|
|
Home
|
Episode 8 - Dr John Juedes Part 1 Transcript |
|
|
|
Page 4 of 6
Pawtucket: Right. When untethered, like, I suppose one thing that
I’ve seen so many times is the arrogance of leadership, the thing about
being a servant versus being the guy that’s driven around in the limo
or the golf cart at the Rock of Ages or something.
Dr. Juedes: Yeah, that’s humility and certainly if you look at what’s
said in the bible about, say, Moses, you know, the must humble guy on
the earth, and Christ himself, you know, you need that humility to keep
that arrogance from developing.
Pawtucket: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Juedes: I teach some leadership classes to leaders and the first
couple sessions are just about how your character affects your ministry
and the weaknesses of your character are going to show up in your
ministry just as the strengths of your character do. So unless you
deal with those spiritual, emotional character issues in yourself, or
compensate somehow for them, they’re going to do a lot of damage
because as a leader, who you are is more important than what you know.
Who you are is more important than what you do, so that’s why the
qualifications for an elder or deacon in Timothy and Titus are almost
entirely character things, they aren’t ministry or to some degree,
they’re behavior, but they aren’t ministry or skills or anything like
that. They’re almost entirely character because who you are means more
than what you know. That’s where V.P. Wierwille really lost it is
there were some real deep character problems as far as use of women and
arrogance and a desire for power, things like this, and they yield bad
fruit. It might take a while for it to show up, but really bad fruit.
Pawtucket: Speaking of that, you had said, to quote a paragraph where
you were talking about Ralph Dubofsky had offered a caution in 1988,
you recognized a tendency to latch on to all E.W. Bullinger wrote
because most of what Doctor has taught you over the years has been
Bullinger, though V.P. never gave him credit and you made a statement
of “so you need to resurrect critical thinking based on the Word.”
Dr. Juedes: You know, I think there’s been too little critical
thinking. I often think of when people were in The Way there was
always this impression that they thought for themselves, and as an
outsider, they all think exactly alike.
Pawtucket: Yeah.
Dr. Juedes: I don’t see any independent thinking here. But they saw
themselves as that. And that’s part of, I guess kind of a
self-deception that happens and it really does take a better level of
critical thinking to do that and maybe it’s most useful to have some
kind of outside input to do that, you know, that’s part of the idea of
the articles on my web site and a lot of what you do at GreaseSpot as
well, is you try to have some outside input and challenge people to
think about this, think it through. See, it’s hard to do it just on
your own, I think, but it’s important to do that. And to compare what
the facts are to what you really think or believe. And people have
trouble doing that and that’s why some of the things we put on our web
site are actually examples so, you know, plagiarism or pictures of
certain things so that people really think, you know, challenge your
image of people and your beliefs.
Pawtucket: Biblical research. The Way really went into that to the
point that it almost excluded what I look at as like the social aspects
of a church, you know, feeding the hungry, you know, things like that.
You have a program where you build, or you used to do the building
houses?
Dr. Juedes: Yeah. Our church goes to Mexico twice a year to build
houses for needy families there. We raise the funds here, we send it
ahead so they can buy the materials and then we go over and we build
two houses in spring and two houses in fall. We’ve never had trouble
getting funds for that, like once people see the depths of the need,
they respond and that’s a wonderful thing to see. That’s a regular
part of our ministry.
There are some other programs we do, like, you know, making Christmas
gift boxes with Samaritan’s verse in the fall and some other things as
well. You know, that’s a prominent thing in the New Testament. Judas
leaves to betray Jesus and they assume that he’s gone to give money to
the poor. Why is that? Because it was normal for them. You know,
Paul goes to see the apostles and agrees they’re on the same page as
far as ministry and their only caution that they have for Paul is,
‘Well remember the poor.’ So it’s definitely a strong part of that.
Maybe in our society we’ve moved towards the government doing things
for people and try not to think about our personal part of that. Yeah,
and I think that’s something that we build into our church ministry
because I think it’ll happen less on your own if you just do it on your
own and that’s part of the benefit of being attached to a church or a
fellowship because you can structure some of those things and build the
discipline of doing that, which people may not have that discipline on
their own.
|
|
Last Updated ( Monday, 05 February 2007 )
|
|
|
