waysider

Indoctrination is the reason PFAL was structured the way it was.....overload of information, crammed into a short period of time, dealt out in incremental portions, with no room or time to consider alternatives. It's the reason you could not walk into your local bookstore or public library and pick up a copy of PFAL or RTHST. I actually asked, one time, why, if we were so consumed with spreading our message, did we not make the materials more readily available to anyone who wanted them. I was told (by leadership) that the systematic build up of the class was just as important as the material, itself, and the casual reader would be missing that. In plain English....it's an indoctrination process.

Critical thinking is a two-edged sword. It can keep you out of trouble or put you on the hot-seat. I still prefer it to blind acceptance.

"just attempting to show how the perceptions and messaging changed in 10-15 years." And change they did.....in leaps and bounds. It was still a scam, though, even though we knew some pretty cool people and had a swell time singing Kumbayah around the campfire.

I still remember the old "farm" days, having lunch in the BRC basement, singing "Rollaway" and thinking I was part of some elite organization. But, like a magic trick whose mechanisms are revealed to you, it no longer holds any mystique.

A mellow take on an old classic:

Wierwille wasn't talking about etiquette.

"She stated early in her reign that the TWI was like a big ship and it took a long time to change directions." It took the Titanic less than 3 hours to....*change directions*.

HAND PICKED

Daaat's riiiiight!!

You should have known something was amiss... Harvest Gold was all the rage that year.

I think song was written as a tribute to him.

Thousands of people sat through the AC. How many picked up a "cookie" or two about Wierwille's true character and lifestyle? (It doesn't lend much credibility to his ramblings on the "revelation" manifestations.)

Yeah. Didn't we all think we were gonna come away from there, knowing how to operate revelation?

Heh! Reminds me of the scene in Christmas Story where Come to think of it, maybe that's what really happened to VP's eye.

Well, I'll bet they already knew what you had gotten them, on account of all that revelation they were getting. hahahahahaha!

We took up an offering to get him some kind of trinket. Did other classes do this, as well?

Whatever happened to learning at the man of God's feet? Wierwille would blow in, in the afternoon, "coffee" mug in hand, for some long drawn out "teaching" on definitions he lifted, almost word-for-word from another source.You could have read the whole thing in 5 minutes but he dragged it out for what seemed like hours. Immediately after that, he would disappear. Then you would rehash the definitions in your twigs and talk about how blessed you were to be hearing the definitions. The evening session was basically a rehashed SNS. Sometimes there would be a night-owl in The Way Woods and Wierwille would talk about....himself. Advanced? Not hardly.

I never thought of that until just now. The whole time the healing service was going on, Wierwille was on stage, jabbering away through the P.A. system. <_<

I remember being at the Rock Of Ages, on the closing night, when Wierwille announced there would be a healing service down in front of the stage, at the end of the teaching. He pretty much *demanded* that all AC grads report to the front of the stage and pair up with someone who needed to be ministered to. I found myself thinking, "What the hell is this all about?? If God wants me to go, He will tell me, Himself, and He hasn't." So, I didn't go. As I stood there in the back, murmurings began to shoot through the crowd about people throwing away their crutches, rising from wheel chairs, blind regaining sight and all that kind of stuff. In retrospect, I think the murmurings must have been intentionally instigated by shills because I saw no evidence of anything of the sort. Still, I felt really guilty for a long, long time that I might have deprived someone of deliverance that night. I didn't realize at that time what a sham so much of it was.....I agree, it may well have been the worst part.

I guess they were the lucky ones. They didn't have to "speak in tongues daily (as) prerequisite to revelation"....page 10/key #3

As I've said before, my time at the A.C. was probably the two most depressing weeks I spent in all my time in The Way. I couldn't understand why everyone else seemed to be "getting" something that, to me, seemed like a bunch of jibber-jabber. (You would think that someone who had studied acting would have recognized a "performance". )

There were people who would come to the weekly branch meeting with the same laundry list of minor ailments, week after week after week. It got to where I hoped they didn't ask me to minister to them because I didn't want to be associated with their failure to receive.