Steve Lortz

When I was involved with TWI, I didn't bother listening to what people from other persuasions had to say because I knew that they were "mistaken" in some categories, and that mistaken-ness corrupted everything else they had to offer. After I had left TWI and realized the error of some of the things I had been teaching, I thought, "Well, because I taught error in that one category, it didn't change the truth of what I was teaching in other categories..." And then I realized the same thing was true about EVERYBODY else! There isn't anybody who is 100% correct, but likewise, there isn't anybody that I can't learn something from, even if what I learn is simply how NOT to read the Bible... That's when I started investigating how other people interpreted various passages, and that's when I really started to learn things about the Bible, FROM the Bible, other than what I heard in PFAL. In some of our classes at the School of Theology, we write exegesis papers each semester. They are the big projects of the semester, and we present them in class to defend them under questioning. The passage of scripture may only be about a handful of verses long, but the exegesis papers are expected to be 10 to 12 pages long. We get to tell what we think the verses mean, and why we think that, but only after reviewing what the scholarly community has said about the passage since 1985. Most of the paper is describing how various scholars have argued over the meaning of the passage in the recent past, and then we get to make our contribution to the argument. That's how genuine scholarship is really done. In 1988 or '89, John Lynn moved back to Indianapolis. He had banded together with John Schoenheit and Mark Graeser (though neither Schoenheit nor Graeser lived in Indianapolis) to form Christian Educational Services. The purpose of the organization was to throw out the bath water of PFAL without throwing out the baby. I lived within easy driving distance, so I became relatively heavily involved with CES. That involvement was certainly not as intense as my involvement with TWI had been. John, John and Mark picked away at things they perceived to be errors in PFAL, but they were never willing to consider that Wierwille's teachings on "administrations" was also an error. They misidentified it as THE baby! Everything they've done since then, in the offshoot that was CES and in CES's own offshoots, has been to defend their definition of the mystery, or GOD'S SACRED SECRET, as they've come to call it. In Ephesians 3:6 Paul stated the content of the mystery that had been revealed to him, "that the Gentiles should be fellowheirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel." Nothing about an age, nothing about grace, nothing directly about the Church, nothing directly about Jews, something only about Gentiles. Darby's fundamental assumption, expressed by Scofield in his Reference Bible, was that the Church is a wholly new thing, completely separate and discontinuous from Israel. The truth is that the Church is composed of the believing remnant of Israel under the New Covenant promised in Jeremiah 31, with believing Gentiles grafted in on the same basis as believing Jews, by grace through faith in the resurrection and Lordship of Jesus Christ. Wierwille was wrong in his definition of what the Christian Church IS. Lynn and Schoenheit have BOTH magnified Wierwille's original error, thinking that they are the only ones who are "saving the baby." When I was involved with TWI, I was an ignorant fool. In many ways I am still an ignorant fool, but not in the same way. When I was involved with TWI, I was unconscious of my ignorance and my foolishness, but at some point, I was humble enough to admit it, and shed the arrogance I had learned from Wierwille. Neither Lynn nor Schoenheit have been humble enough to recognize the truth about their selves or their efforts. They are both still promoting ignorant foolishness, and it just makes me sad, because I like them both as people. I have sampled parts of Schoenheit's REV. He probably picked the ASV to use as a frame because it has been in the public domain for a long time. He has used a very light hand in changing the text. It's hard for me to tell what's original and what Schoenheit changed without an unaltered copy of the ASV to compare. Where Schoenheit really loads it up with his own interpretation is in his "commentary." His commentary is very dense with references to the Greek, but it's Greek that has no bearing on his real problem, that the word oikonomia is NEVER used in the Bible to mean "a period of time." The Greek word aion DOES mean "a period of time," but if you track its use through Paul, it totally contradicts the scheme Wierwille taught about "administrations." CES published a piece called "22 Principles of How the Bible Interprets Itself" Both TLTF and STFI still use the piece. I think TLTF changed the title, but I have no idea how they split the intellectual property. "22 Principles" constitutes a "systematic theology." A systematic theology starts out deriving a system for interpreting the Bible, and then forcing the texts to conform to the system. Systematic theology stands in distinction from "constructive theology" that allows the text to speak for itself. Systematic theology says "the single difficult verse must be read in light of the many clear verses." Constructive theology says "the single difficult verse tells you that your conception of the 'many clear verses' may not be as clear as you think it is." Love, Steve

I deliberately decided to post this thread on the open forum because it is not exclusively about TWI or exclusively about doctrine though it incorporates aspects of both those things. In some ways, it's about how we view ourselves: how we viewed ourselves then, how we view ourselves now, and how we will view ourselves in the days to come. I think Ham gets it. We thought of ourselves as great Bible scholars. We viewed anybody who disagreed with us as an ignorant fool, no matter what credentials that person held. But the truth was, WE were the ignorant fools, taken in by a snake oil salesman. Am I mourning the truth that I was an ignorant fool? No, there isn't much profit in that. What's been done has been done. I'm just being objective about what I was during the time I believed Wierwille. "Cursed is the man who trusts in man, who makes flesh his arm, and who turns his heart from the LORD." Jeremiah 17:5 There's more to say, but my meds are kicking in, and I'm too drowsy to go on right now... Love, Steve

I've spent the last four years working on a master's degree in theological studies at the Anderson University School of Theology. The fact that I've been working at it so long is because I've had health problems that have caused delay, and I've had to take a number of courses over again after medical withdrawals. When I started working on the degree, I thought I might be able to use it, along with an acquired proficiency in Greek, to teach at a classical academy... but I seriously doubt whether I'll have the strength and stamina to teach again. After my latest round in the hospital, my social security was switched over from age-related to disability. So I've been thinking, why the heck am I still working on this degree? and how the heck will it affect my sense of identity (something we've been discussing on another thread), since I probably won't ever be a teacher again? A few days ago, I had an interview with my faculty adviser (for the first time in two years) and I spent some time asking him about his adventures in the SBL (Society of Biblical Literature). The SBL is like a giant Bible fan club for geeks. But they are professional geeks. After I left the Navy in 1976, I became involved with adventure gaming on a national level to stay connected with people outside of my narrow life. From 1980 to 1987, I was involved with TWI as a larger social context, but I continued to stay active professionally in the adventure game field, and so I had a network to fall back on when I decided to leave TWI in 1987. Since 2008, my social circle has been narrowing again, to the point where it's now just my classmates at the SOT and my surviving family. So I've decided to join the Society of Biblical Literature as a full member, even though I am not actively doing biblical work in a professional capacity, to extend my social network among like-minded people (though the members of the SBA are as diverse as anything you could ever imagine), and to revise my identity as a person who is still interested in something bigger than myself. I will never, ever again get as deeply involved with a religious "denomination" as I was with TWI, but SBL is more like a fan club and debating society. Nobody is judged at the SBL by the results you come up with, but rather by the quality of your thinking and research. Yesterday, I was thinking, "If somebody was trying to get me interested in a religious group today, I would ask what kind of standing their researchers had in the SBL." That would tell me more about their attitudes toward the Bible than anything else would. That got me to thinking what it might be like if somebody from Spirit and Truth Fellowship, or The Living Truth Fellowship or Liberating Ministries for Christ International approached me. So today I went to all of their websites, and tried to view them from the perspective of someone who DID NOT have an intimate knowledge of them and how they work, but instead as somebody who just stumbled on them from their Youtube presences. The experience was disgusting and humbling. They are ALL slick, slick, slick... but they all rely on the ignorance of the people coming to them. They all take advantage of that ignorance by promising knowledge and power, but it's obvious to anybody who has done any real Bible study that their promises are empty and fraudulent. And they ALL learned it from Wierwille. In the part of PFAL where Wierwille told the story of how he took all his books out and burned them, and then of how God taught it all to him from scratch, he was perpetrating one of his most heinous sins (though it was short of his serial sexual predation). What he trashed with that story was our desire to go and check the things he was teaching against what other, bona fide Bible scholars were saying. What a fool I was... Love, Steve

