Steve Lortz

You posit the situation, "if I need a fire to get warm and someone tells me to use matches, someone else tells me to use a cigarette lighter, someone else says no those don't work, use sticks instead, someone else wants to know how hot a fire I want or tells me I can't start a fire without the right kind of kindling..." The actual situation is this, Wierwille tries to sell you an empty Zippo he stole from somebody else while Jesus just goes ahead and lights your fire for you. The difference is this, Allan, who gets the credit when "believing" works, and who gets the blame when it fails? When Wierwille's form of prayer with "believing" works, who gets the glory? The person who is doing the praying gets the glory because that's who the power belongs to. When Jesus' form of prayer with "believing" works, God gets the glory because God is the one that the power belongs to. If we focus on the word "believing" alone, and if we look at Matthew 21:22 alone, as Wierwille did, then Wierwille's definition of "believing", that "there is power in believing" is plausible. However, if we focus on the word "prayer", and we respect the integrity of God's Word by including Matthew 6:9-13, then all of Wierwille's teachings on "believing" are shown up for what they are, insidious forms of self-worship. You ask, "...it doesn't matter if the fire ignites does it ?" I ask, "...what happens when the fire does NOT ignite?", and there will CERTAINLY be times when it does not. Do we rag on ourselves (and others) because we didn't "renew our minds" enough? Do we rag on ourselves (and others) because we didn't have enough "believing"? Or do we trust God's will and seek a greater understanding of it? Love, Steve

The problem is, as twinky suggests, WHO do we believe? Do we believe what Jesus meant when he said "whatsoever things you ask in prayer believing, you will receive" or do we believe what Wierwille said it meant? They aren't the same thing. "I believe in believing" is not a sufficient answer because it is recursive, that is to say, the major terms are defined by each other, therefore it is a circular statement and logically invalid. Since "believing" is defined in terms of "believing", it can be made to mean ANYTHING. Since "I believe in believing" can be made to mean ANYTHING, it consequently means NOTHING. Wierwille took advantage of this feature to promote his confusion... Love, Steve

