rubina

8 hours ago, skyrider said:

Here's a little memory and true story that few have ever heard.......

It was another Sunday Service Teaching in 1982/83 (May or June) where Don Wierwille was the teacher and Walter Cummins was the emcee.  This predated the Auditorium -- so the Sunday services, at this time, were held in the OSC dining room (tables removed -- and transitioned into row seating).   About 40 minutes into the service, the fire alarm went off!

Well, everyone was evacuated out the south doors while the Safety guys ran to the OSC grid to see what quadrant of the building the fire was located.  I was the Warehousing Department Coordinator at the time.  Since half of the building was warehousing.....I was highly interested in finding the source of this fire.  The blinking light registered it in the west end quadrant of the warehouse.....so we made a mad dash that way.  In a matter of two minutes or less, we spotted a small fire ablaze on a pallet in the upper shelf.

Two guys climbed up the racks and put the small fire out.  Several of the Safety guys were already on their radios.  Apparently, one Safety guy at the east end of the warehouse had seen two boys running out the east overhead door.  His suspicions were correct.  The cover-up was immediate.  Some of us found it quite amusing and ironic in light of the two men at the teaching podium that night.

The two young boys who started the fire......Ralphie Wierwille and Bobby Cummins.

I've noticed that there's always been a lot of second generation wayfers that get into trouble. I really wonder what is at the root of that.

My best guess is that their parents were always too caught up in their TWI "responsibilities" to spend the proper amount of time raising them.   

18 hours ago, WordWolf said:

1st century Christians were never centrally-controlled nor organized.  twi bore no resemblance to 1st century Christianity except where twi CLAIMED they did. But all the claims don't mean reality matches a claim.    The 1st century Christians probably didn't have access to the entire New Testament ANYWHERE. All documents had to be hand-copied. With no printing press and no scanners and PDFs, that was a laborious process and few copies circulated for the 1st century AD (certainly relative to now.)

So, twi has NEVER had "The Word as it was known in the 1st Century." because vpw NEVER had "The Word as it was known in the 1st Century." 

vpw might have known that when he phrased the promise he was supposedly given, but he skipped over "Church history".  So, he was likely to make such a mistake where God Almighty would not.

 

 

Probably not the place for this, but I've started to study church history lately and have found it very interesting. As a result, I've been growing more interested in the Orthodox Churches. 

On 4/20/2020 at 11:20 PM, Rocky said:

 

 

This brings us to the first and, to my mind, most important reason to read the classics in 2019 2020.

1. You should read classic literature because it forces you to think deeply and concentrate.

21st century media is hell on the attention span.

But you already know this.

You know that our digital devices are shortening our attention spans, teaching us to only skim the surface of ideas, and making us addicts to tiny dopamine bursts that come from (among other things) the Like and Share buttons.

As we near the end of the second decade of the 21st century we’ve developed widespread awareness that our devices have made us shallow thinkers. We’re less cognizant, however, of the effect of the content itself.

Or the style in which the content is written.

Have you ever wondered why so many of the articles you read, like this one, are organized in numbered lists?

Or why the writing in these articles is so often organized into ultra-short paragraphs, many of them only one sentence long?

We, the content creators of the 21st century, have learned to write in snappy lists with short sentences and one-sentence paragraphs.

We write this way because this is what you, the content consumers of the 21st century, choose to read.

You like content that is clear, concise, simple, and to the point. You’re in a hurry (always), and we writers know, God do we know, that we are competing not just against other essays or other books, but against the endless siren songs of Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter.

We know that if we ask too much of you, say, if we give you a long sentence or, God forbid, a long paragraph, we might be taxing your mind more than you’re interested in having it taxed. We know that a complicated, multi-layered thought, one that might require you to slow down or reread a sentence or look up from your screen and think for a minute is too much to ask when your phone is bursting with notifications and there’s a new video on your favorite Youtube channel and everyone’s talking about that new show on Netflix but you haven’t even seen the last new show everyone was talking about yet and you’ve got ten tabs open on your browser and 3,000 unread books on your Kindle and holy hell who has time to consume it all just open my vein and fill it with listicles please!

There’s a cost to all this.