I've been struggling how to respond to this question ever since the thread was first posted... The identity I thought I was building for myself was totally destroyed in the fall of 1971, when I was 22 years old in the Nuclear Navy. For two-and-a-half years, I had been identifying myself as my fiance's soon-to-be-husband. The reason I was in the Nuclear Power Program was to acquire a marketable skill in order to support her. When she rejected me, I lost my identity. I didn't know how to make any decisions because I didn't know who I was. I found myself in the position of continuing to be a sailor whether I liked it or not, so I decided to be Popeye, and that's what I did for the next few years. In 1973 I went over the hump... that is, my enlistment was half over, and I began to think about getting out. I looked around me and saw fellows, bound and determined to leave the Navy, but 30 days after their discharges, they'd be back in. They didn't know how to be anything but sailors. They didn't know how to think like civilians anymore. I swore that wasn't going to happen to me, so in 1974 I set out on a deliberate course to re-learn how to think like a civilian BEFORE my discharge date. That was when I started consciously picking things to do that would re-shape my identity! I joined the Alternate Recreational Realities Group of Hawaii (ARRGH!), a civilian wargame group that met at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu. I joined two other civilian groups whose memberships partially overlapped with ARRGH!'s, a local proto- (VERY proto-) chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism, that engaged in live-action medieval martial arts/roleplaying, and the local chapter of the Mythopoeic Society, a sci-fi/fantasy monthly book club. When I had been in boot camp, I knew they were tearing down parts of my identity to replace them with things that would turn me into a sailor, and I consciously went along with the process to minimize friction. After 1973, I used the knowledge I had learned about how to fiddle with my identity to take my experiences with my new-found civilian friends and use them to re-civilianize my identity. During that time, I was also introduced to that identity-machine par excellence, Dungeons & Dragons! In '76 I got out of the Navy and did okay. I had a lot of adventures on San Francisco Bay, but in 1979 I found everything I was pursuing out there coming to a dead end, and I moved back to Muncie, IN, to go to school at Ball State with my brother. I felt sad about leaving all my friends in Baghdad by the Bay, so I made up an affirmation. Whenever I started to feel sad, I would repeat to myself "The people who I need to have come into my life are coming into my life right now!" until I didn't feel sad anymore. And I watched for those people to appear. That was when I got witnessed to, but I didn't jump right into this twig/way thing. I had brushes with all kinds of cults in Honolulu and San Francisco, including the Hare Krishnas, Scientology and Synanon, as well as some small locally-grown groups whose names are well and truly forgotten. For a time, I lived in a boarding house in San Fransico, and we residents often discussed the cult recruiters we would encounter on the streets, and how their groups operated. I tested these way people. I would deliberately fail to show up when I told them I would, just to see if their attitude toward me would change. Sometimes I would show up when I told them I wouldn't, to find out if they were doing something differently when I wasn't there. I tested them for about a year before I gave in to their gentle pressure and signed the green card. It wasn't until a long time later that I realized there were no Corps in that fellowship. If there had been, I would probably have been put off by Corps attitudes and behavior. So... during the time I was involved with TWI I was sometimes aware of what was happening with my identity, and sometimes I wasn't paying enough attention. There was a thing that happened to me on L.E.A.D. that had a powerful effect on my identity, but it was the Lord who pulled it off, and not the organization or doctrine of TWI. One day I got up before anybody else in my L.E.A.D. twig's camping area, and I barfed. Later, breakfast got cooked, and after eating a few bites, I barfed again. We went hiking to the wall we were going to climb and I started to feel sick again so my coordinator had me drink about a quart of slippery elm. Oddly enough, I stopped barfing after that. We got to the wall, and I did a couple of easy climbs. My coordinator came over and told me I wouldn't have to do the hard climb (about 75 feet) since I wasn't feeling well. I decided to do the hard climb anyway. I did very well. Even when I stopped to rest, I was continuing to look above me to find the next hand and foot holds, focused on the climb. I had seen other people break down and swear or cry in the middle of their climbs, but I never felt like that. As we used to say in submarine escape training "I FEEL FINE!" I got to the top and took my place to help handle the rope for the next climber coming up (I forget the technical name for the position), and as I sat there taking up the slack, I felt an overwhelming sense of disappointment and failure. Why did I break down AFTER the trial was past? I spent about a year trying to figure that out. First, I put the feelings into words... "if I can win at climbing these rocks, why can't I win at the bigger issues of life?" I realized that I had identified myself as a loser when my fiance rejected me. But how could I change THAT identity? I couldn't get her back, and if I could, I would have wasted all those years (about 15). One day, as I was contemplating the statement "Jesus Christ is my complete substitute for sin and for the consequences of sin," I realized that Jesus Christ had been rejected by his fiance, too, but that didn't make him a loser! Israel was Christ's bride, and he was rejected by her. After Peter had denied Jesus three times, and their eyes met, Jesus felt every bit of the sorrow and humiliation that ANYBODY has ever felt being rejected by a loved one. And yet he did not become a loser. In the flesh of Steve Lortz, my identity was as a loser, but in Christ, my identity might not be that of an all-conquering superhero, but it isn't as a loser anymore. The Lord gave me Elizabeth for a wife, and we have been married 24 years, come November second. Has our marriage been what I imagined marriage to be when I was in my late-teens and early-twenties? NO! It has been much better than I ever imagined. Speaking of being an all-conquering superhero, as I've been contemplating this thread, I've asked myself, what WAS the identity I took away from PFAL? I think I'd have to say, "I'm a son of God with power." That can be a useful thing, as long as we don't think more highly of ourselves than we ought, like it says in Romans 12:3, another verse Wierwille turned on its head. But that identity can get WAY out of hand without much encouragement. For several years, I've been wondering why certain people are SO COMMITTED to Wierwille's errors regarding the mystery. The other day, I saw a video where John Lynn was promoting the latest iteration of his never ending cycle of classes. He was standing in front of a chart listing the "administrations" and explaining that Adam was a Gentile, as if this were a revelation to rock the foundations of a person's understanding of the Bible. I thought, "That's so ho-hum... what's the big deal with that to John Lynn?" I thought, "Well, I've been in seminary far to long now (primarily due to health problem delays)... what have I learned about Adam?" And then it struck me, in the Bible Adam is the prototypical HUMAN BEING designed, made, formed and created by the LORD God Almighty, Creator of the heavens and the earth! Adam was the greatest human being who ever lived with the sole exception of Jesus Christ! By teaching that there are three types of people on the earth, Jews, Gentiles and the Church of God, Wierwille was teaching that Christians are the ONLY people who are fully HUMAN. Wierwille said that only Christians are composed of the whole three parts, body, soul and spirit. Christians are the only people who are fully human, and followers The Way International are the only Christians who KNOW THAT THEY KNOW THAT THEY KNOW they are fully human. Every body outside of TWI is functionally less than human. How's THAT for an identity kicker!?! We've all still got a lot of deep doo-doo to flush out of us!!!!! Speaking of manipulating identity, I think the primary tool for doing that in TWI was the artificial language we used to distinguish ourselves from outsiders. Love, Steve