You raise very, VERY good questions, Allan! Questions that take us straight to the heart of the topic of this thread. I wish I could give a simple, rapid fire answer, but I can't because Wierwille's error was so ubiquitous, so many-faceted and so subtle. We have to pay very close attention to the words Wierwille used, how they differ from the words God had used in his Word, and the things Wierwille left out, as well as the things he included. You are right to point out Mark 9:23, "Jesus said unto him [the man who had a son who had a dumb spirit that the disciples couldn't cast out], If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth." What does that mean? Was it as simple as Wierwille made it out to be? According to the United Bible Society's Greek New Testament, the best reading of the verse might be "And Jesus said to him (singular), If you [singular] are able. All things are possible for him [singular] who is believing." The "if you can believe" is in some texts, and was in the text used by the King James translators, but it is not in the texts that most modern scholars consider to be the best texts. Now read on from verse 23 to verse 29. First the man replied with, "Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief!" Then Jesus cast the demon out. Afterward the disciples came to Jesus and asked him why they had not been able to cast the demon out. Jesus answered them, "This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting." Who was the person [singular] who exercised believing in this instance? It was Jesus. And when the man asked Jesus to help his unbelief, what did Jesus do? Did he teach the man about the 16 Keys to Walking in the Spirit? Did he chide the man for failing to renew his mind? No, Jesus didn't. He simply cast the demon out. And when the disciples specifically asked Jesus why they couldn't cast the demon out, Jesus didn't say anything at all about believing. Jesus said the only things that could get this kind of demon out were much PRAYER and fasting. What kind of prayer is Jesus talking about? Wierwille's Vend-O-God style of prayer? NO! That's why Jesus said prayer AND FASTING. Fasting implies self-denial. Wierwille's type of prayer focused on self-gratification only. That's what Wierwille taught. That's what I, at least, believed! It has taken a lot of thinking things through and a lot of humility to flush that crap out of my mind. I had to admit "I was wrong about that..." more times than I care to dwell on. Notice that in Mark 9:14 through 29, the Word of God doesn't say anything at all about believing making the impossible possible. To find out about that, we have to go to Mark 10:27, "And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible." Here, Jesus does NOT say that believing makes the impossible possible. He says "with God all things are possible." And I don't think Jesus was talking about Wierwille's Vend-O-God. God has a will of his own, and it's not yours or mine. It wasn't even Jesus' will! Remember the garden of Gethsemane! If God wants the impossible to come to pass, it will come to pass, but if God does NOT want something to happen, no amount of "believing" on our part can make it happen. Believing is NOT forcing God to do what we want. Believing is trusting that God's will for me is good, and that he is going to take care of me no matter what, even if I am dying. Wierwille divided "believing" into many types, chief of which were renewed mind believing and the "manifestation of believing". I do trust that there are several different nuances to the meanings of pistis and pisteuo in the Word of God, but I think Weirwille's divisions were artificial, confused and confusing. I am confident that more accurate understandings can be obtained in many instances by substituting the English words "trust" or "confidence" for pistis and the English words "trusting" and "being confident" for the Greek word pisteuo. For the past nine months or so, I have been inclined to translate 1 Corinthians 14:22 as “Therefore, tongues serve as a sign not to the speakers who are confident, but to the speakers who lack confidence.” Confident of what? Up to now, I've been thinking SIT builds a person's confidence that she or he has received the gift of the Holy Spirit and that Jesus has been raised from the dead. After considering Matthew 21:22 in greater depth, I am beginning to come around to the idea that SIT builds the speaker's confidence that she or he is speaking by the Spirit of God, that if the Spirit tells us to speak something that is impossible, we are more confident that it really is God telling us to speak it. Thank you, Allen, for your concerns about my health. The whole thing puzzles me. Three times in the past eight years, I have been in the hospital with lethal quantities of something or other in my body, yet I am not dead. In 2007, my blood sugar level was 1010 when I bippy-bopped into the clinic to get my blood pressure meds prescription re-written. That's 10 points off the scale. To put it into gaming turns, I would have had to roll a 101 on a d100 to save. During the time I was in the ICU, my whole digestive system shut down in preparation to die. But I didn't die, and my digestive system turned back on. In 2013, the muscles in my legs turned into rubber bands and I could not stand up. The people in the ER sent me immediately by ambulance to the ICU at Ball Memorial in Muncie, because the level of potassium in my body was lethal. They dialyzed my blood for seven hours before it came back down to a livable level. I didn't realize it at the time, but the muscles of my heart were just as much rubber bands as the muscles of my legs. My kidney damage came from that potassium overdose. Two weeks ago, I started coughing up phlegm. Within minutes, the phlegm was coming so thick and fast that my coughing turned into a continuous spasm, and I could not breath. I woke up my wife and sister-in-law who called 911, then I passed out. When I came to, I was in the ER, and they were getting me ready to send to the ICU. I was in the hospital for five-and-a-half days being treated for pneumonia/broonchitis. The EMTs and the ER people said that I would have had to hold my breath for ten minutes to get my CO2 level that high, and I should have suffocated. But I did not. I know that there is nothing in me that could have kept me alive in any of those situations. Psalm 22:29b says "and none can keep alive his own soul." A lot of people were raising prayers for me in general, but no one ministered any kind of "spiritual" healing to me. The EMT, the doctors and the nurses were my ministers. Nobody that I know of exercised any special "believing", and yet the impossible came to pass AT NO ONE'S COMMAND. I do trust and have confidence in signs, miracles and wonders, but I don't think any of them are "produced" by anybody's "believing." They are produced because God wants them to happen and somebody has enough trust in God, and enough confidence to speak by his Spirit, and God brings the impossible to pass. All for now... Love, Steve

Thanks, Rocky! For the past few months I've been suffering from anemia that was caused by kidney damage I took a couple of years ago. When my brain isn't getting enough oxygen, I can't remember things as well as I used to. Love, Steve

