chockfull

TWI's version of dualism: "If you don't mind, it doesn't matter". Now that sounds like a Trekkie version of the old Kansas song "Dust In the Wind".

Actually the closest thing to ANY systematic handling of the scriptures was Corps teachings which focused on whole books of the Bible. Many of those were later released as "University of Life". All I am aware of were either church epistles, "leadership" epistles (Timothy/Titus) or Acts. Probably the best part of the Adv. Class focused on textual teachings of OT people in the context of walking with God. But absolutely not, "training in the whole Word". I seriously would question how many Way Corps grads have even read the whole Bible all the way through.

Good for you, pond. Your observations are keen, yet is this how God desires his children to live? Is this what He is talking about as the body of Christ? I love the people, yet my heart holds out with hope for a body where Christ is magnified, where you don't find your average good-hearted Joe on the street who treats you better than the so-called household. I can't go back - those with their eyes blinded by the Pharisees have made a conscious choice to be blind. They will not wake up, and it is not my calling to wake them. That will require the Pure One in His white robes, to illuminate the stain of their garments so they may be ashamed.

Chaos and fate are illusions.

I understand, Jeff. I was watching the documentary on Michael Travesser recently. He proclaimed himself the human embodiment of God, then proceeded to consummate relationships with most of the married women in his camp / compound. One of the women's husband he asked what he thought of his proclamation. The man responded "It was a little overdone". He was kicked out, his wife and child remained. I make snappy comments now to reinforce the ridiculousness of the behavior I tolerated previously, but I wasn't so glib in the actual situations. I would like another go around though. Hahaha.

A simple live with believing and love is much better than one based upon lists. Great observation rascal.

Corps Principals - I have a perspective: CP1 - This is just a basic spiritual goal that every Christian has and grows to fulfill in their walk with Christ. Nothing magical, or leadership restrictive. Of course the changes from the first ones show the overall legalism that has crept in to all of these. CP2 - This one basically is rhetoric, means nothing. TWI does absolutely no comprehensive book by book study of the Bible. For that, go look for a Calvary Chapel church. The training that is received, rather than being based upon "the whole Word", is rather based upon narrowly defined focus determined by BOD and usually restricted to currently written publications like collaterals, classes, etc. Whole topics in the Word, like debt, are ignored and people are focused on "present truth" of what BOD wants to look at. It's one huge lie, but hey if you can't base a ministry on truth, then redefine a lie to be truth works for them. If someone questions it, you can always put them on probation. CP3 - This is a decent overall fitness goal, like those that most people on the planet have. The legaslistic updates have included nutrition, grooming, etc. Basic personal physical goals. Nothing earth-shattering or again restrictive to leadership. The legalists can do wonders with this one, reteach you how to breathe, read labels on cans, etc. CP4 - This one is the most hilarious. Old interp - believe to prosper financially yourself + support the church. New interp - well, since that one is a pipe dream with BOD's edict against mortgages, 2nd job distributorships and most financial tools of raising capital all other businesses employ, now let's make it mean "being happy living very close to poverty". Oh, and you don't need to worry about HQ - they can cut expenses and live off the $25M they have in the bank regardless. Just make sure of the springs in your bobblehead so you don't get cut. CP5 - the legalists have prevailed. "Leaders and workers" isn't good enough - we need "overseers and laborers". This is a Freudian slip on the part of the BOD. They really don't want "leadership", especially "strategic leadership". "Overseers" promotes the correct "lording over" type of attitude they function in. As "laborers" promotes the appropriate attitude you are to have towards them. Especially "day laborers", who are too stupid to ask questions or provide feedback, just do what they are told. Do what you are told, and get us the reports. Teach what we tell you to, hook up to the STS and don't fall asleep, and keep that $$$ flowing in. Where is the "earnest desire and humility"? Where the BOD tells you it is. Who cares if common sense dictates otherwise? We meet once a year to sit down and determine what will be best for your life. Does the job market for volunteers, medical considerations, education, money, or anything else to help the person ever enter in to thinking? Why of course not. They determine the "spiritual goals" i.e. where a person benefits the organization most, and "God will bless them in the other areas". God takes up the slack where the BOD are slackers, apparantly. That must be a new Bible verse. "We don't assign Way Corps where there's no earnest desire." Actually, with the abysmally poor strategic leadership of the organization at the BOD level, driving everything towards fear, mediocrity, dullness, the exact opposite is true - they assign Way Corps virtually everywhere there is little to no earnest desire. Because that's the whole ministry. Tradition built on plagiarism and corruption, heavy-handed rule, legalism, bribery and politics. The blind beating the blind. Physicians of no value. Blind guides. Those who care primarily how they look, not who they help. Pharisees of Pharisees, whom God will call to account at Christ's return.