When I was in-rez at Gunnison, and I had a little time to myself, I'd sneak up into the library... nobody else ever went there... and read the reproductions of old dime novels that were there. Love, Steve

I just realized, while reconsidering John's contribution to the video you posted, DontWorryBeHappy, how colossally arrogant and ignorant it is to teach that Adam was a Gentile. Colossally arrogant and ignorant of Wierwille as well as of Lynn. Adam was NOT a Gentile! There WERE NO Jews or Christians then, so there couldn't be any Gentiles either. Adam was primarily a HUMAN BEING. Not just any human being, but until the woman came along, Adam was THE human being... designed and created by God himself. Adam was an unfallen human being, vastly superior to anyone else except for Jesus Christ himself... including every Christian currently alive... including Wierwille and Lynn. In practice, Wierwille's doctrine of "Jews, Gentiles and the Church of God" destroyed the dignity and respect with which we are to regard other people as fellow HUMAN BEINGS. Wayfers don't consider anyone except themselves to be fully human. Other people are merely "empties floating by." I Corinthians 10:32, the verse from which Darby extracted his doctrine of Jew, Gentile and Church of God, says that we are not to give offense to anybody, neither to Jew nor to Gentile nor to Church of God. Darby took that verse and TURNED IT INTO AN OFFENSE against Jew, Gentile AND the Church of God, because Darby used it to teach members of the Church that they should think more highly of themselves than they ought. No wonder the principal members of what was CES are so committed to their erroneous definition of the mystery. It makes them better than any other people. It makes people other than themselves less than human... No wonder they continually miss what the real gospel... the real good news... is. They think the good news is "Our doctrine can make you better than anybody else! Surely you want to be better than anybody else! GET A CHART! GET A LIFE!" Love, Steve

I browsed around on their Youtube channel for a bit. There are a few channels I like to watch a lot of... but this is NOT one of them. I would have the heck embarrassed out of me if I was associated with this channel. I like to see what John is up to occasionally. From 1989 to 1996 I followed John fairly closely... just about the same amount of time I spent involved with TWI. I contributed to the Dialogue newsletter, and when he was on the road, John let me teach the fellowship that met in his home. At first, he wanted to save the things he considered good about TWI and get rid of what was bad. But there was no fear of the LORD before his eyes... he learned that from Wierwille... and he flattered himself so much that he lost the ability to distinguish what was good from what was bad (Psalm 36:1-4). I liked John as a person, but he's been gone off the rails for a long time. So much so, that he thought Momentus was a good thing, and far too many peoples' lives were wrecked by it. John's cluelessness makes him dangerous, in the worst way. In the last days of CES before the shift to Stiffy, John, John and Mark decided to host a seminar addressing various questions that people had brought up. I wrote and submitted a paper about how fallacious dispensationalism (Wierwille's "administrations") is. My paper was solid research. Instead of considering and rebutting viewpoints other than their own, they cancelled the seminar. I don't attribute their decision to my paper alone. There were others, too. The upshot of this paragraph is that the leaders of Stiffy and the Teenage Mutant Truth Fellowship have had an opportunity to seriously consider the truth about what they are teaching, and they deliberately chose to ignore that truth. "GET A CHART! GET A LIFE!" What kind of rallying cry is THAT! The rallying cry I taught to my seventh-grade students was "EXERCISE JUDGMENT!" It struck me from the time I started to really question the things John says that he often makes the most audacious claims, unconsciously equating himself with God and the Word. "GET A CHART! GET A LIFE!" reminds me of Proverbs 4:20-23. Wisdom's words are life to those who find them, and health to all their flesh. There is nothing... and I mean NOTHING... on TMTF's chart that communicates the gospel of salvation... nothing that communicates life or health. There is a fifteen minute video on the channel titled "Social Media Tips" about how to use the stickers on facebook. I thought "what is this? a clever scheme for promoting their group on facebook?" IT WASN'T! It was the most stupid, insipid, condescending drivel I've EVER viewed! John thinks he is being media savvy, but he is just once more demonstrating his cluelessness. And the fact that Adam was a Gentile is some kind of ignorance-shattering revelation that will motivate people to take a class on THE END TIMES!!!! OH EM GEE Love, Steve

You guys have hit on the truth regarding the real successes of "TWI". It had nothing to do with the content of the classes. It had everything to do with the heart of service that so many people had, who believed the things Wierwille PREACHED about Jesus and the Bible instead of the things VP TAUGHT and DEMONSTRATED by his actions. It had nothing to do with the leadership's plans to move the word over the world. It had everything to do with seemingly anonymous people on the field exhibiting the hospitality of God's heart to strangers, with no prospect of remuneration. Those were the real heroes of "TWI," those were the wayfers who truly showed people the love of God, those were the people who are going to receive real rewards when the time comes. I too am thankful for those people. And their absence came about because Martindale, in all his stupidity, drove them away... Love, Steve

The more I have participated on this thread, johniam, the more I have come to appreciate what you wrote in your first post. It seems that you and I have some things over which we we can agree to disagree, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate you as my brother in Christ, and as the unique expression of God's love that you are. You fell in love with TWI and Wierwille. So did I. We just had different experiences coming out of our encounters with TWI. God has recently flung me back into intimate contact with a religious community that I had to walk away from about five or six years before I ever heard of TWI. That community formed in the late 1800s, but believed that there is only ONE church of God, and that creeds are man-made and divisive. This group never participated in the fundamentalist conferences, and so never ended up subscribing to the idea of literal inerrancy of the Bible. But the group was very much into music, and there are several nationally known gospel singers who came out of the tradition. It struck me that the mindset of this group was not handed down through the sermons that the ministers taught, or articles and books that the writers wrote, but through the lyrics of the songs the congregations sang. I was reminded of that when I was reflecting on your first post that I just quoted. Many of us experienced the unconditional love of God in our local twigs. If that love didn't come from Wierwille and Power for Abundant Living, where DID it come from? I am inclined now to think that unconditional love was modeled to the people of TWI by the hippies Wierwille brought back from California. It seems that THEY might be the original "rock stars" of TWI... What do the rest of you think? Love, Steve

