Introduction

I grew up, one of more then 500 youth during its 30-year life, in a religious community that many of its surviving youth, including myself, consider to be a cult. Funk and Wagnalls dictionary has a short to the point definition of a cult – zealous devotion to a person, ideal or thing. The Order embodied all of those traits. The adults called the youth “Emerging Generations,” we just called ourselves Order Kids.

Its official name was The Order: Ecumenical, but it was simply known as the Order by its members. A Charismatic preacher, professor and theologian, Joe Matthews, (He was also a Chaplin in the army during WWII and survived some rough fighting in the Pacific.) formed the idea of a family religious order in the late 50’s that grew to fruition in the early 60’s. He was the father figure that everyone, including me, loved and revered and who guided the Order through its maximum growth until his death in 1978.  Joe was also an alcoholic who was cold and often verbally and mentally abusive to his own children. (He is rumored to have used severe physical punishment occasionally as well.) 

Joe originally joined the first intentional religious community, “The Religious Life Community,” which was part of the University of Texas Theology Program. Joe started out as Dean of Religious Studies with the program and within a few years was the Dean in charge of the whole community experiment. His family along with at least 7 students and their families aimed to create the kind of religious community that he believed was at the core of Jesus’ teachings. Soon the Matthews and the other seven families moved to Chicago and became first the Ecumenical Institute and then The Order: Ecumenical.

They practiced a form of religious revolutionary and liberation theology that included the belief that community members should live together, share their resources equally, study and discuss intently issues and religious thought with emphasis on experiential learning, and finally that the community’s aim should be on helping disenfranchised people and communities by challenging the established church to be more responsive to the needs of the poor globally.

While this might be a good ideal, it manifested in many different ways some of which became corrupted and harmful to the children that were part of the Order. I do have a lot of love and respect for some of the adults in the Order. They were certainly courageous and hard working and did have some great impact with communities across the globe. During my late high school years, as the Order began to slowly disintegrate without Joe’s leadership, my final 2 sets of guardians really loved me and wanted me to succeed in life and I believe they helped prevent me from taking my own life to stop the seemingly unbearable pain and sadness that I lived with inside. I still consider the surviving guardian to be a sort of second mother and we still communicate with each other.

What really saved me though was finding my first true deep love when I was 17. I mark our long distance relationship, which continued on and off until I was 22, as the begging and end of my transition into adulthood. When it ended abruptly and painfully I was finally set free to enter into the next phase of my adventurous life

Here is a brief developing outline of my first 18 years - including some of my life statistics - and the 3 years following until I entered my adulthood. There is no denying that my 14 years in the Order defined me as a person. Even after 35 years, since I left the Order, I continue to reflect and try to understand, and to heal from the internal pain that growing up in the Order left me with. It has taken some time and a lot of work to look at my experience objectively striving to understand the decisions that my parents made, which impacted our entire family for the rest of our lives. While some parts of my life then were horrible, I have strived to take what good I can from the experiences I have had.

The Order taught me many things that have helped me in my life. I grew up with a global perspective; I felt the impact of, and participated in perpetrating, systemic racism at an early age; I learned: serving others is a great vocation; living in poverty is not a bad thing; how to budget; how to plan and cook meals for large groups of people; thinking critically and strategically is important in all aspects of life; a strong work ethic is vital to success; how to organize an event effectively and conquer my fear of talking in front of large unknown groups; and, probably most importantly, how to pretend I know what I am doing when I am just stumbling along in a haze trying to figure things out.

All of these tools have helped me through my life in all of its aspects. I am relatively happy with who I am - though I still strive to improve - and I know that I am the Me I am, and the me I am going to become, because of the Order.  Many of us surviving children of the Order continue to have a unique bond because of our common history and continue to communicate and support each other through web platforms, occasional newsletters, and reunions every few years or so. I think that it is pretty cool that I am still friends with some of the kids I was with in the Order pre-school, 53 years ago.