Allan, if you are having trouble understanding what Jesus was saying about the relation between believing and prayer in Matthew 21:22, then maybe we need to re-examine the things Wierwille taught us about prayer. Wierwille taught that prayer is like a vending machine. You feed the required amount of believing into the slot, you make your selection, and the machine delivers exactly what you "asked" for. Wierwille's view of prayer turned God into nothing more than a vending machine. Wierwille taught that prayers would fail to come to pass for either or both of two reasons: 1. your believing was insufficient and/or 2. you were not clear enough in making your prayer. I once was friends with Isaac Bonewits, who earned a degree in magic from some university in California. It wasn't stage magic, it was the theory behind using your mental powers to alter objective reality. One of the key elements for producing "real" magic is focus. The purpose of all the paraphernalia, the hand waving and the mystical words is to FOCUS the magician's BELIEVING! I had read this gentleman's books and became personally acquainted with him several years before even hearing about TWI. When I took PFAL, I recognized the magical thinking Wierwille was teaching about prayer, but I had not yet become convinced that magical thinking is bogus. I thought Wierwille had discovered and was teaching a Biblical basis for the things my friend was teaching about "real" magic. And the reason I was studying "real" magic in the first place was because I wanted to know why some of the prayers I prayed in the name of Jesus Christ were answered while others were not. But... was Wierwille's take on prayer really Biblical? Jesus explained all about what prayer is and how it should be done in Matthew 6:5-15, and gave an example for his followers' guidance in verses 9-13. In Power For Abundant Living Wierwille said that we, as followers of the way living in this wonderful grace administration of the Church, could not... did he use the words "dare not", I don't now remember for sure... pray the Lord's prayer, because it says "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." Obviously, this COULD NOT HAVE BEEN ADDRESSED to Christians, who have already been forgiven for everything they might do, past, present and future, even for drugging and raping young girls on a serial basis! Yet Matthew was written by, to and for Christians well after the day of Pentecost. The example of prayer that Jesus presented was preserved and held up as an example for Christians AFTER THE DAY OF PENTECOST. The Word of God has not failed. It is Wierwille's administrational system of theology that has failed! Read Matthew 6:9-13, Allen... Now go read it again... Where does it say anything about "believing"? Where does it say anything about becoming "clear and concerned"? Where does it say anything about what I want? (red drapes, fig tree dying, etc.) It doesn't! It says "Thy will be done..." Prayer is NOT about getting what I want, it is about doing what God wants done! Wierwille taught that our prayers might not be answered if we couldn't muster enough believing, or if we weren't properly focused on what we wanted. Wierwille never even suggested that a prayer might not be answered because it was at cross purposes to GOD'S WILL! The reason Jesus got results in his ministry was NOT because he had some extraordinary mastery of believing. Jesus got results because he was always busy doing his Father's will You want to know what killed that fig tree? I'll tell you what killed that fig tree! God WANTED IT DEAD, to remind people of Habakkuk chapter 3. Love, Steve

Yes, Wierwille DID lie, delude, grand stand, seduce, with his statement. No, Jesus DID NOT lie, delude, grand stand, seduce, with his statement. Yes, Wierwille's teaching on Matthew 21:22 was an interpretational error. It was not an error in interpretation from the Greek. It was an error of systematic theology. Systematic theology is where a person develops a system for understanding the Bible. Systematic theology becomes erroneous when violence is done to the meaning of what the text actually says in a passage in order to make the passage fit the system. Wierwille developed a systematic theology, a major feature of which was "there is power in believing." Wierwille had to twist the interpretation of every passage that dealt with believing, because there is NO passage stating that there is power in believing. That's why Wierwille had to come up with so many different kinds of believing, none of whose definitions make sense. That's why this thread exists. None of us can understand what Wierwille meant by "believing" because the things Wierwille taught about believing were all different from what the Bible actually says, and all different from each other as well. The only common thread in the things Wierwille taught about believing was that "there is power in believing," and we can't go to the Bible to clarify our understanding of what Wierwille taught because the idea that "there is power in believing" is nowhere stated in the Bible. Wierwille didn't develop his system. Its foundational idea was plagiarized. When a question arose, he made up a rationalization on the spot, usually in the form of one of his little pamphlets. It was only later, when the pamphlets were being collected to be published as books, (the original four color-cover books whose general title I don't now remember), it was only then that Wuierwille had to make his ideas cohere, and he did a pi$$-poor job of that. There is no power in believing. There is nothing within us that can reach outside of our bodies and alter physical reality. Signs, miracles and wonders DO happen, but they are ALL results of God exerting HIS power... never the result of us exerting any power of our own. Love, Steve