Was the fall of Jerusalem in the sixth century BCE REALLY God's immediate judgement on OT people? Is it REALLY irrelevant to us today? You say I know this. What do I REALLY know? I know this. Paul wrote in Romans 15:4 that the accounts of the fall of Jerusalem were written for our learning... for OUR learning. According to Wierwille all of God's wonderful matchless Word in the Old Testament and in the Gospels has been totally irrelevant to US since the Day Of Pentecost. Yet here in Romans, written AFTER the Day of Pentecost, Paul, the man who received the revelation of the mystery, tells us that everything written before-time was written for US to learn things from! Wierwille taught in Power for Abundant Living that Romans 15:4 says the Hebrew Bible, which was all that had been written before Paul, was written FOR us, but not TO us, therefore we can safely ignore whatever parts of it we don't like. In PFAL, Weiwille was forcing Romans 15:4 to mean the exact opposite of what it actually says. If you stop and carefully examine what Wierwille taught, he often desecrated the Word of God that way. Romans 15:4 tells us that the accounts of Jerusalem's 6th century BCE fall were written for US Christians, living in the same time as Paul, to learn something from. What are we supposed to learn from them? We have to have a little background first. Salvation for Israel in the OT was the Exodus from Egypt. Israel was saved BEFORE the law was given and the covenant of Sinai was cut. People did not have to work to earn salvation in the Old Testament. After the Exodus, they were automatically born into the covenant community. Keeping the law was NOT a means to salvation, it was how saved people were supposed to behave out of thanksgiving for their salvation. Sin did not automatically exclude a person from the covenant community. Sacrificial atonements freed them from the consequences of their sins. Those atonements were symbols for the full atonement that would come with the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. The heart of the law was not for people to keep all the picky little details, the heart of the law was for people to extend the same mercy and righteouness toward others as God had extended to them in the Exodus. Time went by, the united kingdom of Israel was set up (later to be divided into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah). God had his symbolic home in the Temple at Jerusalem. Because the leaders of Israel led their people out from under the covenant, Samaria, the capital of Israel fell to the Assyrians in 722 BCE, but Jerusalem miraculously escaped the same fate. So the leaders of Judah taught their people that they were invulnerable because God's Temple was in Jerusalem. They could never "lose their salvation" the way the ten tribes of the north had, whether they kept the heart of the law or not. So what was going wrong in Jerusalem? First, according to Isaiah 9:16-17, it was the leaders who were responsible for the problems. It was not the "leaves on the tree" failing to run the classes strictly enough. It was the leaders' hypocrisy, speaking the truth of the law, but behaving lawlessly. According to Jeremiah 23, the hypocrisy was exactly the same as TWI's... adultery... teaching that people are to be loved and things to be used, but using people and loving things. The prophets told the people of Judea that they were immune to having the same judgment fall on them as had fallen on Samaria, because God's Temple was in Jerusalem, and God would NEVER let it fall, even if the people didn't keep the law. The people didn't reform, and Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians, and the Temple was destroyed in 587 BCE. Israel has never fully recovered since then. As Christians we were saved when we received the gift of the Holy Spirit under the new covenant, not by works, but by grace through faith. After we received salvation, we received a law that we are supposed to keep out of thanksgiving for our salvation. That is the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, written on the tables of our hearts, and it does NOT contradict the 10 commandments. Wierwille taught us that grace freed us from having to keep any law whatsoever. We can sin however we want to, whenever we want to, and we will be still be invulnerable to the consequences of sin. That just ain't so. When we fail to keep the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, we walk out from under the protection of the new covenant. What will that mean at the bema? Only Jesus Christ can say. But we saw the fruits of Wierwille's hypocrisy, the "covenant community" of The Way International was destroyed, as surely as Jerusalem was destroyed in the 6th century BCE. Love, Steve

You would do well to pay closer attention to what I've actually written, my friend! :)/> You wrote, "You said in the previous post that your respect for VP/twi was turned inside out when a woman told you face to face that VP propositioned her. Next thing you know, VP is not a Christian. You're not the only one here who snapped like that. You never had to do that. I can see that you love God. Again, some things only God can sort out." I didn't write that my "respect for VP/TWI was turned inside out." I wrote "That was the moment when my love for The Way International turned inside out." That moment was when it was confirmed to me by biblically proper testimony that Martindale, the leader of TWI, was practicing the same sins as Eli's sons and as the prophets of Jerusalem did prior to the fall of the city in 597 BCE. It wasn't Wierwille... I didn't have ANY testimony regarding him at that time... it was Martindale. And I already knew that Martindale's leadership was making wreck of the whole ministry. I did NOT write "VP is not a Christian." I wrote, "Wierwille was not Christian." I had originally written, "Wierwille was not a Christian," but after long and hard consideration, I decided to take the "a" out of the sentence. That changed the word "Christian" from a noun to an adjective. I am not judging whether or not Wierwille was a Christian. Only Jesus Christ himself can do that. But I am saying that the words and actions and fruit of Wierwille's life do NOT demonstrate Christ-like attitudes or behaviors. I never "snapped," as you put it. It took me a lot of time, diligent study, and prayerful thought before I was able to see through the "Dr. Wierwille" that we all thought we knew and loved to the real "man behind the curtain" of TWI. The first thing that gave me pause was the quality of leadership exhibited by Martindale and the Corps Coordinators I had known. This quality was the fruit of Wierwille's specific example, training and selection, and it was reprehensible. Wierwille was not a leader. He had an uncanny ability to manipulate people into doing what he wanted, but that isn't the same thing as leadership. Wierwille didn't teach Martindale, the Corps, or ANY of us, the very first principle of leadership, to take responsibility. Wierwille didn't train people to become leaders. He surrounded himself with yes-men. And Martindale became president of TWI because he did best that thing which yes-men do. Martindale didn't start out as a serial sexual predator. He had to be persuaded to become one by his mentor, Wierwille. That was some of the fruit of Wierwille's life. I can see that you love God, too, johniam! Next episode, what time is it, anyway? Love, Steve

