(This is part 1 of part 1 of a two part series)
Down a dead-end gravel road so heavily traveled a wall of dust hangs like smog, a tent city springs from the fallow fields.
Pulsing music drifts across the scraggy plains.
Neon lights advertising elephant ears, corn dogs and fresh-squeezed lemonade adorn a string of carnival trailers.
Some 20,000 people—teenagers wearing black leather in the summer sun, twentysomethings who have tattooed wedding bands on their fingers instead of gold ones—move among big tops, a tug-of-war sand pit and a funnel cake vendor.On every available surface—the doors of portable toilets, the kiosk of 25-cent pay phones, the trunks of leafy oak trees—hang dozens of brightly colored handbills trumpeting the most anticipated event of the sweltering July weekend:
Water Baptism. Beach. Saturday, 1 p.m.
Held each summer near Bushnell, Ill., a no-stoplight town that doesn't even appear on most road maps, this four-day evangelical extravaganza is Woodstock with a twist. It's Goth meets God. Punk meets prayer. Hard rock meets the Holy Spirit.
Part concert, part fire and brimstone, part brazen self-promotion, the event, Cornerstone Festival, is the most modern and public outreach of Jesus People USA, a controversial Chicago-based sect that stands as one of the last surviving religious communes of an American generation. Despite an onslaught of criticism that the group is overly authoritarian, secretive about its finances and psychologically abusive, Jesus People USA continues to attract largely the same clientele it has for nearly 30 years: troubled, disillusioned, needy youth.
In the 1970s, when protesting the Establishment was a religion of its own, Jesus People members journeyed wherever the interstates took them, preaching a devout lifestyle to hippies tired of free love and drugs. In the 1980s, they launched punk-rock bands. And today, in an age of feng shui spiritualism and dot-com materialism, the commune draws so many converts through its flashy Web site and national magazine that there is a waiting list to get in.
Those who came to Cornerstone Festival last summer—a young man who hitchhiked from New York, a Christian youth group from west Texas, three sisters who drove their parents' mini-van from a farm town in North Carolina—were lured there by the big-name Christian bands, the campfires and cookouts, the seminars with titles like "Mustard Seed vs. McWorld: The Future of Faith." But almost none of them knew the tempest the commune has stirred in recent years.
They did not know that scores of once-loyal members have fled Jesus People USA since 1990, accusing the commune of exploiting them for free labor in its multimillion-dollar businesses, of making them so emotionally dependent on the group that they were terrified to return to the outside world, of leaving them so spiritually wounded they no longer believe in God.
They did not know the commune's rules discourage adult members from leaving the premises without an assigned "buddy"; require them to forgo worker's compensation and health benefits; and, during the group's earliest years, allowed for them to be spanked with wooden rods as punishment for sin.
And they did not know that all authority in the nearly 500-member group rests in the hands of eight unelected men and women, half of whom are related by blood or marriage.
What the festival-goers see on July 8, the final day of last year's Cornerstone Festival, is this: a well-oiled evangelical machine that specializes in full-immersion, assembly-line baptisms where spectators are reduced to tears and converts are elevated to talking in tongues.
Thousands of people gather on the shores of the lima bean-shaped lake carved from the center of the 500-acre farm. One of Jesus People's most visible and vocal leaders, a minister named Neil Taylor, wades into the murky water until it reaches his waist. He stands with his arms outstretched, palms up, as though catching raindrops. Then, with an almost imperceptible nod, he beckons the first convert of the day.
A high school girl steps forward. She pushes her way through the crowds and trudges out to where Taylor waits. Three times—"In the name of the Father, in the name of the Son, in the name of the Holy Spirit"—the young woman collapses limply into his waiting arms, her entire body, even her face, swallowed by the Water of Life.
More than 60 people follow. For almost an hour, long after his fingers had begun to prune and his long angular face has turned a deep, sunburned red, Taylor baptizes all of them with a prayer he knows by heart.
Just hours after the last convert has returned to dry land, the trampled and littered fields stand nearly desolate. Cars slowly make their way back down the gravel road, disappearing into the cornfields and dust.
Some return north. Some head south.
And members of Jesus People USA—with several newly baptized converts—drive east, to Chicago, to a threadbare building where everyone shares bathrooms and Bibles, money and mission, hardships and hope.