What was it that Wierwille was selling? The title of the class says it all... POWER For Abundant Living! Wierwille was selling POWER. The reason we signed up for the class was to gain POWER, whether that was POWER to accomplish great spiritual feats or, POWER to get into the pants of the girl was waving a green card under our noses, or POWER to get rid of that person who kept bugging us to take the class. The POWER that Wierwille sold was the counterfeit "law of believing" The fundamental thing Wierwille taught was that there is POWER in believing. All the rest of the stuff... all the classes and all the programs... were promoted as means to gain and manage MORE of that POWER. This thread poses the question "So what is believing?" I submit that "believing" was the particular form of snake-oil Wierwille sold to us, and that we in turn sold to others, good little multi-level marketers that we were. As part of his subterfuge, Wierwille PREACHED many things about the Bible and Jesus that were true, but he TAUGHT things that were in direct opposition to the things he was preaching, often at the very same time, as was true in the section of the foundational class where he preached that we need to observe "to whom addressed" at the same time he was lying about to whom Romans 9-11 are addressed. The meaning of "believing" in Matthew 21:22 has been brought into question, and an issue was raised, "was it a gospel thing only"? Romans 15:4 says "For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope." Wierwille twisted this to mean we don't have to pay attention to anything in the Old Testament or the Gospels, because those things took place before the day of Pentecost. The irony of it all was that Wierwille took a huge proportion of his proof texts from the OT and the Gospels. Such was the case of Matthew 21:22. It occurs in the gospel of Matthew... but the truth is that the gospel of Matthew was written from, to and for a Christian community of faith well after the day of Pentecost, probably by the community at Antioch, the same community that sent Paul and Barnabas out as missionaries. Those Christians felt that the things Jesus said about "believing" at the incident of the fig tree were important for the members of their community to know. Those same Christians felt that is was just as important to know what Jesus said about POWER when his followers asked him how they should pray: "For thine is the kingdom and the POWER, and the glory, forever" (Matthew 6:13b). The POWER belongs to God... ALWAYS! The glory belongs to God... ALWAYS! When Wierwille taught that there is POWER in believing, he was stealing for himself the glory that rightly belongs to God only. He was teaching US to steal the glory that rightly belongs to God only, and we in turn taught the same thing to others. It's not something to be proud of... There is NO POWER in believing. The POWER and the glory always belong to God and God alone. Love, Steve

It's not as simple as it seems. Wierwille taught that "believing is a verb, and a verb connotes action." However, the verb translated "believing" in Matthew 21:22 is not exactly a verb in the same way Wierwille taught. It is a participle, a verb used as an adjective. It has to modify some other word in the sentence, probably the "you" (plural). There are a whole slew of ways participles can be translated from the Greek. In this case, I think it's a conditional participle, that is to say, it could best be translated as "if believing" The "whatsoever" is an intensifier of the word "all" and could also be translated "as much as." I think an accurate sense translation of Matthew 21:23 might be "and all, as much as you [plural] might have begged for by the instrument of prayer, if believing, you [plural] will receive." The verb translated "shall ask" in the KJV is subjunctive in the Greek, but that's a whole nuther can of worms. Lack of believing can prevent a prayer from being answered, but "believing" by itself cannot force God to answer a prayer. Wierwille taught that there is a spirit realm and a senses realm, and that the laws of the spirit realm supersede the laws of the senses realm. By manipulating the laws of the spirit realm through "believing," we can produce results in the senses realm. That was hogwash. The Bible teaches a unitary, not a dual cosmos. We can, through the use of our minds, influence the physical processes occurring within our own bodies, but there is nothing, NOTHING, in our minds that can reach out beyond our bodies and alter physical reality. Only the verbal and practical expressions of our minds can do that. Signs, miracles and wonders are apparent violations of the laws of nature, but they aren't in the view of quantum mechanics. They are merely events that are highly improbable, but not impossible as Newtonian mechanics would have it. All of the POWER... ALL of it... is in God's WILL to bring his Word to pass. There is no POWER in believing. Love, Steve

There is NO POWER WHATSOEVER in believing... The only power in a belief transaction is the power of the person who made the promise to keep it. If God makes a promise to do something, and that thing gets done, then the only one who has exerted any power is God. If God makes a conditional promise, and if we demonstrate by failing to meet the condition that we don't trust God, then our lack of trust can be regarded as preventing God from bringing his promise to pass. But if we do have faith, and meet the condition, then it is STILL GOD'S POWER, not any "power of believing" from within us that bring's the promise to pass. The title of the class... "POWER for Abundant Living"... was a lie from the get go!!! Love. Steve

