Tzaia

They do pledges at our church. It is a budgeting tool. I have absolutely no problem with a partnership plan. We were partners, not a large amount. $25 a month for years. Occasionally more. When I parted ways with CES my husband said that continuing partnership support had come to a logical conclusion. Just in: Received an email from JAL. Probably the first one ever.

Steve, Will you share your perspective on which ones are contradictory? As for calling regular contributors "partners" it definitely is not a legal partnership and I'm not sure why it's called one, but then I didn't understand changing Dialogue to Contender.

OK new thread on Momentus. Hi Steve, I still have some serving utensils of yours.

Oh, and BTW, I've really appreciated the welcome. I really didn't know what to expect in response to my first post. My concerns are not that these people aren't good people, because they are. My concern is the us vs them mentality and the need to CESify programs that are already out there and the way they treat people outside their inner circle or those who rightfully confront with the excuse of not liking the way they did it. My response is that it started out as gentle, but even a 2x4 failed to get their attention, so who's fault is that? What is the ethical integrity of someone who comes on and acts as if they stumbled upon a site, when, in fact, they didn't? I am concerned because Jeff is being "groomed" for management and instead of dealing with his lack of interpersonal skills and his problem of feeling like he's entitled to operate by a different set of standards, they just remove anyone he conflicts with. I've heard that man speak to Mark in such a way that if I had been Mark, he would have been shown the door. I 've watched him sit in a meeting, where decisions were made and then go downstairs and go on as if nothing had been said. Giving them money tells them that you like what they're doing. You many like what you see, but you don't see everything. These guys were big players in an organization that burned people big time. I realize that it takes some time to unlearn that mentality, but quite frankly, I don't like the way they are going about it because I believe that in this particular situation, accountablity needs to be a very public and open process because the lack of it affects many people. That's just my opinion. If you would like, I'll tell you about *my* Momentus experience. But only if you want me to. Tzaia

No, I'm not real thrilled about the triune god thing, but to expect something different would be rather foolish. I'm not so interested in changing people's minds about the trinity; I'm more interested in working out a peaceful co-existance. I'll tell you a few ways I've been doing that in later posts. I really need to work today...

It was not my desire to vent, especially, but as a sort of insider and as an observer, I have had to wage some major ethical wars with the CES home office. One of the things you won't see is them out here posting on CES time anymore. More on that later. Part of one person's job was to spam all the seminaries with the BU website. Here it is, MY website, and now it's associated with spam. Of course it wasn't spam in their eyes because they had something important to say. I'm standing there saying that don't you know that is the same reasoning that every spammer uses? Well, that came to hit home one day when Dan couldn't send email to comcast customers. So I pull up the logs and see where the IP address for cesonline has been blacklisted. So I go to Dan and show it to him. He asks how that happened. I tell him about the unsolicited email coming from the office. He drags Jeff up from his hole and Jeff proceeds to tell him that they have permission to send mass emails from AOL. I'm standing there saying that this has nothing to do with sending mass emails from AOL. It is the spam that is being sent from the office to people picked off the internet telling them about the BU & TorT sites from the office and enough people registered a complaint that it got them landed on a blacklist. Jeff says they don't do that. My question is ever? (which is not true) or anymore? (which is moot, since the damage has been done). So yes, your contributions have been used to pay some person to spend several hours every week to send spam. I am trying to explain the ethics of this and Jeff just waves it off. I kept talking about them needing to be squeaky clean. Quit using pirated software, quit downloading music & software from P2P places like Kazaa and LimeWire (which should be called SlimeWire) and quit spamming people with email for a site that belongs to me. Some of you are partners. Notice that you didn't get a Contender until recently? Did you notice how you didn't get a teaching of the month for awhile? Have you noticed the erratic publication of The Sower? It's hard to get anything done when you p!$$ the majority of time away surfing the internet and playing with stuff on the computer. I knew what was going on and apparently it didn't take Dan too long to figure it out, either. So now all their internet activities are tracked. When I left, they were still spending over 50% of their time on the internet. However, since Dan arrived they put more work out in 6 weeks than they had the previous 6 months. This has been a top down problem that they know exists, but after all folks, it's them and there's more important things to do than meet deadlines. They bring in a supporter who is also a financial consultant. 18 months into the process the consultant was gone. I asked about it and was told that the consultant had become pretty perturbed about them not enacting the recommendations and had pretty much confronted them. And then the consultant talked to others, kind of like I'm doing only they told people to quit giving to CES; as far as I'm concerned the decision is yours, but you are entitled to enough information to make an informed decision. Anyway, so they locked the consultant out because the consultant was sharing their concerns. So I asked if they had a problem with the recommendations. No, just never got around to doing it. So I said, so basically you p!$$ed away nearly 2 years of this person's time and you expect them to be gracious about it? Mouths dropped open when I said that. This is what I saw. I saw a vendor just dropped because they didn't keep the paper stocked that CES liked to use and sometimes they didn't do things on a timely basis. I go to Dan and ask where's the grace in that? I told him that when CES sends a print job out that it isn't trivial and that it's a huge outlay of paper that isn't cheap and would most likely tie up an offset printer for a number of hours. If that printer is told to expect a job on a certain day, they have to plan for that. It doesn't take more than once or twice of the job not showing up as expected, thus the print shop losing money, for the print shop to not go out of their way to accomodate them when it does finally arrive. Here the print shop is cutting them a deal, because they are a Christian organization, but no one should be expected to lose money. And the printer most certainly shouldn't be dropped because CES doesn't meet their deadlines. I don't know if they'll ever figure this out, but I can tell you that when you eliminate healthy checks and balances and instead rely on each other for accountability when there has been problems with that in the past, you tend to lose perspective. Now they don't have someone who can sit in there with a vendor's perspective and raise these issues. They have eliminated every person who asked the hard questions. Those are the kinds of things you need to take into consideration.

