Steve Lortz

I used to teach writing and humane letters to 7th-graders. I required that the drafts of the papers they turned in be hand-written, in cursive script, with black ink. I knew that this would be a one-school-year experience for them. They had used a hand written print script in grade school, and would use computers to print out papers beyond my class, but I wanted them to have an experiential knowledge of what writing has been for so many generations. I remember clearly seeing copies of the letters my great grandfathers wrote home from the Civil War. My students also had to bring personal copies of dictionaries to class with them, and we had a lot of fun answering questions by looking things up in the dictionary. When I started writing for publication, all those years ago, I had a manual, portable typewriter. I used it till there were no more shops to keep it in repair. Then I switched to a Brother word-processor with a daisy wheel printer. That's what I started writing Dispensing with Darby on. I used it till one of the keys on the daisy wheel broke, and I found out that I could not get daisy wheels anymore. So I got a Brother word-processor with an inkjet and used it till the "1!" key stopped working. That's what I used to finish Dispensing with Darby. When I tried to get a new word-processor, I found out that THEY were now obsolete, and I had to get a computer. I eventually got a Dell pre-loaded with MS Works, but I had to get Word also, since so many people require that material be submitted in Word. I find composition to be much easier on a computer than it was by hand or on a typewriter. Some of my students would compose their papers on their computers, and then copy them out in longhand to turn in. That was fine by me, and they knew it. My class was an instructional situation, but I can no longer picture writing by hand or typewriter in a commercial or professional application. Composing and editing on a computer are much, much closer to the brain's "speed of thought." I learned a new adjective watching Judge Jennine Pirro today, "redonkulous." By using obsolete methods of processing written materials, The Way International is just being redonkulous! Love, Steve PS - When I told my 7th-graders the writing requirements, I told them they had to use ball-point pens. That was a matter of old habit. My teachers had always stipulated ball-points because fountain pens could be too messy. I was astonished when my students asked me what a ball-point pen was, because each and every one of them was holding a ball-point. Then I realized, none of them had ever used, or possibly even seen, a fountain pen. There had never been any occassion in their brief lives when they had needed to recognize that a ball-point pen is a ball-point pen! And The Way International doesn't realize they are hopelessly outmoded!

My answer to the question at the top of this thread is, because The Way International is, was, and always will be a cult. Cult, cult, cult, cult. WordWolf's entry that I just quoted is all the evidence any reasonable person would ever need to recognize that TWI is a cult! Love, Steve

It also makes me wonder how many NEW people John is able to attract. It seemed to me that he built the following for CES by diligently pursuing all the contacts he had made as Corps coordinator at Emporia. I know I never brought any new people to CES. I don't remember any showing up at John's home fellowship (which I attended). CES had the "Introduction to God's Heart" class, but it wasn't exactly running back to back. I always said it should be titled "AN Introduction to God's Heart", but that idea never flew. A lot, and I mean a LOT, of ex-wayfers peeled-off from CES after the Momentus episode. I can't imagine that the lawsuits and coups of the past few years (not to mention dreams of spiders crawling out of people's noses!) led to any great influx of followers <_< John Lynn seems to have chosen a very lonely path. Love, Steve

I took the foundational class in July '80, and the last TWI function I attended was ROA '87 (to haul as many people as I could off into the woods to tell them about the adultery). I think I was involved with about 30 classes. As a twig coordinator in 1985, I ran a foundational class at the twig level. We bent over backwards, and broke every rule so that people could finish the class. In '86, after Geer read POP, Martindale started saying the ministry was in trouble because the people on the field weren't being strict enough running classes, and the quality of all the new grads was too low. That's when I realized that Martindale, the president of the whole organization, had NO IDEA of what it took to run a class in the field. That's when I lost all respect for him. About six months later, I found out about the adultery, and that very day, I disassociated myself from The Way International. I spent the next year or so talking to people I had gotten into the Way, telling them why I had gotten out, and why I thought they should, too. Most of that was face to face. There was no internet back then! Love, Steve