I hope this post doesn't wander too far into doctrinal territory, but it's about a conclusion I arrived at while studying I Corinthians 12-14, and it has to do with how all sorts of people, not just TWI, misunderstand the words about believing in I Corinthians 14:22... "Wherefore tongues are a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not..." TWI and just about every other commentator I've read count "them that believe" as people who are already Christians, and "them that believe not" as people who are NOT Christians, but I don't think that's how the verse should be understood. I think it means "tongues are a sign, not to those who are confident about being born again, but to those who lack such confidence." Speaking in tongues builds up our confidence in the truth that we are indeed born again, as per I Corinthians 14:4 and Jude 1:20. People who are confident that they are born again don't NEED a sign. Speaking in tongues is not like some mystical battery charger that builds up our POWER to do the impossible! Love, Steve

Thanks WordWolf for starting the thread, and waysider for posting the keys, and everybody else for your contributions! I was interested in exploring this topic farther, to find out what things I still hold onto from my TWI experiences of nearly 30 years ago, but I'm still pretty wrapped up in completing the classes I'm officially enrolled in at the School of Theology. I am being treated for anemia brought on by kidney damage, and I have to be judicious in how I spend what energy I have. Thanks, again! Love, Steve

If I'm remembering properly, during the advanced class Wierwille talked about going to all sorts of spiritualist demonstrations and activities where God taught him a heck of a lot of stuff about "the spirit realm." Then he told us not to try to do it ourselves, that God had been protecting him so he could learn things and teach us, but since we had the benefit of Wierwille's experiences, God wouldn't protect us the way God had protected him... Did anybody else come away with that impression? Or am I retrojecting? Love, Steve (Not to derail the topic, but I've been trying to remember what "the 16 keys to walking in the spirit" were. If somebody has a copy and can post them somewhere, I'd appreciate it! Thanks)

In the foundational class, Wierwille mentioned a spirit named "Mr. Fletcher." Mr. Fletcher was the supposed "spirit guide" of Arthur Ford. Arthur Ford was exposed as a fraud. Either Wierwille himself did not believe what he was teaching, or he was taken in by Ford's fraud. I think Wierwille didn't really believe in "devil spirits" (a phrase NEVER found in the Word of God), because it's hard for me to see how he would have taken them so lightly in his own life if he thought they were real. Love, Steve

Thanks, Tzaia! Love, Steve

After I took the foundational class in July of 1980, everything seemed so NEW TESTAMENT! Adherence to law was replaced by grace. I DID SEE signs, miracles and wonders! A few short years later, during the late winter of '85-'86, in residence at Camp Gunnison, there didn't seem to be any trace of the New Testament left. Everything was OLD TESTAMENT! Fleshly results had become the expected... no... the REQUIRED standard. As far as signs miracles and wonders went, all the heavens were as brass. There has been a lot of talk on various threads lately about blurring boundaries, how did Wierwille change our lives, the 16 keys to walking in the spirit as the pinnacle of TWI's instruction, etc., etc., etc. It occurs to me that the "bait and switch" from New Testament living to an Old-Testament-style servitude happened in the advanced class, and a lot of these topics seemed to come together in my mind. In the foundational and intermediate classes we were supposed to learn about three of the nine manifestations mentioned in I Corinthians 12:8-10, speaking in tongues, interpretation and prophecy. Just about everything the Bible says about tongues and interpretation is in the New Testament, and fresh out of the foundational class, we all looked to Paul's letters rather than the Old Testament and the gospels as guides for how we should live. After all, those other things "were not addressed TO us." The advanced class was supposed to be about word of knowledge, word of wisdom, discerning of spirits, faith , miracles and healing. The main thing we were supposed to learn in the advanced class was how to use the 16 keys to walking in the spirit. There were no practicums in the advanced class. We were supposed to learn from lectures (bad ones) the content of which were passages from the Old Testament purportedly illustrating how various OT people applied the 16 keys. It was during the advanced class that peoples' attitudes shifted from "what would the followers of Jesus or Paul; do?" to "what would the followers of Elijah or Elisha do?" Wierwille and Martindale LOVED to play up how Elijah and Elisha were the "men of God of the world" in that their day and time, but that Wierwille and Marindale were NOW the "men of God of the world." So the boundary blurring between newwness of life and Old-Testament-style servitude to men of God came in the advanced class... but that was just when the water started to heat up. It wasn't brought to a boil until Corps training. And by the late winter of '85-'86, you could have stuck a fork in me, because I was done for. If it hadn't been for the mercy and grace of God getting me out of that situation, and into a place where I could open my eyes again, I would probably be just as much a crispy critter as anybody over in Ohio... Love, Steve