We are part of the the confessing church movement We are a bit more on the conservative side, but you will see hands raised at the contemporary service ;)-->

Is that All without exception or All without distinction (sorry, couldn't resist)

Jack is a presbyterian who started the great banquet movement based upon the walk to emmaus movement which was based upon a catholic thing started in 1949. Whew. Bloomington. Been there, done that. Partied. Ours is the Southport Indianapolis banquet.

They may have taken it off. I was looking for the email on my laptop, but it may be on my other computer.

I want to share what was a major paradigm shift for me. Like I said, we have been doing the presbyterian thing since 1993 off and on. The kids were involved in the youth program, which they loved. DH started going in 1999 and became a member of the praise team and I became a regular in 2001. In October of 2002 I did a 3 day weekend. Some call it a walk, tres dias, but ours is more ecumenical and is called a Great Banquet based upon the Luke passage. I will say that I avoided going for 2 years because of the Momentus debacle. There was no way I was going to put myself in the hands of people I didn't know. BUT, DH came home so different. He never said a cuss word for nearly a year. He kept urging me to go, but something always came up like babies being born, kids leaving, etc. Well I finally went and walked in one person and left 3 days later being a totally different person. I have invited everyone at CES, but it's never been a good time. Guys, I'm telling you that the weekend finally showed me how to know Jesus, not just know a lot about him. I'm here in Indy, but we have people come from all over the country to our banquet because the food is so good. :D--> That's part of it, but really it's because the synergy is great. In the past 2 years I've served on nearly every team just to see the transformations. You can find out more by going to http://www.lampstand.net. BTW, there are no secrets; only surprises. The reason why we don't talk specifics is that we want it to be YOUR weekend and every weekend is different due to the dynamics of the guests and team. The food is great and the surprises are awesome. There is lots of music, but it's not loud (I've been a music director 3 times). It was so, so healing.

The best way is for each page to have a title, relevant keywords and a description, allow caching and back linking. Don't put keywords in your meta-tags that aren't mentioned in articles. Post in relevant newsgroups and with links to the site. Avoid links to specific articles. Make sure your pictures and graphics have <alt> tags that have specific keywords. Name your graphics with keywords. When I sit down and do Christian Unitarian I will study what search words were used to hit BU and write accordingly.

Awww. thanks. Just the way I like it...

Tzaia: pronounced Tz i ya I used to call myself Taz or Tazia sort of after the Tazmanian devil as I am sort of a whirling dirvish. I tend to do masculine names because many guys can't deal with an assertive, alpha female who is logic minded. I've tried posting on Christnet as a woman and it gets ugly. When I do it as a man, it's less so. If you put "John the Biblical Unitarian" in the google newsgroup area you will get an idea of what I was like 2 years ago. I've come a long way since then. Anyway, one day I misspelled Tazia and sort of liked it. Then just last week I was thinking of what it stood for. So here goes: Tech Zone: Amy's Internet Answers because I own a company called Amy's Answers.

