Oakspear

Jargon and speech patterns tend to spread around a group pretty quickly and get entrenched. In addition to "just", I remember a lot of New Yorkers pronouncing "God" just like Wierwille did, despite the accents being pretty different.

Martindale said it frequently, usually in the context of people leaving "the protection of the household". I can't recall the first time I heard it, but it might have been during the "Leadership Tapes" aka "The Galatians Tapes".

I don't recall the word "cult" being thrown around until after the Jonestown tragedy, which took place less than a year after I joined up. I think that my parents were more upset that I wasn't a Catholic any more than anything else. If I remember a lot of the anti-cult literature back then, it focussed more on doctrinal issues; a lot of the bad practice that we discuss on GS wasn't widely known then. At some point my parents, according to my sister, talked to a deprogrammer, but decided to forgoe that option. They tried to be supportive, visited me during my WOW year and even attended some fellowships during the 90's.

I too need more information before becoming incensed: Was he given the week off without asking for it? Was there an understanding that he would be paid, maybe based on previous situations? Was he told that he would be paid? Where I work, we can take advantage of the family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for medical reasons (including family medical)and come back to the same job and rate of pay. We have a Paid Time Off (PTO) benefit where we can be paid for the time off up to the amount of PTO earned (it varies based on how many hours you work and your seniority) - we can also purchase short term disability insurance.

Thaaaat's riiiiight!

Yeah, I get it...you're venting...about us

There aremany things that affect small groups of people, yet are important nonetheless

The best road is going to be different for each individual. Maybe sounding like you "just walked out of a twig 20 minutes ago" is the best road for some people, maybe the best road for others is throwing out every scrap of information learned in The Way and starting completely over. Of course the path one takes will most likely look like the best path, while others look pretty darn stupid! No one is forcing me to go to church (although Geisha thinks I'm going to Hell )or read the collaterals (Mike has suggested it though) and I'm not telling anyone to follow a pagan path (Happy Litha <Summer Solstice> everybody ) My path to recovery, the one that is unique to me, started when the first lawsuit was announced. That inspired me to examine Martindale's teachings until I concluded that they were not compatible with what Wierwille taught or with what I discovered myself using PFAL "research keys". Eventually I concluded that Wierwille's stuff didn't hold up to biblical scrutiny very well either. The realization that several offshoots were teaching wildly different things, all using PFAL keys to researching the bible, led me to believe that there wasn't just one way to "rightly divide". The plethora of beliefs outside of TWI, all using the same bible, and the variety of other religions, all claiming to be the true, divinely inspired WAY, inspired me to back off and seek the path the resonated most with me. It's a non-Christian path to me sure, but most who know me would not disagree that I'm a better person these days then I was when in TWI.

I turned 51 yesterday, so maybe it's time to take down the boogying Grant that went up in honor of #50 last year! I had to go to work at 3:30am on my birthday, got off work at 1:00PM and drove out of town to perform a wedding, got very little sleep and was at work at 2:45 this morning! I did buy a 6 pack of the Samuel Adams "Longshot", winner of the annual home brewing contest that I'll be enjoying this afternnon.

Does God talk to me? Yes she does.

I hardly ever talk about or reference TWI outside of this site and one other. Why are you so concerned about people who discuss and yes, b*tch about, TWI on this site? I'm interested in your response

If it was genuine, how would we know?

TWI redefined "branch" to mean two or more twigs (fellowships) back when Martindale came up with his 'every corps grad a full time minister' fiasco. Part of it was his dictate that every Corps grad had to be overseeing at least a branch, and since branches under the old definition (seven or more twigs) were pretty rare, the definition was changed. If I remember correctly he got it from the section in Exodus where Moses deputized men to be "rulers of tens", "ruler of fifties", etc. He decided that "rulers of tens" couldn't possibly mean more than ne "ruler of ten", but that was the plural of "ruler of tens", ten representing the basic fellowship unit, the family or home fellowship. (That's right kids, it doesn't make sense)

I initially was anonymous because I was an "innie" and my wife wanted to stay in, I wanted to say my piece without getting any undue attention in the "real" world. "Oakspear" was not my original handle I used a few: Taoiseach (not "Tao Search" by the way, but a Gaelic term) Tyril III (later just Twyril) - a character in a short story that I wrote in high school. I used both handles for a while to confuse the WayGB John Oakspear - I had lost the password to Taoiseach and wanted a "backup" handle - again to confuse the WayGB. Oakspear - I dropped the "John" and adopted Oakspear as my only handle after the WayGB made a good guess that I was Twyril and "confronted" me about it I, like some others, use the name Oakpsear in "real" life. I use it as my middle name on my business cards and most of the GSers that I know personally call me that in person. I'm not shy about anyone knowing my legal name, if you google my legal name and "Oakspear" I'll come up a few times

I don't think it's so much a doctrine, i.e. "leadership" telling you not to take pictures, but a fear reaction to what other wayfers will say if you've got pictures of "cop-outs" on your mantle. Which says a lot in itself.