I'm an old booger, pushing 61, and it seems to me that the younger folk, like all my neices and nephews, are just too tech savvy to be taken in by the wonders of YouTube classes, the way we were taken in by the wonders of cassette classes all those decades ago. The whole context and paradigm of looking for information has changed. STFI and Lynn just seem so oblivious. Am I onto something here, or just being symptomatic? How are cult leaders gonna squeeze money out of a generation that cut its eye-teeth on Napster? Love, Steve

I went to Tucson. It was a tough year, but I'm glad I went. I'm not glad I went for the sake of TWI, but for the sake of some wonderful friends I made. That was back before I became conditioned to making the shallow, conditional friendships of a Way leader. Love, Steve

Quanta here, quanta there, Quanta nearly everywhere. Some are slow, some make haste, They all have flavors we can't taste. Some go to clubs and live it large, Some get in at 1/3 charge. Some are heavy, some are light, A lot of them make quite a sight! Some are big, some are small, Some have no rest mass at all. Some are bright, others duller, Even though they all have color. See how they gyre and torque and spin, Ignoring them would be such sin! Love, Steve

A tiny piece or bit of what? Order? Isn't order a quality that describes relationship. Isn't knowledge awareness of order. Aren't thoughts dynamic functions within the order of the mind? Love, Steve

I was in residence with the 16th Corps for two blocks. I knew some of the 14th Corps who went on to perform in AotS. All I can say is that my heart goes out to them. They were subjected to a lot more garbage than run of the mill wayfers or even Corps were. If I had performed in AotS, I think I would just want to forget it. Love, Steve

Information is order, or kosmos. The opposite of information is disorder, or chaos. A living cell is a temporary respository of order purchased at the cost of a constant flow of energy. Love, Steve

So do I. Love, Steve

Can you tell me what spcific teaching you mean when you write, "that spirit teaching stuff"? How can I get rid of it if I don't know exactly what it is I'm trying to get rid of? Love, Steve

In the late-'80s through early-'90s, John, John and Mark did a lot of scouting out other "ministries." Anthony Buzzard, Dale Sides, Greg Pharis and Dan Tocchini come to mind off the top of my head. But it turned out that most of the groups were looking to grow by absorbing each others' membership, not to learn by listening to others' opinions. Anthony Buzzard was the only one who was behaving in a truly interdenomionational manner, and I still get his mailings from time to time. He runs an annual conference, which I attended once. Buzzard didn't hog the stage, and there were all kinds of outside speakers. One of the most interesting was an athiest historian who specialized in church history. All the others except Tocchini went their own ways when they found they couldn't convert CES to their own way of thinking. Tocchini reeled CES into the Momentus training, hook, line and sinker. Vastly worse than TWI (if you can imagine THAT). CES thought to turn Pharis into a unitarian. Pharis thought to turn CES into part of the personal prophesy movement. Pharis won, with all the spiders-crawling-out-of-peoples-noses dream business following. CES DID dialogue in its early days. There were open Q&A sessions at the annual meetings. But I remember the year where they replaced the Q&A session with one where the leaders sat on the stage with their respective spouses and "shared their hearts", just like the Trustees of TWI did. Dialogue ended, and John, John and Mark returned to their vomit. Love, Steve

I think that's how most (all?) of the off-shoots got started. Love, Steve

When people ask me, I tell them I'm a Free-Range Baptist. That usually makes them stop and think, "Not ANOTHER group of Baptists!" Love, Steve

If you don't dream, you might get yourself checked for sleep apnea. You may not be sleeping as soundly as you think. I found out the hard way. Love, Steve

One of the most important things I think people can do to recover from TWI is to simply go back to using the normal language they used before becoming involved. Special jargon, and unusual meanings given to ordinary terms, are the tools of thought-control and group-think. Love, Steve