You guys are a hoot. Thanks for the coffee. I take mine with cream (the real stuff) sweet'n'low, 1 equal and 1 splenda in a real mug. Don't ask... Perhaps you guys have been out on t or t where they have the picture of the staff. As Paul Harvey says: Now here's the rest of the story. I was in the office when that picture was taken. I shared office space with Dan Gallager and he got up and offered me a ride to where the picture was going to be taken. I looked at him and said, "Dan, thanks for the offer, but apparently you don't realize that I don't work here." He got this really strange look on his face and went to get Schoenheit. Schoenheit said, "She's right. She is not a part of the staff and shouldn't be in that picture." Never mind that I have been there longer than all the rest of them put together and I am handed a 1099 every year. Oh yeah, it was real uncomfortable for them. I can't remember if that was the same day Karen Anne had brought in invitations to a staff Christmas party or not, but she had given mine to Jeff for him to give to me, but seeing as I was there, she went and retrieved it and gave it to me. I looked at her and thanked her and told her that apparently she didn't realize I wasn't staff. She said something about including friends. We didn't go as we had another party to go to that night. But what I'll never know is if Jeff would have passed that invitation along to me. I go in there last week to pick up my final check, which they were dragging their feet about paying. Billy, bless his heart, introduces me as the mother of the BU website to some woman there. Apparently he has no idea that I've been shut out, but that's Billy. But the kicker is that Mark hands me one of those usb thumb drives explaining that he can't get it to work in his computer or laptop. The restraint I showed was remarkable. What I wanted to say was, "Didn't you hire someone to do these kinds of things?" But what I did was test it and tell him to throw it away. I have a skeleton of a site up at http://www.christianunitarian.com/index.php I'll be interested in any input on the design as that's about as far as I've gotten so far. My goal is to get up on the top of the search engines without spending a dime. One of the ways that can happen is if people link to the site and vote for it using google's toolbar.

I'm not painting a wide brush on orthodoxy. I'm happy at my Presbyterian church. It's not everybody. Just the noisy few that cause the problems.

