Dr. Juedes:  It’s what we live on, isn’t it?

Pawtucket: Yeah.  Yeah.

Dr. Juedes:  You know we don’t live on rules, we live on acceptance and grace. 

Pawtucket: Mmhmmmm.

Dr. Juedes:  And that’s what we look for most in a friend, a wife or a husband, you know, in a parent.  We look for grace.  It’s what keeps us going.  It encourages us, it inspires us.

Pawtucket: Right.

Dr. Juedes: I always think of the man who has a son who has a demon and Jesus says, Do you believe?  And he says, Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief.  I thought, this is me, this is humanity.  You know, we believe, but we don’t believe.  There’s always that element underneath there.  You know, we’re confident, but we’re afraid.

Pawtucket:  Right.

Dr. Juedes:  And the Lord responds right away, you know, and He heals the son.  And I think it’s a good picture of how accepting God is.  It’s important that we recognize our weakness or our guilt, our regret, or whatever, but we don’t have to be defensive about that, because see, if we admit those things He doesn’t reject us, and that’s what we’d expect.  You know, instead, He accepts and restores us and that’s the real breath of fresh air, the water in the desert that we look for and that we need.  And that’s partly for people who are on the periphery and also for people who have been involved in hurting others in both cases.

Pawtucket: Right.

Dr. Juedes: You know, sometimes when we have a keen sense that we’ve done something that injured someone, that’s when we almost say we’re not worthy of grace or worthy of forgiveness.  Well, the nature of grace and mercy is you aren’t worthy of it so just admitting that is how you receive that and that’s the goodness of God there.  Now when I think about the things going on in CES, you know part of that is some of the Way problems repeating themselves.

Pawtucket: Right.

Dr. Juedes: But how you deal with this, you can fall into the same trap that some people have had in leaving The Way also, what I tended to notice in the splinter groups of The Way is that they looked at themselves or their group and said, There’s nothing intrinsically wrong, just a few leaders didn’t apply or use this right.  You know, the problem isn’t the core beliefs or attitudes, the problem is how that was practiced and I don’t think that’s the case and one choice the people in CES now are going to have to make is are you going to recognize that there are some real core problems that caused this and it isn’t just a few people who are haywire? 

You know, so there are some core problems and one of them is the idea of submitting to the authority on personal matters as well as relational and spiritual ones.  The idea of personal prophecy is, the assumption is, you are submitting yourself to this prophet, and to the words of this prophet and that means you need to follow their direction.  You almost have to, you almost give up some of your personal responsibility in order to do that and that’s a basic core teaching and I don’t know if they explicitly teach that or not, but it’s certainly assumed behind that.

Pawtucket: Right.