Steve Lortz

"Deprogramming" IS a matter of habit. To the degree that an ex-wayfer continues to fellowship with people who still hold to the Way's erroneous doctrines and practices, that person continues to be a wayfer. Love, Steve

Thanks for the balance, WordWolf! Are you familiar with the idea of "para-church ministries" and "denomonational cover"? The people I've heard discussing "being under authority" have tended to be exclusive rather than inclusive Christians. That is, they tend to view people who don't belong to their particular denomination (or family of denominations) as not Christian. If you aren't under the authority of an approved denomination, such as an evangelical protestant one, then there is something highly suspect about your Christianity. The way I view it, there is wheat and there are tares in every denomination that even only mouths the truths that Jesus is Lord and God raised Him from the dead. There are Christians who walk in the spirit, and Christians who have submitted to hierarchical control. It seems to me that the people I've heard discussing "being under authority" have used it in the sense that a person has to be under hierarchical control of their denomination, or they can't be good Christians. I can't say I've studied the matter enough to make a definitive statement about what everybody means when they talk about "being under authority". The people I've heard belong to denominations that don't particularly appeal to me personally. The phrase smacks to me of a military chain of command rather than a group of accountability partners. Love, Steve

Thanks for posting that, Mark! I heartily recommend it to anyone, not just ex-wayfers. There seems to be something going around in evangelical circles about how every Chritian should be under the authority of some other Christian. If anybody asks me, I'll ask in reply, "If we put ourselves under someone else's authority, aren't we making that other person our Lord? Can we serve two masters? Should we put ourselves under the authority of anybody other than the Lord Jesus Christ Himself? Seems like a lot of people are inclined to say and do things because those things sound pious, without really giving them any critical thought. Love, Steve

"Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he alloweth." Romans 14:22b Something didn't sit right with me when I first heard Wierwille teach on that verse in PFAL. How did it go? The problem is not with sinning itself, but with sin-consciousness, since sin-consciousness puts us out of fellowship with God? But the tape kept rolling, and I let it slide. But now it is so easy to see how wrong Wierwille's interpretation was. The man is NOT happy because he can do anything he wants without regard to whether it is sinful... he's happy because he doesn't allow himself to do things that might bring him into condemnation. Thus, once more, we find Wierwille turning the Word of God on its head and raping it. Love, Steve

As a veteran of the submarine service, I ask you please not to defame sailors. LCM COULD make sailors blush! Love, Steve

My time in "deprogramming" from TWI was more extended than some, because I continued to hang out with ex-wafers who were trying to "save the baby" while throwing out the bath water. I didn't really start a thorough deprogram until I saw the same abusive patterns being repeated by leaders. Then I started to question whether there WAS any baby. The first of Wierwille's lies I investigated was his teaching about what STFI/TLTF calls "the Administration of the Sacred Secret." The Bible never uses the word "oikonomia" (translated "dispensation" or "administration") to mean "a period of time." Wierwille's definition of the Church as a wholely new thing fails. Wierwille's definition of salvation fails. Wierwille's understanding of the Lordship of Jesus Christ fails. There is much to be deprogrammed of, in every way. Stringing chairs, etc., was an exercise in programming our minds to be mindlessly obedient, to be very aware of peculiar accuracy in tiny things, while being completely oblivious to ENORMOUS error. Love, Steve

If the doofus leaders of TWI were running true to form, they would say that whoever does it successfully outside of TWI must be a "seed-boy". Disgusting crap! Love, Steve

Unfortunately, slide rules are ordinarily exact only to within three significant figures, which was the reason scientific notation had to be developed. Tiny microchips are now more exact than the finest slide rules used to be... Love, Steve Speaking of which... Blue Letter Bible is a heck of a lot more useful and fun than all those concordances used to be.

They aren't. They are all "walking in arrogance". Love, Steve

Thank you for your kind consideration, excathedra! We have both been doing very well for about a decade now, and I facilitate a consumer support group for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. I learned what NOT to do as a twig coordinator in TWI. Love, Steve

Nothing I could testify to in court. My own wife unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide during the Momentus training. I heard rumors that there were several who were successful afterward in other trainings, but news like that was suppressed. For an account of an artificially induced psychotic episode, read the following: My link Love, Steve

The guys who cleaned out the port-o-potties should have been seated at the head table with the microphones. Wierwille, et al., should have been unobtrusively making sure those guys' and gals' water glasses were full. John, John and Mark of CES did servant-leadership for a little while, just before they got caught up in the Momentus debacle. During Momentus, they reverted to type. Love, Steve

