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Paw, thanks for all you do and have done. Gsc helped free me from twi, and being free i seldom post anymore. Over the past decade GSC gave me a voice to expose what I witnessed during my years in twi. I can honestly say I kept no secrets and did all i could to expose twi. So I completely understand you need to do what you need for your own reasons and peace of mind. Whether you continue with GSC or free yourself from the hassle, thank you so very much. Peace!!

True. But I am not for reviving and restoring anything from the past, to be honest. I made a mostly rhetorical statement with that, since I think we can guess that as long as some of these peeps have an audience, an interest and a paycheck be it dollars or just ego-boosting praise and worship, they're going to go their own way. But yeah, remove and replace is the ideal way to go. My view of the Gospels, Acts and Epistles are that while they give me a view of what happened, and why and a strong degree of "what God wants us to know" in terms of doctrine and practice I don't think they should be viewed as the one-and-only way in which to do things, to live. They don't really provide a finished template from which a final product will be produced, rather they give what I'd call a "functional guide" as to how to proceed to build what is really described as a growing, dynamic living organism. We're really like a body, we have attributes of say, a fountain or a river - everyone sees the water and hears the sound of the water but it's not the same water every minute. The whole of the expanse of what is that river or fountain is much larger than the single drops I see at one time. For generations the word "Church" has been synonymous with "Building". The Church has for many been first a place where a leader of some sort presides and the people gather and attend to listen and participate in some form of ritualized activity. Yet we don't see that happening in the first few generations of Christians and there's nothing written indicating that's the desired state for the Christians in the records we see generated by Luke, Paul, Peter, and other writers and scribes of that early era. So we get from the Bible a kind of "how to do all things through Christ, how to be abased and how to abound", in both individual life as well as group church life. The clearest message of the epistles is that there is no need for anything extraneous beyond the people themselves and their ability to come together and meet and interact as a "body" of Christ, with each person an individual part contributing to the whole, with support and assistance from God through Christ to each member. A "diversity" of ways and means, all through that "selfsame spirit". So - and this is like preaching to the choir I suppose - but by building an extensive library of copy cat rituals, traditions and requirements that essentially act as governance for individual and group behavior we, they, whoever, severely restrict their own ability to really "be" the body of Christ. Any artifice or facade, any set of authorization codes for specialized access, any levels of participation, titles, recognition and reward that restricts the free movement of all the parts will reduce and even prevent growth and function. Timothy and Titus give us a well rounded view of how the church should "run" itself, and there aren't any peripherals. Anyway - I find churches pretty boring and dull if all they do is meet/greet/sit down/shut up/listen/and go home, and they'll become germ-farms for all manner of ungodly viruses. Today more and more churches diversify and work "across the aisle" with other churches who may do different things. And they should - if we're all Christian in essence we're all related and have a godly right to our own diversity as well as a godly responsibility to share with others. What say ye?

Socks and WordWolf, true that! after this thread I might need some R and R ...rest and relaxation.

I wouldn't say, "too", I would say "only". Unless we're trying to revive and restore the 1st century church, there's nothing since then that's worth reviving and restoring. Everything after that has been a construction of man, and I'm sure we all know what that means.

With the emphasis on how freaking perfect vpw's system allegedly was, nobody's eager to REMOVE or REPLACE it. To keep the money moving and the people in their seats, they want to claim to just "revive" and "restore" the "classic" twi- since selective memory makes that a paradise that in few ways resembles the actual experience.

Innerestin' - there's a bit of that in the contect of 2 Twinky, as the writer is warning Timothy about a couple people who were teaching and misleading people. Here's a nice translation of that section of 2: Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth. Avoid godless chatter, because those who indulge in it will become more and more ungodly. Their teaching will spread like gangrene. Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have departed from the truth. "handling the truth" correctly, or "making a straight way" with the Word of truth.....later in verse 25 it reads "Opponents must be gently instructed, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth"... "Restoration and revival" - The phrase implies there's a former state that is being restored and revived, presumably a right one, a good one, one that should be present. It has to be a personal thing, a people thing that deals with individuals lives. Frankly I think it's going to have to be more than mirror image of what once was, and it's really just like the logic of Timothy's wisdom and in the words of Jesus Himself in Matthew 9 - "And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost as well as the skins. No, new wine is put into fresh wineskins." When Jesus was asked why His followers didn't observe fasting practices and traditions that were were advocated by the religious leaders of the day he used that example to illustrate that it was better to not try and put His teaching into the old practices that didn't serve or represent the same things he was teaching. Much like today we would not want to dress up or refresh old ideas based on doctrine that was was wrong and then try to achieve different results - it doesn't really make sense. (or you might say "....doing the same things over and over and expecting different results is insanity....") Ephesians 4:11-16...."Ministries" are God given spiritual gifts from God to the Church, the body of Christ. They are given to people, for people. God doesn't give "Gift Farms" or "Gift Buildings" to the Church, he gives spiritual gifts to His people and the "work of the ministry" is to help support each other into a rich full relationship with God, in the "church of Christ". The realities of that are in us, in our lives, thoughts, feelings. The "invisible" things of God are then visible through our lives. So every church pastor needs a sign in his office that says "it's God and the people, stupid!"....because everything in the Bible leads us to understand that all this claptrap we're so earnestly building to glorify God is going to turn to dust and end up in someone's else's landfill. What will go on forever is - "Love", the essence of the pneuma hagion that is the "us", reborn, anew, and rockin' that new body smell someday. The BRC won't be resurrected, that grass I cut so clean and neat to look good for the Sunday Night Services won't be restored. It's "LIFE", our lives, eternally bound together with God, now. One thing I learned is that I needed to REMOVE and REPLACE some of the things that had accumulated and worked their way into my spiritual life, things I thought were necessary, things that were comfortable and familiar. In reality they were just baggage, dead weight. "Nice to have's". So perhaps there needs to be a REMOVE and REPLACE movement too.

This is more a suspicion than an observation, so take it with a grain of salt. I think part of the problem in discussions about "critical thinking" is a lack of agreement on what "critical" means. It sounds to me like one person is using it to mean "searching for and finding fault," while another is using it to mean "examining the argument and determining whether its logical bases are flawed. Someone who is engaged in critical thinking is NOT looking to find flaws or fault. He's not being cynical. If you're not engaged in critical thinking, you can be suckered into anything. If you are engaged in cynical thinking, you won't believe the truth even when is is staring you in the face. Anyway, just a thought.