Sooo.... Say a group of local believers decides to pool their resources and build a fellowship hall. Everything is hunkey-dorey. Then two of the group's members disagree with each other over some point of doctrine. Perhaps one says there was an Aramaic substrate, and another contends that the original autographs were in Greek. Neither one can understand why the other is being so pig-headed and obtuse. Their disagreement flares throughout the group, and soon there are two camps who cannot stand the sight of each other, much less sharing the same fellowship hall. They decide to split. Which group gets to keep the hall? After all, it was a substantial investment. They go down to the courthouse and ask a judge to decide. The judge thinks the New Testament was originally composed in King James English. The judge is going to flip a coin to make the decision, but the leader of the Greek autograph faction convinces the judge his group will be able to campaign more effectively for the judge during the upcoming election than the Aramaic faction will. So the judge decides that the Greek autograph faction gets to keep the building. All of the other leaders of groups that own fellowship halls in the town start teaching the Greek autograph position, because they don't want to lose their buildings. That's why Theodosius declared the Nicean position to be orthodox, and anybody who held differently to be a deranged, insane heretic. That's why "Their meeting places shall not receive the name of churches" (be eligible to receive a subsidy, or in our culture, they would lose their tax-exempt status). Before the late fourth century, it was simply assumed that if a person became a Christian, that is, if a person received baptism, then that person was saved and his immortal soul would automatically go to heaven when he died. When Theodosius said Christians who disagreed with him would "be smitten... with Divine Vengence", he was declaring that Christians would be sent to Hell eternally on his say so. The Roman legal system had no provisions for dealing with differences of opinion (the original meaning of the word "heresy"), so the magistrates had to resort to laws regarding maleficium (cursing through sorcerous means) to enforce orthodoxy. Theological disagreements turned into literal "witch-hunts". Love, Steve

1986 Love, Steve

Sometimes I dream I am at the ROA, trying to avoid TWI goons and tell people the truth. Sometimes I dream I am coordinating a WOW family, but it's three-quarters of the way through the year already, and I haven't yet learned the names of my family's members. Sometimes I dream I am coordinating a WOW family, but I'm sabotaging all efforts to put a class together, and trying to figure out how to tell the members of my family that I don't believe in PFAL anymore. Sometimes I dream that I am able to get up on the main stage at the ROA and confront Martindale. Sometimes I dream that I am back in residence in the Corps, trying to figure out how to explain to my Corps brothers and sisters where I've been for the past 23 years. I imagine these are fairly mild dreams compared to what some other people might experience. Love, Steve

If Wierwille was the man behind the curtain, then the word "spiritual" was pretty much THE curtain! Love, Steve

"It is our will that all peoples ruled by the administration of Our Clemency shall practice that religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans... this is the religion followed by bishop Damasus of Rome and by Peter, bishop of Alexandria, a man of apostolic sanctity: that is, according to the apostolic discipline of the evangelical doctrine, we shall believe in the single dieity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost under the concept of equal majesty and of the Holy Trinity. "We command that persons who follow this rule shall embrace the name of catholic Christians. The rest, however, whom We judge demented and insane, shall carry the infamy of heretical dogmas. Their meeting places shall not receive the name of churches, and they shall be smitten first by Divine Vengence, and secondly by the retribution of hostility which We shall assume in accordance with the Divine Judgment." This is the text of an edict handed down from the Roman emperor Theodosius in January, 380 A.D., quoted by Charles Freeman on page 25 of A.D. 381. This edict was a startling reversal of the toleration that had marked the whole of the Roman Empire to this point. It was the end of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech for well over 1000 years. Love, Steve

Are these things bad? Love, Steve

What exactly do you mean by the phrase "that spirit stuff"? Love, Steve

Neither Second Temple Judaism nor the Christianity that sprang from it were monolithic. Paul may have felt that the Asian Christians had turned away from him personally, but that doesn't mean they turned away from Christ, or even away from a Pauline form of gentile Christianity. Paul's writings were certainly saved and read in the churches. All of the churches addressed in Revelation toward the end of the first century were in Asia. In fact, one of them was at Ephesus. There could have been older people sitting in the congregation at Ephesus listening to John's messenger delivering Revelation, who could remember sitting in the same congregation as youngsters listening to Paul's messenger deliver Ephesians. The body of Christ was much vaster in the 20th century than Wierwille and TWI ever imagined. The same thing was true of the 1st century. Love, Steve