August 04, 1998

THE SCHOOL BUS

I didn't know what to expect when the old white school bus painted with Hebraic symbols and names pulled up in front of the old school house that I was inspecting with a guy who wanted to turn it into to either a church or a social service center.

A painted sign on the bus said that they were from a group called the "Wine Press". At least three hundred people including children live on the fifty acre farm near Bethel Springs. The average age of the people there is thirty. In back of the bus was the word "Yahshua" which is a very bad spelling of Y'SHUA.

At least thirty people from the farm had come on the bus. Their dress was what you could call "Jewish-hippie". There were a lot of young kids. The members were supposed to live like the tribes of Judah. There were eight tribes at the farm. The adults had taken on Jewish-like names but they did not know very much Hebrew.

I was quite concerned with the kids. Their expressions were all blank and they had no real idea about the world off the farm. I found out that they didn't go to school. What got me also was that they didn't really know how to play and they were fascinated when a train went passed the old school.

Another thing that concerned me was the name that the leader gave himself. When I first heard it, I thought it was Sh'ma, which in Hebrew is "Hear". Instead, the guy said that his name was Shama, which in Hebrew means "destroy". From what I had gathered in conversations with some of the members, was that it was felt that the members of the farm would be called upon to punish the people who had not accepted Y'SHUA during the End Times. My concern was that this was just a Revelationistic cult.