As far as JAL is concerned, the "baby" is "the Administration of the Sacred Secret", even though the Greek word translated "administration" is NEVER used in the Bible to indicate a period of time. The deaths resulting from CES were tied up with their involvement in the Momentus multi-level marketing scheme, rather than the sorts of shenanigans Wierwille pulled. When you swear a solemn oath that you will completely ignore the connection between a program and the damage it does, you've made a BIG mistake! Love, Steve

A little while ago, my nephew reminded me that becoming legalistic is the intermediary step between walking in the Spirit and hierarchical power structures, and legalism comes from forgetting grace, which comes from ignoring the things we have to be thankful for. Love, Steve

I'm doing a batch of reading on the work of Jesus Christ and the person and work of the Holy Spirit for Constructive Theology II, and I find it a bit disheartening. I learned how to walk in the Spirit, and from time to time I did it, before I ever heard of TWI. There were times while I was involved with TWI that I walked in the Spirit, usually breaking some TWI protocol in the process, and there have been times since I left TWI when I've had occassions to walk in the Spirit. The effect of TWI was to substitute hierarchical power structures for walking in the Spirit, and unfortunately, that seems to have been the history of what we think of as Christianity in a nutshell. What a joy it is to know that the Lord loves me, in spite of my ignorance and my foolishness. Love, Steve

...the first step in thought-reform... Love, Steve

The word "spirit", in both the Hebrew and the Greek means "wind" or "air in motion" or "breath". You have just expressed, cman, the poetic essence of the word "spirit"! Love, Steve

When IDEOLOGY and AGENDAS AND CASHFLOW are intertwined... It's the same way with politics... Love, Steve

Howzabout this: Since the Enlightenment (mostly 17th-, 18th-century Europe), propositional knowledge (math, science) has taken precedence over poetic knowledge (knowledge conveyed through simile and metaphor). That hasn't always been the case. When the Bible was written, poetic knowledge took precedence over propositional knowledge (as it should). Ham is using poetic means to commnunicate truth. It is more powerful than simply saying "The Bible is not mathematically exact and does not have scientific precision." BRAVO! Squirrel-bard, BRAVO! As Young Mr. Grace used to say on Are You Being Served?... "You've All done very well!" Carry on! Love, Steve

Don't sweat the load, cman! Not every thread could or should go on for ever. Thanks for putting in your share! Love, Steve

There was an unseasonable snowfall... or maybe it was dandruff, and the voice of Gawd told him he would be married as no one has been married since the first century! Love, Steve

Amen! At times he PREACHED truth, but he always TAUGHT error. Love, Steve

I think there ARE places where the Bible is intentionally ambiguous. Without digging out my concordance, some of Jesus' parables come to mind, where everybody looks around afterwards and says "Whu... ?" Love, Steve

The most disturbing transition in my experience of TWI ('80-'87) was right after the reading of The Passing of A Patriarch, at the very beginning of the Fog Years. I had been a twig coordinator in the Twin Cities and I had just worked like a dog to successfully put together and run a foundational PFAL class at the twig level. It had been years since a class had been run at anything lower than the branch level, and everybody... me, the branch coordinator and the limb coordinator... thought the branch was suffering for it. So they all helped me as much as they could, and running a class at the twig level was a very difficult thing to do. We had to bend over backwards to see to it that the new people got what they needed to take the class. The Passing of a Patriarch was read on a Corps night in the spring of '86. Everybody in the Corps was talking about it, but few believers outside the Corps knew any details. They just knew that something bad was happening. Then, if I remember correctly, in the fall of '86, Martindale made some kind of announcement that the Ministry was in trouble because the believers who were running classes on the field had gotten TOO SLACK in screening people who could take the class, and TOO SLACK in enforcing all the picky, petty guidelines for running classes. It was some months later before I found out about Martindale's adultery issues, but it was when he made the announcement about the Ministry being in trouble because of what was happening at the level of the twigs that I lost all confidence in his leadership. I wasn't a commissioned officer in the Navy, but I had to study and exercise genuine leadership. I had qualified as a Third Class Petty Officer and exercised the duties of an Engine Room Supervisor. I had learned where responsibility lies in the chain of command. When Martindale tried to shift responsibility for the Ministry's problems from the Trustees to the people on the field running classes, it was my first indication that Headquarters was living in a fantasy bubble, and the leaders with which Wierwille had saddled TWI when he retired were nothing more than a bunch of bumbling yes-men and yes-women. It's easy enough to look at the outward things of TWI to discern transitions, but the real transitions that mattered were the changes that happened in the hearts of the Trustees. Love, Steve

How is the ABS handled? Do people send their money straight to "headquarters", or do fellowship coordinators collect the money and send it in, as with the old "blue form twigs"? I haven't had any direct experience with STL. What does STL teach about keeping promises? Love, Steve