I'm thankful you're letting me post on your thread, johniam! Nothing outrageously bad ever happened to me while I was involved with TWI. I knew there were a lot of people screwing around at the local level, but it wasn't everybody, and I did not become aware of the official permissiveness until I was in residence in the Corps training. All the Way Corps people over me were decent folk. I never had a direct encounter with VPW before he died. To me he was the Dr. Wierwille I had come to "know" and love in Power for Abundant Living and from the main stage at the Rock of Ages. I had lunch once with Craig Martindale and a dozen or so other 16th Corps folk at Emporia. LCM asked me a few questions about what I had done for a living. I never received a face-melting from my Corps Coordinators, not even when I deserved one. There aren't very many threads here at Greasespot where it would be appropriate for me to write about how easy I had it in TWI. I may well have been on L.E.A.D. at the same time (though in a different group) as the lady who cut her own toes off due to frostbite. I threw up one morning on L.E.A.D. and the coordinator gave me what seemed like a quart of slippery elm to drink. Great honk... I still had fun and the Lord taught me a lot on that L.E.A.D. trip. There are other people here at Greasespot who find it hard to put their selves in your shoes, johniam. Some of the best things that will ever happen to me in my entire life happened while I was involved with The Way International. But those things didn't happen to me BECAUSE of TWI. They happened to me because of JESUS CHRIST! He wasn't really absent after all. Wierwille preached many things that were true. He proclaimed "The integrity of God's Word is ALWAYS at stake! It's the Word, people! The Word, the Word, and nothing BUT the Word!" But how did that work out in the practices of TWI? What does the Word of God say? Deuteronomy 19:15b, Mark 18:16b and 2 Corinthians 13:1b tell us that "in the mouth [singular] of two or three witnesses [plural] shall a matter be established." Where the testimonies of several witnesses agree, we can find the truth of a matter. What did the Trustees of TWI say? "Multiple centers of reference cause confusion." What did the the Trustees mean? "Don't listen to those guys out there who are saying things about us that we don't want you to hear." Did the Trustees come right out and say what they meant? No. They dressed it up in multi-syllable words and phrased to to sound like some principle that might have come out of Proverbs. "Multiple centers of reference cause confusion" is a fleshly dictate that contradicts Deuteronomy 19:15b, Mark 18:16b and 2 Corinthians 13:1b. "What we are telling you IS the truth (yeh...right...) so whatever you do, don't listen to anybody else!" The Trustees of The Way International purported to be holding forth the accuracy and the integrity of God's wonderful matchless Word, but in reality, they were teaching the self-serving dictates of their own flesh. That's what the Bible calls "hypocrisy", johniam,... "hypocrisy." The Trustees said that the problems with TWI were being caused by the leaves on the Way Tree. They weren't being strict enough in how they were running foundational classes. But what does the Word say? Isaiah 9:16-17 "16 For the leaders of this people cause them to err; and they that are led of them are destroyed. "17 Therefore the LORD shall have no joy in their young men, neither shall have mercy on their fatherless and widows: for every one is an hypocrite [chaneph - hypocrite] and an evil doer, and every mouth speaketh folly." and Jeremiah 23:9-11,14-16 "9 Mine heart within me is broken because of the prophets; all my bones shake; I am like a drunken man whom wine hath overcome, because of the LORD, and because of the words of his holiness. "10 For the land is full of adulterers; for because of swearing the land mourneth; the pleasant places of the wilderness are dried up, and their course is evil, and their force is not right. "11 For both the prophet and the priest are prophane [chaneph - hypocrites]; yea, in my house have I found their wickedness, saith the LORD." "14 I have also seen in the prophets of Jerusalem an horrible thing: they commit adultery, and walk in lies: they strengthen also the hands of evildoers, that none doth return from his wickedness: they are all of them unto me as Sodom and the inhabitants thereof as Gomorrah. "15 Therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts concerning the prophets; Behold I will feed them with wormwood, and make them drink the water of gall: for from the prophets of Jerusalem is profaneness [chanephah - hypocrisy] gone forth into all the land. "16 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain: they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the LORD." Substitute the word "Trustees" for the words "leaders" in Isaiah and for the word "prophets" in Jeremiah, and we have exactly the same situation as that of The Way International, even down to the adultery.The problems that afflicted TWI (and still are afflicting the "Way Tree") are the responsibility of the LEADERS, not the leaves. You're right, johniam, "Just because VP helped himself to things he shouldn't have doesn't define twi 100%." But the hypocrisy Wierwille spoke as a result of his adultery, the folly he spoke, caused us ALL to err, caused us ALL to speak folly, and will eventually destroy the potential of ALL those who still follow him, even though he has himself been dead for thirty years. God tells us we are not to listen to the words of Wierwille and the Trustees. Those words make us vain because Wierwille and the Trustees spoke a vision out of their own hearts, and not out of the mouth of the LORD. Either it's the Word, the Word and nothing BUT the Word, johniam, or it is entirely something different... Love, Steve