With my sense of humor I would likely have responded "And yet somehow kicking you in the balls at the moment seems to fit the bill for both".

The fact that something can be explained has zero bearing on the truth of the explanation, the methods used to formulate the explanation, or its inherent value. There are aspects of the mind and of life that are under an individual's control by choice, while there are other aspects that will never be. By virtue of the language we are using to discuss the "authentic" you as opposed to one that is not authentic directly limits what we are discussing to those aspects of the mind and life that are under individual control. If your personal choice is that control over any aspect of these is an illusion, then that's all it is - your personal choice. You can't choose that for me. The matrix was a very entertaining movie, a mental model, and possibly a mind picture compelling enough to be used in examples of comparison like a figure of speech. Yet Neo learned to bend physical laws to his advantage within the matrix.

Actually nothing amazes me more than the overall state of the lack of Christian discernment.

"Wanting" can be looked at in more than one way. There are certain things we "want" that I don't know if I would say are a genetic response so much as base instincts to ensure survival. Maslow's hierarchy of needs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs) is one way of looking at where "wanting" comes from. And I am not distinguishing the stupid delineation between needs and wants taught in TWI - for the purposes of this discussion those words are interchangeable. A need or a want is something a human pursues after satisfying. As Maslow describes in his writings, the more base things at the bottom of the pyramid are what need to be fulfilled first, then if they are, humans move towards the things up the pyramid. People without food on the table aren't going to be wanting self-actualization, for example. He also describes the interaction of societies, and that as a society progresses and the quality of life raises so that the bottom pyramid needs are consistently met, then you see many of the top portion of the pyramid needs being expressed - like the Rennaisance period and all of the rich art and music from there. One thing interesting to me about this line of thinking and "the authentic you" we're discussing in this thread is that people seeking the authentic you would be more in the upper portion of the pyramid in Maslow's diagram. Self actualization is a higher level need. It involves complex thought, goal setting, and action. TWI actually through its doctrine in many ways keeps people in the lower base levels of Maslow's pyramid. Scrambling to fulfill prescribed numbers of meetings per week / month, living in rentals, free thought being discouraged, large amounts of lower level functions of life being "re-taught" (breathing, exercise, nutrition, dress, etiquette), sending in large portions of income to support the system. People are too poor and occupied to have time to think to the point of inner reflection. Education, job success, and "secular" goals being taught as less important than "spiritual goals", which by translation means becoming more subject to the will of TWI leaders with more time, money, life to dedicate to them. They use Jesus as an example, yet they are not the God he served. People live on a hamster wheel running and running with no time for free thought and liberating self-actualization goals. I'm sure if you would question some of the leadership about this they would respond that the greatest leader is the greatest servant and self actualization comes within a life of service. But then you start to compare their words with how they live, and very little of their lives goes towards actually serving people as opposed to orchestrating ways to control people and for people to serve them. They set themselves up to be the representatives of God, and are served as such, never questioned. Yet they live to control others and worship the positions they themselves hold as the source of that power and control. God's desire is a stark contrast to that in that every person lives up to their individual calling and relationship with Him. This is not in some blind-obedience, self-perpetuating morass of people climbing a Pharisees political ladder, but in the full development of all of the self-actualization of what a person wants to accomplish in their life with God working in them.

I tend to view the "authentic self" as who I want to be, what I want to emphasize in developing myself, and acting in congruence with my innermost beliefs. Perhaps some portion of that is genetic, yet as a thinking rational human being I believe I have a great deal to say in what my "authentic self" is.

While I can completely relate to the feeling expressed here, what I differ with is sitting around missing friends and someplace to go. If these people are not currently your friends because you have chosen to go a different way in your ministry associations, were they ever REALLY your friends? There are plenty of great people out in our societies, and great Christians as well who mostly have never heard of TWI. Develop a hobby, go bowling, darts, shoot pool, do knitting clubs, photography, go back to school, meet new friends, start a supper club, start a babysitting exchange. You know, all those things we used to involve ourselves with in the community under the guise of "moving the Word"? Well, now you can actually enjoy them for the richness of the people they expose you to as opposed to having some kind of ulterior motive or class or lame fellowship to sell them. I will not let the Pharisees dictate my future.