Having spent 6 years as a petty officer in the US Navy before I ever heard of TWI, and having spent 2 blocks in residence before dropping out of the Way corps, I have to agree with everything skyrider and WordWolf have written here. We had to be advanced class grads before being admitted into residence. After finishing the advanced class, I remember being a little disappointed at how little of the "other six" manifestations was taught. All we did was go over Old Testament examples, and compare what happened with the 16 keys to walking in the spirit. It was like the 16 keys to walking in the spirit were the pinnacle of spiritual teaching in TWI, and they weren't even spiritual. There was nothing more "spiritual" than that in the corps training. The in residence classes were mostly classes we'd already had, or Dale Carnegie or how to hold a toothbrush, or listening to a corps coordinator or other big-wig bloviate endlessly. It seemed the purposes of the classroom training in the corps was to keep us from spending any time thinking freely, and to keep us sleep deprived. Real teaching is a conversation. In residence classes were run like the taped classes, we couldn't ask questions or comment. The only thing we learned from in residence classes was how to sleep with our eyes open. Bad, bad BAD!!!!! Love, Steve

I felt like responding to shiftthis, waysider, but you did a much better job than I would have! Thanks! Love, Steve

I don't remember much of De La Torre's book, and the house is in an uproar (the house was built in the late-1800s and our nephew is doing some re-modelling, bringing it up to code, etc.), so I can't easily find the book to reference it, but you could well be right, JumpinJive! Marxist thought has influenced many Christian theologians since the introduction of "liberation theology." I don't think the sharing that Christians did in the first century was the same as modern communism, but I don't think it was like modern capitalism, either. The premise of communism is that the state owns everything. The premise of capitalism is that private individuals own everything. But the premise of God-o-nomics it that GOD owns everything, and what we receive is given to us to steward. In the Old Testament, debts were to be periodically forgiven and land that had been lost as security was to be returned to its original "owners". In TWI, ABS was originally administered in the twig, but Wierwille had it all sent to Headquarters so that it "wouldn't be misspent". Something similar happened in the late-first, early-second centuries when the metropolitan bishops (branch leaders) won their power struggle against the elders (twig leaders) of the church and had all the church funds of the city gathered in one location. Since the church was illegal, so were the church funds, and metropolitan bishops often operated like gangster bosses in 20th century prohibition cities. Since I lost all my work in 2008, my wife and I are officially poverty stricken, but we are doing all right. We don't tithe anywhere, but we give what we can, when we can, to whoever in our circle of friends and acquaintances has a need. I was in St. Vincent's Hospital for a week in April, and I had the very strong impression that everyone there was serving the Lord, and I was "the least one of these" his brethren that they were doing it to him through. It's all Christian ethics... all of it... Love, Steve

No, johnian, let's not just let this one die... if we are going to take responsibility for our beliefs and actions... which is the only way to become truly free... then we have to be rigorously honest about the decisions we've made, and why we made them. Was it wrong for me to be involved in TWI. That depends on the knowledge I had of the organization. When I thought that Wierwille's on-stage personna of the elderly Bible teacher was genuine, I had no problems promoting the benefits I thought I was receiving from PFAL. And I HAD received benefits... it's just that I had been deceived into thinking those benefits came from PFAL, and not from the Lord Jesus Christ. But when I realized that Wierwille was actually a predator using the truths he preached in PFAL to disguise the errors he was teaching and to take all sorts of advantages of well-meaning people, I knew that promoting TWI was very, very wrong. Not only that, but I realized I had to spend at least as much energy de-promoting TWI as I had spent promoting it. You wrote, "No godly deliverance, just bondage. Whatever," Why do you classify abortion, taking human lives, as "whatever", johniam? Why? I suggest that you will never be able to free yourself from the deceptive heartlessness promoted by Wierwille until you come to some prayerful consideration of that question... Love, Steve

