where things started going wrong

[smurfette]

Where things started going wrong with some well-meaning people who were also deceived like us

In my version of, Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse, on page 174, the authors start discussing how sometimes us humans get our sense of value from what we do or how we look.

"Let's say the focus of our hope for value is aposition in the church. Rather than pointing to Jesus, what is really valued is how well we perform in church. Eventually, we realize that memorizing and spouting Scripture, witnessing and leading study groups are terribly inadequate sources of life, in and of themselves, leaving us empty and looking for more."

Then in an attempt to be rewarded and fufilled, some go into ministry.

""So let's say here I am: A new Christian leader, with lots of drive, lots of ambition, a Bible in my briefcase and a mission in my heart. The mission? To build the Church! To advance the kingdom!These are wonderful sentiments to be sure; but part of the "working out my own salvation with fear and trembling" will be to remember that there is a significant problem lurking in the shadows of my soul. The problem is subtle, and very dangerous. It is this :Unless I stay rightly connected to God, my entire sense of value as a person will come from how I perform as a person and how others reward and applaud my behavior. When we cross this inner line, something wrong begins to take place. I may encourage you to come and serve and give to the glory of God. but the real reason I'm encouraging you to do that is because I will look like a success if you do. I will use you to make me look good. At this point, my ego has begun to feed on you."

I thought of this quote while reading about the 3 page what to do/not do when the mog came to visit--mostly about the mog needing us to give them a feeling of value/like they were succeeding.

[likeaneagle]

Smurfette-

I never read that book. I think that wass the motivation from about 95 on. Not everyone I met was like that...things got stinkky around me when the new BC said to our fellowship she was going to whip out all influences the last bc left. she pointidly said we were to close as a branch and she was going to break us up..is that ego???

[smurfette]

The measure of success according to loyboy was how much you cleaned out an area since we had so many homos and other problems. had to get spiritual and clean house I am sure others here could go into more detail about how corpse would tell "horror stories" of cleaning up a super messed up area BTW did the previous branch leader leave as an assignment or did they get kicked out/leave on own? I remember other posters talking about how into some corpse were when it came to cleaning up.

Edited August 28, 2005 by smurfette

[smurfette]

which imo was a crock--used all that homo stuff and genuine spiritual suspicion as a cover to kick people out

[likeaneagle]

the previous got kicked out..so they sent in a female stalon..no kidding on this one

[TheHighWay]

Oh man, they HATED it when the believers of an area were really close and tight-knit. They were just SURE it meant that the people had gotten lazy, or too attached to a particular leader, or were hiding something... I saw this over and over again.

My goodness, people, what does that SAY????? Why didn't I see that at the time?

[vickles]

I wonder if this is the reason when I was a twig coordinator and was getting lots of people coming. We had a wonderful fellowship. They took me off as being a twig coordinator and put me in one farther away that was not any fun and put a guy in place where I was that knew nothing at all on how to run one and had no common sense at all.

I saw this kind of thing happen year after year.

Now why is it that they made dumb decisions if it was going too good? Doesn't even make sense at all, except that the higher beings were jealous maybe? :(-->

[WeWereScammed]

quote:

Originally posted by vickles:

Doesn't even make sense at all, except that the higher beings were jealous maybe? :(-->

Nothing TWI does makes sense and the higher beings are stupid.

[ex70sHouston]

When the base quit growing(fill in any reason you want), the leadership kept growing. You move good people out of jobs to put in the "trained" and the trained have no idea of what they are doing.

TWI is a grand pyramid scam that releyed on believers taking more and more classes then going into the corps. If no one is left on the bottom or the top just gets to big it all collapese into itself. Planned self distruction.

Lets also not forget that if you wern't the favorite foot kisser you were chewed out or kicked out.

[smurfette]

Sorry all. I probably should have put this wth approval addiction. IF anyone originally had good intentions..they eventually switched to please the leaders above you mode. That meant clean out the old but get fresh new naive newbies. Remember all the different reports that twig leaders had to fill out-witnessing, how many new people had come to fellowship, what was taught etc? Numbers numbers numbers is what it became. Who can get the most classes together, what state had most new people etc. Plenty of you know even more than I

Edited August 28, 2005 by smurfette

[Bramble]

Vickles, I think you are on to something.

Before '94 we had a thriving little fellowship in the middle of nowhere. Old way grads were driving many miles from a couple other small towns to come to our fellowship once a week.It was fun, we had lots of kids so we did a kiddie fellowship, too. We tried to bless people, it never occurred to Mr Bramble and I that we were supposed to be reproving people and root out weakness in their lives.

We had to quit being the Fellowship leaders--we, gasp, had a mortgage, and we had some pressing medical bills(lack of believing.) We eventually sold our house and moved to the Limb city(where the word was 'hot.')Rent was higher than our mortgage payment, btw. And we got to clean the limb home and do their yard work!

All the people that traveled to our fellowship were told to drive To The Limb, many more miles away, or move to the limb. Many, of course, dropped out of TWI.

This was how the Household was 'strenghthened' in the nineties.