When you are talking about people that use a religion and a group of people to appease their own psychosis, then good enough will never be good enough. Because it's not actually about the quality of service, it's about that complaining and being dissatisfied is what they are after. It gets them wanted and craved attention, enforces rank in the "household", and makes them think they are more spiritual by upholding some kind of legalistic, unrealistic, and wicked standard. It upholds their sick, psychotic view of themselves, which actually is completely contrary to scripture. Usually the complaint is after the fact, as opposed to seeing effort in training before the fact. When I face people like this now, I generally look at 'unreasonable' types of expectations as the person holding them is the one with the problem.

How unbelievably lame. Joyce Meyer when faced with similar kinds of scrutiny and questions publicized her financial books for any who want to look at them. I think you can download them off a link on her main website. Notice the basic difference of character there of the leadership of two Christian ministries. Yet TWI still wants to hold some kind of elitist view of themselves as the greatest Christian ministry since the first century. Ummm, sorry guys. You don't even measure up to your peers. Except in your ability to cover things up and make excuses.

And so later his just penance was to move large numbers of boxes without question or complaint at a minimum-wage salary? What can Brown do for you?

We should do a sequel video with a martindale impersonater flipping burgers and damaging one, and a dude with a 10th corps nametag confronting him on it. Or better yet, a manager speaking Espanol and someone interpreting the confrontation.

Hi John, Thanks for your thoughts and explanations. I do think it would be beneficial to many on this thread if you posted a little regarding your approach, or even if you post hyperlinks to your own website where you explain your approach. It's good to get to know a little of your background, experience and work. That type of thing goes a long way to alleviate concerns. chockfull

Since we're talking about behavior modification, I wanted to add a few things from the perspective of the cognitive behaviorist angle of psychology. The reason I want to do so is that it touches upon "anger" that is currently being discussed, and it also touches on "self". Also, personally I feel that elements of that approach have helped me take control over my response to these types of things and have helped me to define where I want my future to go. You can view the field of behavior modification as a continuous application of stimulous / response. The easiest example to think of is Pavlov's dog - the famous case. Ring a bell, then set out food for the dog. Over time, just ringing the bell causes the dog to salivate. That is classic stimulous / response. Humans as thinking entities have the ability to inject conscious thought and decision-making into the stimulous / response cycle. We cannot control the stimulous - the influence of the external world upon ourselves, but we can control our response. One way to look at "self" is that space in between stimulous and response for the thinking individual. The cognitive thought that evaluates the stimulous and rationally decides where to go and what action to take. What is "the real me"? That space where I decide who I want to be, how I want to act, and thus how to respond. Responses can be classified into three areas: aggressive, assertive, and passive. Many times "anger" can be looked on as simply an aggressive response to stimulous. This may or may not be appropriate or rational. You can look on an individual stimulous from a scale of 1 to 10 in intensity. Then you can look at the response from a scale of 1 to 10. A 10 stimulous and a 1 response is passive. A 1 stimulous and a 10 response is aggressive. More in the middle is the assertive response. A response that is thought through cognitively and appropriate to the stimulous is generally considered a more healthy response. How does all this fit in to behavior modification and TWI? TWI, and probably all such groups that use authority to abuse, conditions a passive response. They expect a passive response. They reward a passive response. A passive response is compliance and conformity. They use a particularly passive definition of obedience (hupotasso definition, anyone?) that talks about cognitive thought but tolerates none of it. They attack both aggressive responses and assertive responses. The thing they can tolerate the least is a thinking individual armed with the scriptures standing up for themselves in an assertive fashion. The result of this is an individual conditioned to passive responses. And leadership that is trained to produce that in others. Since this is very unhealthy - typically associated with a victim in an abuse situation, long periods of extended passiveness under an abusive stimulous eventually usually results in a person bagging emotions in an unhealthy fashion, and then unloading them in usually an inappropriate response (the aggressive response - a 10 response to a 1 stimulous). Have you ever just "blew up" at a loved one without any rational reason? Or experienced the "kick the dog" syndrome? Many people feel ashamed at that, however very few can trace it back to a pattern of conditioned passive responses. TWI and abusive leadership uses the irrationality of this type of response to further condition passive responses. "Why are you so angry?" "It was just a simple request" "I did nothing to deserve this kind of response". The healthy way out of this type of cycle is to take charge of conscious rational thought and start to plan out assertive types of responses that are appropriate to the stimulous and reflect the values you wish to preserve. Respond as "the real me". Take back your own life. Take back your own values. Interesting - remember VPW's attempt at ethics? Lifestyle of a Believer? Yes, I'm aware of the irony. One statement in there however is very true - "no man is the means to another man's end". Yet in TWI with spiritually abusive leadership and the cycle of conditioned passive response, functionally exactly the opposite is produced. Every person becomes the means to another's end - endless cycles of using people to preserve little "fiefdoms" of abusive leadership. So to me, looking at "anger" and "the true self" is most valuable when evaluated within the context of looking at a larger pattern of behavior. Examine a man or woman within their environment to understand.