So... where was I? Oh... for seven years I had been in love with TWI because the people in my original twig had loved me, and I attributed the same kind of love to all of the rest of the people involved with TWI, including Dr. Wierwille. Before anybody jumps in and says "he wasn't really a doctor, you know" let me say this: Wierwille had carefully crafted a public persona... the kindly old Bible scholar we saw on the main stage at the Rock of Ages, who would occasionally get all fired up about respect for the accuracy and integrity of God's wonderful matchless Word. When I say "Dr. Wierwille" I am referring to THAT persona, and that was the only persona I had direct experience of. Before I became involved in the Way Corps, I never had any personal encounters with Wierwille, and by the time I did get involved, Wierwille had died. To me he was "Dr. Wierwille" and I loved him because I thought he loved me. But from 1986 forward, I had begun to question the dead man's judgment because he had picked Martindale, who when it came to leadership was a total idiot, to take over the helm of the organization Wierwille had founded. How could that have happened? How could such a wise, godly man have been so fooled? A DOCTOR, even? In the spring of 1987, the branch coordinator in Muncie called an emergency twig coordinators' meeting. His name was Ken. He washed windows for a living, and he had been servicing an account at a hotel in Indianapolis. Who should walk up to him as he plied his squeegee but John Lynn. John was giving a presentation at the hotel about all the problems that were plaguing The Way International, and John invited Ken to come in and listen. Ken hesitated. We had ALL been warned about listening to ANY of the defectors from TWI. The Trustees said "Multiple centers of reference cause confusion." But Ken had been praying for God to let him know what was going on, so Ken accepted John's invitation, and that's where he found out about the debauchery of the Trustees. Ken was reporting these things to us at the emergency twig coordinators' meeting, when one of the fellows present put up his hand. That fellow had a girlfriend, who we all knew, who was in residence with the 17th Corps at HQ, and he told us she had alleged in a letter that Martindale had propositioned her. That got me upset. If it was true, then the leader of the ministry I loved was using his position, not to love God, love His Word and love His people, but to take advantage of people to satisfy his own carnal lusts. A few days after the emergency twig coordinators' meeting, I managed to get over to HQ and spend some time with the lady. She confirmed to me personally that the report about Martindale was true. That was the moment when my love for The Way International turned inside out. Even if it had at some point been "God's ministry" its leaders were laying "with the women that assembled at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation" just like Eli's sons in I Samuel 2:22. The deacons don't deac, the elders don't eld, and you can't trust the Trustees... Fr@nklin Smith was the limb coordinator of Indiana, and he was fired by the Trustees because he had a copy of Schoenheit's paper on adultery. That was pretty stupid of the Trustees because then, Smith made copies and sent them to anybody who wanted one. The body of Schoenheit's paper wasn't very controversial... just stock quotations from the Bible about adultery being a sin, but the devastating parts of the paper were the appendices, where Schoenheit used the Word to shred about a dozen or so of the lamest excuses I ever heard for a man to stick his private part where it doesn't belong. As I read those excuses, I realized that Martindale was too stupid to have made them up. Those excuses were the ones that Wierwille and the other Trustees had been using for decades. I began to see through "Dr Wierwille" to the real man who had exercised such an influence over my life. I began to trust my sisters in Christ who came forward with testimony about how Wierwille had drugged and raped them. One of the leaders who had left TWI came through Indianapolis and gave a presentation of Athletes of the Spirit. She used the pause and the rewind buttons to examine the production in detail. She asked the questions "what did they say?", "what does that mean?", "what is happening on the screen when they say it?" and "how does that line up with other Scripture?" The result was stomach turning. AotS glorified one person, and one person only, Craig Martindale. And at the very climax of the whole thing, the "man of god" receives revelation from God to murder a helpless human being... damn... DAMN! How Christ-like is THAT! While Martindale was taping the segment where the "man of God" defeats the lascivious devil spirits, he was screwing those same dancers who were portraying the devil spirits! Some of us had a bootleg copy of Power for Abundant Living, and we began to go through it using the stop and rewind buttons and questions similar to the ones the woman asked when she was presenting the truth about Athletes of the Spirit. We weren't able to get beyond the first three tapes (1&1/2 hours). Wierwille PREACHED many things that were true about the Bible and Jesus Christ, but the class was FULL of contradiction. The things Wierwille TAUGHT about the Bible and Jesus Christ were often the exact opposite of what he was preaching. Despite Wierwille's charismatic use of the English language, despite the fact that people who believed what Wierwille preached got results, Power for Abundant Living itself was a fraud. During the course of our involvement with TWI we were weaned off of walking in accordance with the spirit, or even walking in accordance with the written Word, and trained more and more to walk in accordance with Wierwille's fleshly dictates. Were there people involved with TWI who loved other people with the love of God? Yes there were! It seems to me, johniam, that you were one of those people who were loved, and who in turn loved other people with the love of God. I like to think I was one of those people, too. But Wierwille was not, and neither were any of the Trustees. Is the conclusion that TWI was and is a cult based on subjectivity only. No. Margaret Thaler Singer (not to be confused with Margaret Sanger of Planned Parent infamy) is a psychologist who has studied organizations that use thought reform, and has been called in court cases to testify on the cult-like behavior of various groups. She has been asked what the difference is between the Marine Corps and a thought reform cult, and she says the difference lies in this: that the Marines know from the get-go what they are letting themselves in for. Cults make their followers deployable to a hidden agenda. Singer wrote a book called Cults in Our Midst that you might want to read if you're interested in learning more. You say your agenda, to run classes, was not hidden, johniam. And that was true. But while running classes was the overt agenda of TWI, the real, covert agenda of Wierwille and the Trustees was to get money to supply their WANTS and to allow them to operate the levers of power within the organization, to garner adulation and hero-worship for their own egos, to gain willing body servants that they didn't have to pay, and to engineer a social system that would permit Wierwille to have sex with whomsoever he wanted, willing or otherwise, whensoever he wanted, and with no consequences whatsoever. How can we be certain? In Deuteronomy 19:15b, Mark 18:16b and 2 Corinthians 13:1b, God's wonderful matchless Word tells us that "in the mouth of two or three witnesses shall a matter be established." Nowhere... and I mean NOWHERE... does the Bible ever even imply that "multiple centers or reference cause confusion!" There are plenty more than two or three witnesses to the predatory behavior of Wierwille and the Trustees. We got upset when Wierwille was criticized because Wierille taught us to identify with HIM... Wierwille never taught us that our primary allegiance should be to Jesus Christ, and HE is the one we should identify with. Wierwille stole the thankfulness, the honor and the glory that we should have rightly been giving to Jesus Christ and took it for himself. Wierwille was not Christian. He substituted himself for Christ in our estimation. He was an enemy of Christ. I am sorry if you find these things painful, johniam. The real causes of your pain are not the truths I am speaking, but Wierwille's lies that you and I both believed for far too long. God bless you, johniam, in the name of Jesus Christ! Love, Steve

So there I was, in love with The Way International (and Dr. Wierwille) for about seven years. Did the Bible seem to make sense? Yes, as long as I ignored a few small difficulties. Did I see miracles? Yes I did. Did I receive revelation? Yes I did. Did I see God working? ...um... well... that's what I was told... Did I see the devil working? ... I was told that too... and I told others... but was I right? How did I fall out of love with Wierwille and his organization? When Chris Geer read The Passing of A Patriarch at Corps Night, he raised what seemed like endless questions and provided NO answers. Everybody at Gunnison... and I mean EVERYBODY... had questions, but communications from Headquarters was shut down entirely for about a week, or at least that's what we were told. That was the beginning of the "fog years." The Passing of A Patriarch purported to be Wierwille's last will and testament regarding The Way International delivered to Geer in the UK. Wierwille was supposedly extremely disappointed with Martindale and the Trustees, but no genuine reasons were given for that disappointment. If I remember properly, Geer mentioned gambling among the Trustees and came down very heavily on Don Wierwille. Everybody knew that there was "spiritual trouble" at Headquarters, but nobody was willing to put their finger on what the specific problem was, nor how we could deal with it, besides speaking in tongues for the Trustees. I had moved back to Indiana where I had the branch coordinator's confidence, and was within easy driving distance of Headquarters. I would go over there and have lunch with some of my 16th Corps friends who were in residence at HQ. There was NO scuttlebutt at HQ that I was aware of. A severe clamp had been put on the transmission of ANY information, at ANY time, in ANY place. At some point, Martindale came out and said that all the spiritual problems of the ministry were the result of the people on the field being slack in how they were running the foundational classes. When I heard that, giant red flags started flapping all over my field of vision. You see, I had been formally trained in leadership, and had exercised leadership as a sea-qualified Third Class Petty Officer in the submarine service, long before I had ever heard of TWI. During the seven years I was in love with TWI, I had assumed that all the upper level leaders of TWI understood leadership as well as I did. The first principle of leadership is, that as a leader, you take FULL responsibility for everything that happens under your command. By refusing to accept responsibility for the problems at the Trustee level of TWI, and by trying to palm that responsibility off onto believers who were the farthest removed from the Trustee level, Martindale proved to me that he was NO leader. And I began to question how Wierwille could have appointed such a sap to such a key position. I had begun to seriously question Wierwille's judgment. More later, as time permits... Love, Steve

