He says - "what it means to be an individual in a family."
Then I hear a lot of circular logic.... as cult talk.
He sounds like some Hegelian socialist....using circular breathing for non-stop hypnosis!
https://icaglobalarchives.org/collections/institutes-history/training-church-leaders/
The Eccumenical Institute was an existentialist christian organisation. They had a summer conference in Chicago each year called the Research Assembly. It must have been 1974 when I went. The 'assembly' lasted four weeks during which I had many invitations to stay longer. Unfortunately I needed to get back to Salford and so didn't see more of the States. I did have a few trips out into Chicago, but the programme was intensive, perhaps intentionally so if attracting new recruits.
All the cooking and cleaning was done by the attendees on a rota basis, including night shifts cleaning the loos called something like' the hit squad'. The programme started at 6.00am for everybody. There were people of all ages but with 1000 delegates there were several dormitories of people my age. If you spent any free time socialising (chatting) then you would get a maximum of six hours sleep. After four weeks you were pretty shell shocked.
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