+100 for the Zeppelin reference.

The greatest d@mn way to set chairs is eyeballing it in 99% of situations. God created the eyes as a fine instrument of precision. Where there are optical illusions, or there are too many chairs to eyeball it effectively, taking measurements and stringing can help. 1 degree off in the Big Top tent could cause some havoc if multiplied. The rest if it is just people's stupidity and penchance for the law.

No I was not afraid of death when leaving TWI. My relationship with God and Jesus Christ existed prior to TWI involvement and will continue afterwards. It was not defined by TWI. In fact, the growing diversity between the truth written in my heart defined by that relationship and the goods peddled by TWI made it evidently and progressively more clear that TWI is not genuine Christianity. So leaving did not bring fear of death, but trusting life and He who created it. TWI had one thing right - man's greatest enemy is fear. I still remember one of Donnie Fugit's teachings "You know what man's greatest enemy is? Sand..." God rest his soul, he had some passion at least, different from the drivel of teachings today in TWI. Fear is goods sold and promoted by the adversary. Trust and grace are from God. The funny twist is the abuse angle. TWI instills the fear by their practices, then blames the person for being afraid, saying the fear inside of themselves is their fault. You know who really should be afraid? The leadership of TWI, when the Lord Jesus Christ returns and we are standing right with him shoulder to shoulder with him demanding accountability for their lives and actions as Christians. Then their petty positions and earthly abusive authority will have no bearing and they will remain on their face before him ashamed.

From my perspective, clinical psychology does offer genuine help in recovery from groups like TWI. Whether it is identifying characteristics of groups that commonly cause psychological trauma, identifying external resources for additional help, or mental and emotional viewpoints or exercises that help people move on, all can potentially have a benefit. It may not be necessary that the individual has specific TWI experience. For example, the book "The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse" is a book written by a couple of people involved in starting and running a small community church. Yet parallels abound that specifically apply to TWI. With respect to the profession and offering it here, I would suggest that John is only doing target marketing for his services. He is doing marketing here, and he is selling a service. On a forum that is more or less dedicated to recovery from and discussion of an abusive group I would suggest that it is nothing more or less than target marketing. He is making a step towards people on this forum in this fashion. Yes it is true he doesn't post here regularly, so his commitment level towards understanding TWI specifically and the details of it and recovery is unknown at this time. I'm sure as with any profession, the more detailed his understanding of TWI is the better the help will be. I don't think target marketing should be understood as anything different than what it is - offering a service to a market segment. In this field, like in accident injury cases (someone mentioned ambulance chaser lawyers) the market segment is hurt or injured people. So only an individual's personal ethics can determine what genuinely is the difference between caring about people in detail in offering a service and being a businessman first who cares less. The end product, or "fruit" becomes evident with time. If we as a community want to preseve this forum as more of a pure "self-help" type, we could request to Paw that it be advertisement free, or construct another forum subsection that is dedicated to that type of thing. Until then I would suggest just viewing this thread as an advertisement thread that may or may not pertain to individuals.

These people. What they say with their mouth and how they live in their life are so vastly different it's nauseating.

When I think of these topics, one of the verses that is the most comforting is Joel 2:25: "And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you" I look forward to with anticipation God restoring to me the years the worms have eaten.