I'm glad you started this thread, johniam! At first I was put off by the "rock star" analogy. Rock stars were different things, and had different connotations when I was a callow youth, though two of my favorite songs are Life's Been Good to Me So Far and On The Cover of the Rolling Stone. I first took the foundational class on Power for Abundant Living in July of 1980, went to the Rock of Ages immediately after graduating, and fell in love with The Way International... at least that's the way I saw it at the time. I actually fell in love with the people in my home twig, because I knew that they really did love me... they really did... and I attributed that love to ALL of the people up and down the Way tree. I in turn wanted to share that love with other people, and I promoted Power for Abundant Living. I lived that way for about seven years, with the degree of commitment progressing over time. I helped run PFAL classes in Muncie, Indiana, and in February 1982 I moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, to work for Dave Arneson, who was also a believer. I helped run classes in St. Paul, all sorts of classes, not just the foundational. In October of 1981, while at the anniversary celebration at HQ, God laid a very specific desire on my heart, to "be in the fortieth anniversary wave" of WOW Ambassadors. As soon as I agreed to go (not out loud, but in my heart) God gave me to understand that it would make an eternal difference. So I went, and served in Tucson, Arizona, from August 1982 to August 1983. When I returned to St. Paul, I moved to the suburb of Newport where I coordinated a Twig for two years. We started out with about a dozen people, and by the end of the two years, we were about 4 times as many, and we split the twig when I left. While I was in Newport, we ran a foundational class at the twig level, the first time that had been done in the branch in quite a few years. In the fall of 1984 I entered into the apprentice year of the 16th Way Corps, and in the fall of 1985 (EXACTLY 30 years ago) I went into residence at Emporia, Kansas. I didn't have any sense that God had called me to the Corps. It was just that all the people I really liked hanging out with were Corps, so I figured I would become Corps also. After finishing the first block at Emporia, I was sent to Gunnison, where I spent the next block. During my whole time in residence, I had to do "crisis believing" to get my tuition together at the last possible minute. There were a number of factors that came together during the last few weeks of that block. The first was this; I knew that if I tried to stay in residence and put a better spiritual partner twig together at the same time as working the in residence program, I would not be able to do an adequate job of either, so I was inclined to drop out of residence, go home to Indiana where I would build an appropriate spiritual partner twig, and then re-enter training with the 18th Corps. The second factor was the reading of The Passing of A Patriarch on Corps Night shortly before the end of the block. That raised a million questions in everybody's minds, including the Corps Coordinators', and DIDN'T provide a single honest, practical answer to any of those questions! At the end of the block in the spring of '86 I returned to Indiana where I spent most of my time taking care of my ailing parents. I associated with the local Twig in Anderson, and the branch coordinator in Muncie allowed me to participate in the twig coordinators' meetings, even though I wasn't coordinating a twig at the time. I assisted the branch coordinator and his wife when I could. All that time, I loved The Way International and promoted it in every way I could. It was in the spring of 1987 that things began to change. That tale will have to wait for another telling in the not too distant future! Love, Steve

I was in residence with the 16th Corps during the first block at Emporia in 1985 and the second block at Gunnison after New Year's Day. When we went on HoHo Relo, us males were told that if we got anybody pregnant over the break, we were expected to pay for the abortion. I don't know if that information directly addresses any of your questions, MRAP, but it seems to me to speak volumes about the attitude of TWI leadership toward any lives other than their own. Love, Steve

johniam - you and I think differently... I don't think it's so much a matter of categorical disagreement as it is a matter of thinking differently. From what I've read here at Greasespot, I like you personally in spite of our disagreements. This is a thread you started, so I'm going out of my way to respect that, and you have said much that is worth thinking about... for instance, "Some people here say that VP/twi was insignificant, Not enough numbers to have discernible impact. Others say it was a cult. Dangerous. Ruined lives. Those are opposite messages. TWI's dark side didn't stop God from blessing people in it. Even the catholic church does much good. They have a dark side. To the present day. TWIs dark side didn't stop the devil from hurting people in it. I don't think of myself as one of the "lucky ones". I got to know God in twi. He's still there. Still answers prayer. Still heals. Putting twi in the box called 'cult' is no different than putting them in the box called 'God's ministry'. IMO" I would say that Wierwille had tremendous impact on a number of individual lives. Whether that was a large enough number, even up to 100,000, is open to question. I don't think there were ever more than about 30,000 "standing grads" at any one time. If there were ordinarily about 20,000 people attending the ROA, that means that two-thirds of TWI's active followers were camped out on that cornfield. And even 100,000 followers is not very large in terms of religious organizations. How many people are still following Wierwille? Probably more people than there are Shakers, because the Shakers believe in celibacy... but not by much. TWI is going the same way as Koreshanity, and as grads of the original (1967 recording) PFAL class die off, so will TWI. Wierwille preached some things that are not normally preached in conventional Christianity, i.e., we are sons of God with power, God has committed to us the Word and the ministry of reconciliation, but in his teachings, Wierwille obviated these things. We were sons of God with power as long as we cleared everything first with leaders who were closer to the root, whose decisions were often arbitrary and nonsensical, and who had no real knowledge of what was actually going on. God had committed to us the ministry of getting people to sign the green card and pay up, by hook or by crook. Wierwille's impact upon greater Christianity has been ephemeral for two reasons: first, none of his work has ANY scholarly validity because of his plagiarism, and second, he was a really, REALLY crappy writer. He was powerful with a microphone on a stage, but transposed into the printed word, the things he said were at once a strange combination of outlandishness and banality. His legacy will die when the 1967 PFAL class finally dies. Was God present in TWI? Yes he was. The problem arises when we consider the truth that God was also present EVERYWHERE ELSE! Wierwille was wrong in crediting the things God was doing to PFAL and Wierwille's "ministry." Who was delivering all the deliverance you received in TWI, johniam? In John 14:13 Jesus said "And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son." Jesus didn't say "That will YOU do by your believing and a power of attorney!" Jesus didn't say "That will God do!" Jesus said "That will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son!" Who was glorified in TWI? Wierwille, PFAL and our own believing. I agree with you when you say it would be wrong to call TWI "God's ministry." TWI was and is no more God's ministry than the several types of Orthodox, the Coptics, the Roman Catholics, the Lutherans, the Calvinists, the Mennonites, the Anglicans, the Methodists, the Baptists, the Wesleyans, the Pentecostals, the Charismatics and the bazillion-and-one other Protestant denominations. We are ALL God's ministries! If there was anything exclusive about TWI, it was Wierwille's multi-level marketing scheme. TWI was and is cult. Wierwille and his successors made/make their followers deployable to a hidden agenda, and that is the definition of a cult. It's not a matter of subjective feelings. It is a matter of objective evidence. Love, Steve

