*wades through several pages of personal testimony that had nothing to do with TWI but with God and the Jesus People*
God bless. You really should have put this in a section relevant to it, either "New Members" or "My Story." People expect biographies in those. It's really not relevant to this thread.
Concerning the second post..... The short of it, from someone who's spent decadeS going over historical records from all sides and personal accounts from all sides, is that vpw was a man who could deliver a convincing sermon- but any good actor could deliver a convincing sermon. The content of the sermons were plagiarized from REAL men of God- people he did not credit. He would plagiarize their material and claim he received it by revelation from God Almighty. Nearly everything wholesome he ever said has been tracked from older sources he rarely credited, or were supplied later when there was a Research Department who could "do the heavy lifting." This man had a bland ministry with bland material- until he found better sources to plagiarize. When he plagiarized BG Leonard's classes and JE Stiles' book on the Holy Spirit, his ministry began to show more success. He added work from EW Bullinger and EW Kenyon and found out about the Jesus People. He went over to them, convinced some that he was a genuine minister, then subverted them from working for God to working for him and promoting the PFAL class. Almost everyone who ever logged in here who HAS taken PFAL can trace their "lineage" from a handful of Jesus People (one who taught someone else, who taught someone else...etc until that last person heard.)
VPW made up accounts of things that he claimed happened- he dreamed up imaginary snowstorms decades after they happened, never imagining the internet would make it possible to check the weather reports of bygone decades. He claimed-often-that he was getting direct revelation for things that were later traced directly to a Christian writer or some obscure source (like the John Birch Society). He was a chain-smoker who drank alcohol daily (and often each day.) He set up a rather elaborate network that allowed him to target young women he molested, raped, or drugged THEN molested or raped. He himself admitted that he was a minister on a church payroll for about 2 years before he ever believed the Bible was The Word of God despite preaching weekly sermons ON that Bible.
The time would fail for me to tell of all his felonies, his deceptions, his sins, and so on. He cultivated a public persona that was SO pious, and in private taught that you could do whatever you wanted and it was OK with God (the same things he was teaching publickly were totally wrong, in fact.) The disconnect was so complete between the 2 that it is difficult for people who NEVER met him, often, to accept that the same man who taught ONE thing on tape would say and do the exact OPPOSITE in private. However, we have eyewitnesses and his PERSONAL victims who have stepped forward. The man was brilliant at being a fraud. He spoke God's Word, but so did Balaam's @$$, and I'm not going to revere THAT, either.
He also spoke horrible error. When his sources made mistakes, he made them lockstep behind them. He also taught the "Word-Faith" thing, where you can believe things into happening, or fear them into happening. This meant he blamed people who were unable to obtain deliverance-it was "their fault" since it was always "available." And he himself died of cancer. After decades of giving into his vices as well as raping God's women, he actually told someone, in his final hours, that he was searching through his memory, trying to find some single thing he'd done that displeased God and was interfering with his healing. We could go on all day. But "his" ministry was organized to ALWAYS turn a profit, and lacked the support measures common sense would require of them-those would cost money. The only actual "professional" training in his organization wasn't counseling or anything, but Dale Carnegie SALES training-which shows his priorities. Help people? No,. Sell his classes and collect 10% of the income of more people? Yes...and he didn't even pay the licensing fee. A grad of the Carnegie program plagiarized the material to save the cost of licensing the thing-which is a felony, and he knew that.
And so on, and so on. Myself, I think the men who WERE of God included those he plagiarized, and those Jesus People he stole from God. Himself, no. His "god" was his own lusts..and this is coming from someone who once bought into vpw's illusions when he was young and naive.