Ron Lafferty and Onias

Ron Lafferty and Onias were first bound by a shared project: building the School of the Prophets into a community devoted to receiving and interpreting revelation. Onias saw Ron and his brothers as crucial to that work, and Ron found a new position within it after a period of personal loss. Their relationship then became a test of the authority the school itself claimed to teach. When Ron’s revelations conflicted with Onias’s leadership, the group had to decide whether a prophet’s direction or an individual’s claimed word from God should prevail.

Alliance and the School’s Launch

Onias admired the Lafferty brothers’ energy and believed they could advance his ambitions for the School of the Prophets. The brothers printed, folded, and collated more than fifteen thousand pamphlets, then addressed and mailed them to Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints leaders around the country. What Onias said would have taken months in spare time, they completed in two weeks of day-and-night work. Their labor helped the newly established school begin meeting weekly in early 1984, usually upstairs from the family chiropractic clinic at the Provo home of the brothers’ mother, Claudine.

Onias interpreted the brothers’ arrival in providential terms. On January 8, he received a revelation saying that God had chosen the Lafferty boys before their birth as an elect people. Six weeks later, another revelation instructed him to appoint Ron bishop of the school’s Provo chapter. Onias gladly did so, and the school’s members approved. Ron’s younger brothers, including Dan, already looked up to him, so his new office formalized an influence he held within his family as well as giving him authority in the group.

A Place of Belonging for Ron

The appointment came when Ron was enduring a cascade of losses. He had been excommunicated from the church he loved, his family had divorced him and moved to Florida, and he had lost both his job and the house he had built. With no regular income and little left of material value, he was living in his 1974 Impala station wagon. In his journal, he described prayer and scripture study as responses to these setbacks, and treated them as experiences that had deepened his relationship with God.

The School of the Prophets offered Ron more than an office. Rejected by his wife and scorned by his community, he poured himself into the school, which became his family and his world. He helped send its pamphlets to Church leaders, urging them to abandon what he considered an ungodly course. The school’s central purpose—teaching members how to receive and interpret revelations—also gave Ron a route to religious authority that did not depend on the institutions that had excluded him. His bishopric under Onias and his own access to revelation initially appeared compatible; the school’s subsequent crisis showed how unstable that arrangement was.

Revelation and Growing Conflict

As Ron’s instruction in revelation began, he became the first of Onias’s students to receive a commandment. On February 24, sitting at a computer borrowed from Bernard Brady, he waited for what he understood as the spirit of the Lord to guide his fingers across the keys. He received further revelations on February 25 and February 27. Dan watched with fascination. Ron described the process to him as sometimes unfolding one word at a time, with the meaning becoming clear only after the message was complete, and at other times arriving in phrases.

Meanwhile, Ron’s behavior toward Onias changed. Onias recalled that the once-kind man became angry and controlling, using his position as bishop to dictate to others and taking offense when they did not comply. A disagreement over how to fund a proposed City of Refuge beneath the Dream Mine sharpened the divide. Onias urged members to seek employment; Ron argued that God would provide the necessary wealth by miraculous means. Ron’s revelation directing Mark to Nevada to bet on a horse race offered a supposed solution. The bet failed, and Onias’s subsequent reminder that he had warned against it further damaged relations.

A dispute over sacramental wine escalated the challenge to Onias’s authority. After visiting John W. Bryant’s commune in Oregon around Thanksgiving 1983, Ron had taken part in rituals that used wine and came to regard it as a gift from God. Back in Utah, he pressed the school to replace the juice or water ordinarily served at meetings with wine. At a March 9 meeting, he continued drinking after the sacrament and became drunk. According to Onias’s account, Ron mocked him for refusing the wine, questioned whether Onias was fit to lead, and suggested that the Lafferty brothers should take over. Dan and Watson supported Ron. The issue was no longer only a difference about ritual: Ron was openly disputing who had the right to direct the group.

The Rejection of Ron’s Revelation

The decisive break came when Ron brought his removal revelation to the school. On April 5, he showed it to the nine men present and asked them to determine whether it was a valid commandment. Ron, Dan, and Watson supported accepting it; the other members rejected it. Ron, Dan, and Watson became angry, left the meeting, and ended their association with the school. The vote turned an increasingly personal and practical dispute into an explicit contest over religious authority.

Onias’s teaching had encouraged members to seek and interpret communication from God. Yet that principle could produce revelations that contradicted the prophet who had established the school. The school’s refusal to accept Ron’s revelation exposed this contradiction: for Ron and Dan, God’s word outranked the word of a human prophet, while Onias and the other members rejected Ron’s claim. Onias’s relationship with Ron thus moved from sponsorship and appointment to confrontation and separation. The school had helped Ron find purpose and status after his losses, but its rejection of his revelation ended their alliance and left the competing claims of prophetic authority unresolved.