'Back on a Christian path'
The 10-story, 325-bedroom converted hotel rises from a trash-strewn stretch of Chicago's Wilson Avenue.
The front door is locked.
The first-floor windows are tinted.
And the umber brick building that sits down the block from a harshly lit Beef 'n' Fish and a stone's throw from the tracks of the "L" is hopelessly nondescript, save for a cobalt blue awning emblazoned with cheerful white lettering: The Friendly Towers.
Neil Taylor, a 47-year-old who sometimes preaches his Sunday sermons in a stonewashed denim jacket with the collar turned up, sees these lackluster surroundings as something akin to heaven on earth. On this humid summer day, he is sitting on the Friendly Towers' first floor, in the center of a crowded cafeteria with grease-stained walls, drab tile flooring and a persistent smell of burnt toast.
It's lunchtime, and people are praying loud. They are singing loud, and their hair is dyed in a dozen loud colors. A kid shouts to his mother, "What're we having for dinner?"
Like a parent accustomed to tuning out bedlam, Taylor is unfazed by the chaos. From behind wire-rimmed glasses, he sizes up the reclusive world he has helped govern for the better part of 30 years.
Jesus People USA is organized around verses laid out in the Bible. From Hebrews 13:17, "Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls." From Acts 4:32, "No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything in common." And from Matthew 25:45, "Whatever you did not do for the least of my brothers, you did not do for me."
The members of Jesus People USA also are united by the man-made rules that dictate their daily lives. Members are not to date for one year after joining, and they are encouraged to get the leaders' approval before marrying. Couples are encouraged to get permission and counseling before having children. Members work without pay for the commune's businesses.
That some of the commune's rules have been harsh or restrictive—and that members have been excommunicated for breaking them—is not disputed by Taylor. But speaking as a man with his own troubled past, Taylor says Jesus People's leaders have had no choice but to run the commune with an unyielding grip.
"A lot of people who are traditionally out of control come here," says Taylor, a stern but amiable father of two, "so they need serious limitations and guidance to get back on a Christian path."
To make his point, Taylor gestures toward a young woman with purple hair and piercings all over her face. She came to Jesus People USA with a history of drug problems, he says.
"We helped her," he confides.
And that guy not wearing any shoes: "We helped him too."
From the table where he sits, Taylor can see virtually the entire first floor of the once-grand hotel.
Near the front door is the "money office," a broom closet of a room where the commune's members fill out request forms for cash to buy everything from new underwear to train tickets to birthday presents for their children. A cluttered desk holds an automated telephone switchboard that answers every incoming call with the greeting, "Hi, Jesus loves you."
The front door to the Friendly Towers might just as well be a revolving one, with the number of people who are always rushing in and out.
The children home-schooled inside the commune hurry out to the adjacent playground for recess. Men and women leave after morning prayers every Tuesday through Saturday for eight-hour shifts in the commune's roofing supply company, woodworking shop and other local businesses. Those who work in the commune's cafeteria or on the housekeeping crews come and go with groceries and mops and bottles of disinfectant. And members carry boxes of donated clothes to the homeless shelter or one of the other charities the group runs in the neighborhood.
Dozens of elderly people shuffle through the hallways with walkers and stocking feet. Most of them were living without plumbing or electricity in the dilapidated Friendly Towers until Jesus People bought it in 1990, and—with hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars—turned the building's top three floors into an assisted-living center for them.
Each of the building's 10 floors has a communal kitchen and a communal living room. The one-room apartments have been transformed by Jesus People into beautiful spaces, with polished wood paneling, built-in cabinetry and loft-style beds.
"I look around here and I see beauty," Taylor says. "I see God."
The lunch crowd is thinning. A cluster of teenagers pray unabashedly in a corner; a man sings about Jesus while strumming an old guitar; parents sit at a nearby table, reading a large-print illustrated Bible with their rapt children.
"It's almost a miracle," he says.
For a long moment, Taylor is quiet.
"We've come so far."
Genesis of a church
In the beginning, Jesus People USA could fit its entire ministry in a cardinal-red school bus. The sagging, sputtering old Bluebird had 4-foot hand-painted letters that spelled "JESUS" across one side. And everywhere it stopped—from lakeside towns in Michigan's Upper Peninsula to rural hamlets in the South to a beach on the outskirts of Jacksonville—some two dozen long-haired, Bible-toting hippies would disembark to deliver 30-second sermons to anyone who passed.