In the book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist for general nonfiction), Nicolas Carr looks at all the research in neuroscience and psychology about what the Internet is doing to our brains and determines that, yes, our ceaseless attempts to skim this glut of information is making us shallow thinkers who are far less capable of deep, focused, intense thought than our parents and grandparents were.

You should read the classics in 2019 to unlearn the shallowness and impatience you are learning in your hyper-accelerated 21st century life.

When you read Melville (or Hugo or Austen or Tolstoy or Plato or Shakespeare) you are sharing headspace with someone who is much better at slow, deep, meaningful thinking than you are because they’ve never lived in the shallows like you do.

 

 

 

I've tried to deny the effect that technology has had on me for so long, but recently its become really apparent. I thought that I had the ability to concentrate, focus and, read deep texts, but once I started to try it, I realized how little patience I had. I realized how much I depend on short articles an flashy videos to learn things when I probably should have sat down and read through the issue.  

Thanks guys, I've been reading the NIV translation. I really came back to Christ after reading the Gospels and seeing that there was so much more to Christianity than what the Way taught. 

I still have a hard time reading the Church Epistles because whenever I start reading them I have a hard time getting myself to think about what is being said outside of Way dogma.

3 hours ago, socks said:

This all reminds me of how it was going when we were there..and the over flow of people showing up for SNS - I remember some of the back trailers could dial in and get a SNS feed using...I think it was through the phones....? and say, while the Children's Fellowship was going, they could get the service there....does that ring a bell? {that was after they got electrical and water ran to them finally) 

I remember some discussion around getting it to the trailers because in that era before the other buildings went up the BRC was getting packed upstairs and down and using the trailers made sense, especially during the winter months. There was push back though and it never got done on a universal scale at that time, but then it seems like I heard they eventually set it up so that the trailers had the capability to get the meetings held up in the BRC. 

Ring any bells? 

 

As of now, you can call together with a branch or fellowship into headquarters to get the service or get a CD or DVD mailed to you.

12 hours ago, OldSkool said:

DeLisle was booted by Rosalie for speaking up. I dont know what he spoke up about....i do know he was forced to admit publicly that he hasnt helped people. He was forced to leave hq and went to Montana.

1 hour ago, penguin2 said:

Hmm, depending on when the Georgia person went to teach, either all of Georgia or maybe that person's county, would have had a shelter in place order they would have violated. I don't think they had to get groceries in Ohio.  I am sure a nicely recorded teaching could have been done and uploaded and projected somehow in the auditorium or they could have protected their staff and just had someone already at HQ teach! And does this mean they were running  classes when groups larger than ten are not supposed to meet?

 

They can't be transparent, they have to hide in the dark with all the skeletons in their closet.

Why in the world would JY apologize? Does this mean he was just going to submit to Rosalie and try to stay in the Way???? Like Rosalie has helped the Word prevailed or lifted a finger to help anyone?  For some reason i am just really upset for the DeLis*s because I remember how helpful they were to me long ago!  

I think they have a religious organization exemption, but exemption or no exemption, this isn't the right thing to do.

Anyway, I doubt the classes were gatherings larger than ten. 

I think they put the next Way Disciple group on hold. I don't think they gave any justification for the drive, I think its the result of Rosalie calling all the shots and a slow, unquestioning bureaucracy implementing them. They certainly aren't putting any services online that's far too technically advanced and transparent for them, just this last year they made a big deal about adding a give button on the website. I don't remember all of what JYdL said, but I remember him saying something like that he failed his mission as president to spread God's word to the world. I don't think the exact terminology was all that important because it was mostly meaningless ministry jargon.

The Way's response to the coronavirus has been mixed. In the same announcement where Jean-Yves DeLisle said he was stepping down because he had failed he also announced that the 2020 Advanced Class would be canceled do to the coronavirus and later it was posted on the website that other events were cancelled. The last few sunday services have all been a bit interesting, they seemed to have gotten rid of live audiences and the choir. Two weeks ago the teacher drove all the way from Georgia to headquarters. Last week they announced that the Way Disciples had completed their Foundational Classes and had just held special fellowships in their areas and just yesterday the teacher was still telling "believers" to reach out to others with the Word.