Jesus said what you've done to the least one of these, my siblings, you've done to me... Too true, waysider... too true... Love, Steve

Here are a few things I've learned in my 66 years. 1. Everybody has their strengths and everybody has their weaknesses. Everybody. Groups work best when people recognize their strengths and weaknesses and use the categories where they are strong to help others who might be weak in those categories. That way, the members of the group become mutually supportive rather than competitive. TWI did not promote an attitude of mutual support, as the Bible does. 2. Every person's strengths wane and wax over time. No one is consistently strong all of the time. There are times in life when we work on building our strengths. There are other times when our strengths decline for a variety of reasons in spite of how we work to keep them at peak level. That's just life... for everybody. I don't think the people who were involved with TWI outside of leadership positions were categorically weak OR categorically strong. I think TWI appealed to all sorts of people in all sorts of ways, but the primary way was to promise access to a power that would make our lives generally better. TWI's training and programs were intentionally designed to sap people's strength, specifically in the categories of critical thinking and exercising responsible judgment. Some people were so sapped of strength in those areas that they were NEVER able to leave. Those of us who DID leave did so at a variety of times under circumstances unique to each individual. I've spent decades (after having left TWI) helping deal with my own and other people's mental health problems. I am currently participating in a weekly group dedicated to healthy mood management. That's apart from my religious associations. I no longer find it useful to think of people as being categorically weak or strong. I know that I am neither, and I extend the same recognition to others. Love, Steve

If I'm remembering correctly, somewhere along the line Wierwille taught about Matthew 13:58, "And he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief." He said there was such a thing in a community as "the temperature of believing," and that this temperature influenced what could happen. It doesn't seem to me that Wierwille himself ever laid much emphasis on this, but Martindale made a big deal out of it in the classes he taught on the book of Acts. I think Martindale then used it as a rationalization for why HE couldn't get anything done. It's piteous how far the mighty have fallen when the unbelief of one little person in the room can defeat ALL the believing of the man of God of the world for this our day and time! Love, Steve

Thanks, waysider! It's not the verse I was thinking of, but it's good to have my memory corrected! Love, Steve

WordWolf, what were the scripture references for Key #9, "It may be essential to put unbelievers out of the room"? There is a point I want to address on the "So, what is believing?" thread, and I think those references will help me explain what I think. Thanks a lot! Love, Steve

I think "fear" is a suitable topic for this thread, MRAP, since Wierwille taught that fear is believing in reverse. Wierwille also taught that fear is sand in the machinery of life, and that it ALWAYS encases, ALWAYS enslaves and ALWAYS binds. First, what is fear in actuality? There are two communication systems within the body: the nervous system which transmits messages by means of electrical signals, and the hormonal system which transmits messages by means of chemical signals. "Thoughts" are products of our nervous systems, and "feelings" are products of our hormonal systems. The two systems are not entirely separate and independent. Our feelings can effect our thoughts, and our thoughts can effect our feelings. Feelings are called eMOTIONS because they MOVE us. They cause us to move. Emotions can be classified by what they move us to do. Fear is the emotion that causes us to move into right relation with the object of the fear. The right relation with a rattlesnake is outside of striking range. Fear is the emotion that moves us to get outside of the snake's striking range. The right relation with the IRS is to have our filings on time and our taxes paid up. Fear of the IRS is the emotion that moves us to file our taxes on time and to pay them up. The right relation with God is one of humility, "You are God and I am not." The fear of the Lord moves us to stay humble before God. The fear of the Lord is NOT a bad thing! It is not the same as fear of punishment. It is the overwhelming sense of awe we feel when we truly recognize what God is doing for us all around us all the time. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of true knowledge and of true wisdom. Where there is no fear of the Lord, the deceitfulness and desperate wickedness of the heart are given full rein. Psalm 36:1-4 (NIV) 1 An oracle is within my heart concerning the sinfulness of the wicked: There is no fear of God before his eyes. 2 For in his own eyes he flatters himself too much to detect or hate his sin. 3 The words of his mouth are wicked and deceitful; he has ceased to be wise and to do good. 4 Even on his bed he plots evil; he commits himself to a sinful course and does not reject what is wrong. Wierwille spent a tremendous amount of effort, systematizing his errors, to rationalize ignoring Romans 11:20b, "Be not hignminded but fear:" Wierwille DID NOT WANT to fear God, because he so enjoyed being HIGHMINDED! And the benefits of being highminded, as listed in Psalm 36:1-4 accrued to him in his life. Love, Steve

What are you trying to do, Allen? Get me fired up all over again? :) I know that's what my wife has been praying for in her own odd, Asperger's way! Here for about two-and-a-half decades, I've been perfectly happy to say "There is no power in believing!" As is obvious to the most casual of observers, there IS power! Now you've got me going to the Bible to see where it says the power resides, and it's got me all stirred up. To be brief, I presently think it says that the power is in speaking with confidence by the Spirit of God, but it would take a heck of a lot of painstaking exegetical work to make that stick. (Ugh! I know, eventually, I'm going to have to do that work.) Here's a verse to chew on in the meantime, "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the POWER may be of God, and not of us." (II Corinthians 4:7). Thanks again, Allen! Love, Steve

There's a big difference between preaching and teaching. Preaching is drawing the audience's attention to a matter. Teaching is explaining the nuts and bolts of how the thing works. Wierwille often preached truths while at the same time, he taught the exact opposite of what he was preaching. I think there were a lot of times when he did that with "believing." That's part of the reason we found the topic of "believing" so difficult to understand. If we think back on the whole of what Wierwille said about "believing", then we still find it contradictory and confusing. What a particular person "believes" about "believing" depends on how that person chose to filter the things she or he heard Wierwille say. In one important sense, believing is trusting that a person will keep a promise she or he has made. Biblical believing, or faith, is trusting that God will keep the promises he has made. There has to be a promise in order for there to be believing. Matthew 21:22 in the King James Version tell us that whatsoever we shall ask in prayer believing we shall receive. Wierwille used this verse to teach that God has promised to give us ANYTHING we ask for, as long as we have sufficient "believing." But that's not what Jesus meant. Jesus said "whatsoever you ask in prayer." In Matthew 6 the Word of God sets conditions on the things we can ask for in prayer. Whatsoever we shall ask for in accordance with Matthew 6, believing that God will bring it to pass, we shall receive. Can we ask for healings? Can we ask for signs, miracles and wonders? Sure, we can! Does that mean we can force God to bring them to pass by our "believing?" No, we can't! When we pray for those things, we pray that God's will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. If it is God's will for signs, miracles and wonders to come to pass, those things will happen. If it's not God's will at that particular time and place, then bless our hearts, those things won't come to pass at that particular time and place. And that won't mean that we failed to renew our minds, or that we didn't have enough believing! Love, Steve