That's a whole 'nother subject, Twi & holidays. On the one hand, all of these holidays had "evil" pagan origins, and we'd scoff at the poor idiots who were "deceived", but we would follow the same traditions ourselves, as if calling it "Household Holiday" or "Bless & Treat" made it any better. At least the Jehovah's Witnesses are consistant

If what was in the article is true (sorry, I didn't check all the sources like some others did) then the government entity in question is way out of line. You can have friends over for a barbeque, but you can't have your friends over to "say Amen"? It sounds like a parking and noise issue that morphed into a land use issue pretty quickly and got bogged down in the religios aspect. That's what happens sometimes when you get the law involved. By the way I first heard about this on Witch's Voice and a good number of the pagans who commented were sympathetic to the church folks involved.

Right, because most people are so tolerant of Muslims and Wiccans

I agree. When you buy into the MOG myth, you naturally assume that others are buying into it too, or else they're rebellious or possessed or weak or what-have-you.

Any of you Corps folks have to clean up the "cotton" from the cottonwoods out at Gunnison?

I have seen individuals give out of their own pocket, and I've heard about some leaders using "abundant sharing"* money and not reporting it, but I have not ever heard that TWI officially helped anyone out. *A personal note: I abhor using the term "ABS" - it was a friggin' blue form abbreviation!

For Way Corps grads as well as the non-Corps twig leaders, some folks just revelled in the power that they could have over people and others just took things like chair-stringing as something that could be used when necessary. The number of things that should have been "helpful hints", like chair-stringing became laws that could never be deviated from for some people.

During the mid-nineties, our high exalted Way Corps branch coordinators were running the first of the WayAP classes for non-Way Corps PFAL grads. The class was going to be held in their living room, while twig meetings were to take place downstairs in the finished basement. I was asked to run the twig meetings and oversee witnessing downstairs while the BC & his wife did the class upstairs. I specifically asked if I could leave the downstairs "set up" for twig since I was coming from across town after a full day of work, had several kids who attended twig with us and only had one car, precluding separate trips for me & the wife & kids. Mr. Leader agreed. On the second day that I would be over at the WC home to run the meeting I received a call from Mr. Leader about a half hour before start time. According to him, the room was a mess, disorderly and not at all ready for a meeting "where God's Word was to be held forth". Frantically trying to figure out what I had done wrong I raced over to receive instruction in proper room setup from the expert. When I arrived I found that all the chairs had been moved into the laundry room, the coffee tables had been stacked off to the side and the lamps were moved against the wall. He and his wife forgot that they told me to leave the room set up and rearranged everything in order to 'work out"

Although I never said so out loud, I thought that the TWI vision of the afterlife had more detail than what you could reasonably find in the bible. The doctrine about losing rewards balanced on a lot of assumptions about what certain verses meant. As I recall Martindale would say "It says that you can't lose eternal life, but it doesn't say that you can't lose rewards". Yeah, but it doesn't say that you can lose them either, nor is it real specific about what those rewards are exactly. It seems like TWI leaders had to dig hard to find places in the bible to back up their belief that there were (eternal) consequenses to being a Christian that didn't hang out with TWI. I never realy thought that they adquately made their case, so I wasn't any more afraid of death than anybody else in this world, and being "out of fellowship" or leaving TWI didn't make me any more or less afraid. I wasn't really afraid of being a "greasespot by midnight" either. Any fear that I had was of being cut off from a group that at one time I thought was the only one accurately teaching the bible. When I finally was kicked out I had left TWI teachings so far behind that there wasn't any fear then either

When I first heard about chair-stringing I thought it was a pretty cool way to set up chairs in a lrage room. My WOW bro' and I even used it when we set up an auditorium for a musical production in Amherst, Nebraska that we were involved in. The rest of the crew was amazed at how well it worked. It was the same level of detail for a living room PAL class that struck me as pretty stupid. Probably the worst example of room set-up that I ever encountered was at a Word in Business in the 90's. I don't recall if it was at the Wyndham in Dallas or the Hilton in Chicago, but the chairs were set with no air between them, so that if the whole row was filled, everybody was crushed between the people on each side, and since this was a TWI event, there were ushers to ensure that every row was filled!