I don't know what to make of you, johniam... I can only infer that you are directing this comment at me, since I am the one who characterized the events my wife was involved with when she was in TWI as "hair raising"... You imagine and speculate what my motivations are without asking or even referencing the voluminous writings I've posted elsewhere on Greasespot... "people [steve Lortz] actually got delivered, but now decades later somebody [steve Lortz] who changed their mind [at what point?] and thinks it was all [ALL?] bogus says "hair raising stories" etc." I recognize many specific deliverances I have received from the Lord Jesus Christ before, during and after my involvement with TWI. I didn't change my mind about the benefits of being involved with TWI decades later... I changed it in the spring of 1987, when I heard credible evidence that Martindale had tried to hit on a woman I knew, and that woman personally confirmed the truth of that incident. That was the time when I realized that the whole real purpose of TWI was NOT to "move the Word over the world" but to gratify the greed and lust of Wierwille, Martindale, the Trustees and others. Was it all bogus? Wierwille's presentation was very deceptive. He preached truths straight out of the Bible, but he taught terribly twisted doctrine, usually at the same time. When people believed the truths Wierwille preached, they DID get deliverance, because God is faithful to his Word. When people believed the errors Wierwille taught, the result was bondage rather than deliverance. Wierwille did not teach that sin in itself, sexual or otherwise, was wrong. In this "age of grace", whether something is sinful or not just doesn't matter. What matters is "broken fellowship." Broken fellowship doesn't come from sinning, it comes from "sin consciousness." In this age of grace we are free to do anything we want to do, and as long as we don't think of it as sin, there are no consequences. But people come into bondage to whatever they serve. If people serve sin, as Wierwille did, they come into bondage to that sin. Deliverance came as a consequence of believing the truths that were written in the Bible. Bondage to sin came as a consequence of believing the things that Wierwille taught in PFAL. Does the end justify the means, johniam? Is it all right to lie to people (date and switch) so they can learn "truth"? Is it all right to kill some people (abortion) so that others can "live"? Is it okay to kill the fruit of a sexual encounter because the only purpose of that sexual encounter was to get somebody to sign a green card? Deliverance is not in the eye of the beholder, johniam. Neither is self-serving sexual abuse... and TWI was full of it... Love, Steve

What I heard back in the late-'80s was that even though there may have been 100,000 people who had a tangential experience of PFAL, there was never more than about 30,000 people "standing" at any given time. This was based on info from people who went on to form offshoots. Love, Steve

Not everybody heard everything that was promoted within TWI, johniam. Only those who were "spiritually mature" enough to handle it. And they obviously didn't call it "whoring for Jesus". My wife (we got married after we had both left TWI) has told me (and psychological counselors) some hair raising stories about her sexual experiences in TWI! And the fact that other people have done it is no excuse for Wierwille and his cronies, who existed clear down to the twig level in far too many cases. Love, Steve

TWI big wigs bad-mouthed D&D at the very same time they accepted tens of thousands of dollars a year that were generated by the sales of D&D. They just didn't do it to Dave's face. Dave was one of the most generous, least hypocritical people I have ever known. Money spoiled the lives of everyone else who was involved with D&D, but not Dave. Love, Steve

After I took PFAL in July of 1980, I went to GenCon where I introduced myself to Dave Arneson, the co-author of Dungeons & Dragons. He had previously mentioned in an article in Different Worlds that he was involved with TWI, so when I introduced myself I told Dave that I had just taken PFAL. In 1982 I moved up to St. Paul, where I worked for Dave's company, and we remained life-long friends. During the early-1980s Dave was tithing in the five-figure range each year to TWI from the money he was making off of D&D. I know Dave was invited to the private parties whenever Wierwille came to town, and they all talked well to Dave's face. But when I took the advanced class, there was a segment on the evils of D&D. Wierwille and the Trustees may not have been respecters of persons (equal opportunity predators), but they were certainly respecters of dollars and the people those dollars came from. Love, Steve

Pride is home plate, MRAP, overweening pride! Love, Steve