"Jesus loves you," they would call out, completely undaunted when the people rolled their eyes or turned their backs. "Hey, did you hear us? JESUS LOVES YOU!"
It was the summer of 1972, and Jesus People USA—an offshoot of a Wisconsin evangelical troupe—was less than a year old. Jesus People USA and groups like it were urging people to turn away from a Vietnam-divided, do-your-own-thing society and join poor, transient ministries focused on ensuring the next life was better.
The message was a hit.
The Jesus People bus lurched out of Florida that fall, a "Honk if you love Jesus" sticker proudly pasted on its bumper. The believers on board, including Neil Taylor, who had given up drugs and alcohol after meeting the group on the beach, trusted God would provide them with gas, food and a divinely inspired road map.
Jesus People members stopped in virtually every town they came across to stand on street corners and introduce non-believers to Christ. The group led impromptu baptisms in placid public fountains, in muddy Missouri rivers, in cold Canadian streams. No one was turned away: not the young woman in Michigan who confessed to being strung out on marijuana and Eric Clapton, not the hitchhiker in Montreal who initially burst out laughing when one of the group's members quoted from John 3:16 while dressed as a clown.
Although Jesus People USA was far from the only mobile ministry out there, it was a highly visible one. A picture of the group's red bus appeared on the pages of Christianity Today, and the Chicago Tribune featured the group under the headline, "The young turn on to Christ." Parents who worried about their wayward children encouraged them to join. And at a time when most Christian music was staid and churchly, Jesus People USA started a Christian rock band—Resurrection Band—that soon was being tapped for a national record deal and drawing thousands of teenagers to concerts that often ended with the lead singer announcing, "God is calling two among you to join us."
Six months after pulling out of Florida with 41 believers on board, the oil-burning bus backfired one last time and broke down in Chicago.
The stranded travelers contacted a local minister to see if he could offer them shelter while they decided what to do. A soft-hearted cleric at Faith Tabernacle Church on the city's North Side said the Jesus People members could live in the church's unfinished, cinder-block basement for free.
That night, as the commune members carried what little they owned into the bleak church basement, they saw something that convinced them God intended them to stay in Chicago. The reflective green street sign on the corner said it all:
GRACE ST.
A hard life and hard rules
The girl didn't hop on a bus. She didn't raise her hand at a concert. She wasn't converted on a street corner or baptized in a lake. Like the other children who eventually would be raised inside Jesus People USA, Jennifer Cadieux simply followed her father.
Cadieux had just turned 9 when her father encountered Jesus People in 1973. The commune's band had been performing a Christmas concert at a suburban Aurora church, and Dennis Cadieux—who had long dreamed of being a foreign missionary—was so taken with the group that he decided to sell his family's home and lucrative printing business to join full time, Jennifer Cadieux recalls.
After the holidays, Dennis Cadieux donated tens of thousands of dollars to Jesus People USA and moved with his wife, Louise, and daughters, Jennifer and Cathy, to Grace Street. The couple would have two sons after joining the commune.
None of the progressively larger residences the commune eventually would own on Chicago's North Side—from a yellow-brick six-flat on Paulina Street to a sprawling apartment complex on Malden Avenue to the dorm-style Friendly Towers—could be mistaken for the Ritz. But that church basement where Jennifer Cadieux first encountered Jesus People USA undoubtedly was the worst.
The sewer routinely backed up, forcing everyone to sleep on thin mattresses atop sturdy, plastic milk crates. Water bugs the size of matchboxes skittered across the concrete floor. Maggots made their way into the loaves of bread.
"When we first were getting ready to move, my dad had pulled me aside," Jennifer Cadieux says. "He said there would be ponies and ducks and frogs and ponds, so I stopped worrying. But that wasn't what it was like at all."
During their earliest years in Chicago, Jesus People members routinely spent 12-hour days canvassing the city for souls in need of saving. They recruited at O'Hare, handing religious tracts to baggage-laden travelers. They proselytized on the sidewalks of Old Town, sometimes luring potential converts from the orange-robed Hare Krishnas who also worked the neighborhood. And they attracted hundreds of converts with Resurrection Band, which eventually was touring the U.S., Canada and Europe.