Hi, I'm going to try to respond to all of you. I sold BU because I needed the money and because I was assured in writing that I would remain the "mother". I know Jeff, too. This is a man who claims to want to do the Lords' work yet refuses to pray with someone over a situation. Refuses to break bread and try to come to a win/win situation. Puts on a smile while he is working on shoving you out the door. And has varying standards. He cuts himself an amazing amount of slack while not doing so for others. And he has a tremendous need to be right. He seems to be caring and compassionate, but will not hesitate to use information against you. That is the Jeff I know. I love him, he is my brother in Christ, but I cannot say that I trust him with my life or with my heart. He has a lot of growing to do and there's no such thing as growth without pain. The problems arose when he wanted a vendor at volunteer prices. What I mean by that is that I be called and expected to drop everything to fix or do something, but do it on my own dime. Since I do this for a living and only get paid when I'm billable, this presented a financial hardship on me. 75% of the work I did for them was on my dime/time and I resented the fact that they begrudged the other 25% that I did bill, particularly when I was told to bill. I would receive phone calls about coming in to do things and make hardware purchases, get yelled at for not doing them immediately, only to find out that the necessary approvals had not been given, so then I was reprimended for doing things that hadn't been approved. Try dealing with that environment. The solution for CES was not to work on the process, but to get rid of the person who challenged the lack of process or follow through on the process from their end, which was me. The other problem I had was boundaries. They don't respect boundaries. Since I was a "friend", I was called any time anywhere. 6:30 in the morning. 9:30 at night. Sundays. We are talking non-emergency situations or emergencies caused by not following process. My last major encounter with Jeff was when I was at O'Hare airport standing in line to go to Israel. I received a call about a backup not working the night before. No amount of words could convince him that there are more to backups than slipping a tape in. It was pointless to tell him that when I did them, they worked and when he did them they didn't work because he couldn't grasp the concept of a backup rotation. This man started on me knowing that I had just lost my sister to cancer that had only been diagnosed 2 weeks before she died and that I had been left with dealing with all the arrangements and her daughter who was alone and I needed to get away to sit in God's land for 10 days and sort through my life. Even though there was no emergency, he felt entitled to intrude in my life because he was unhappy and wanted me to know it right then. Whatever he had to say could have waited until I returned, so instead of being able to get quiet with God, I ended up having a royal case of stress induced IBS. Do I sound a little ticked? Over the 4 years Jeff has worked at CES, I watched him bully a number of people; all of them women to the point where they left or were let go because they became rattled or they fought back. He was openly hostile to the access and influence I had with the Johns and Mark. Pay no attention to the fact that I had been doing what I had been doing for CES for almost nothing since 1993. Most of the time I worked for books, but he started complaining about that. I had deluded myself into thinking there was some give and take, and yes, grace. When I saw that wasn't forthcoming, I became the vendor. Had I billed for all my time in August - September, They would have owed me $5000 even at a reduced billing rate. I only billed them for half of that and they complained that I was too expensive all the while demanding more time and complaining when I didn't respond immediately. When I was told they had "outgrown" me, I had to laugh. I pulled them kicking and screaming into that growth. I kept saying that they needed to let go of The Way and the way to do that was through focusing on being Biblical Unitarians. When that didn't happen, I started the site and asked them if it would be OK to put some of their work out there. I also received permission from a number of other people to publish their work. Ryan offered to put the content on the site. I was fine with that. I focused on the structure, look and feel. But I wanted to focus on Biblical Unitarianism, not CES's books, tapes, and approved reading. That was the agreement that was broken by them. I no longer have administrative access of the site, nor am I an administrative contact for the domain. I was misled about that, also. Jeff said that all the domains were being put into one place, but actually only the ones I administrated were put into a single account. The other ones were left alone. You give your money where you believe it will serve God. We have contributed faithfully since before CES was incorporated. That support has stopped because I do know and do have firsthand knowledge of how money is spent and I believe a dispportionate amount of money goes towards "marketing" which I'm not convinced is what Jesus had in mind when he commissioned the apostles to go and make disciples. I have stood with and given considerable time and ability to help CES find it's way out of The Way. I don't think they are headed in that direction, but The Way is like toilet paper stuck to their shoe. Personally, I attend a Presbyterian church where several leaders, including pastors know we are not trinitarian, but that has not interfered with our ability or their willingness to let us serve. We respect each other's differences and focus on the commonality that Jesus is Lord of our lives. It is the first place that I haven't felt like an outsider. They are willing to meet me where I am and I'm willing to do the same. I have not attended very many CES events, but the ones I have been to seem to focus more on being right rather than having the right heart. That's more Mark's area and he does focus on that, but by and large it's more about being right. Jeff says "the proof is in the fruit". He measures fruit by numbers. I think God measures fruit by transformed lives. We have parted company and I am going to focus on the goal of working to overcome Christian's persecuting Christians over doctrine and traditions. I don't think you can love one another effectively when you work, socialize, and worship with only certain people. That is the mentality of CES and of orthodoxy and I don't think it's right or what Jesus had in mind. I'm glad to hear from you all. I am not particularly bitter over the situation because CES is not my sufficiency. Neither was The Way. But I am disappointed. Thankfully I can lay it all at the feet of Jesus. Hope this made sense. Now back to work!! Tzaia

I just stumbled upon this thread after putting CES in the search engine here. I find it a bit deceitful for someone to act like they just kind of stumbled onto the site and are sharing their find. The truth: BiblicalUnitarian.com started out as MY website. I registered the name in August of 2002, built the framework (including the logo design) and pretty much ran out of time to populate it due to business and personal issues. I was asked if the teens of CES could use it as a chat room of sorts and I said no, but it could be developed as a site that would give ALL Biblical Unitarians a point of reference so that they could learn how to talk to others and concentrate on the points of agreement and not the differences. It was never intended to be a CES front and I'm sorry that it turned out that way, but I can't force people to be honorable. I foolishly sold the domain in December of 2003 to CES with the understanding (in writing) that I would have full editorial control over the content. That's pretty hard to do when I've been locked out of the backend of the site. Oh, but I'm sure there was a good reason to renege on a written agreement. --> What I can do is start over and do what I intended to do to begin with. Tzaia

Friends, Download spybot 1.3 AND Ad Aware. Use Grisoft's AVP antivirus. It is free and it seems to be more effective than Norton or McAfee. I am also using WinPatrol, which is "cute" but effective. The problem with Win98 hooked up directly to a broadband network is that without a firewall you might as well put out the welcome mat unless you disable client for microsoft windows and file and print sharing from TCPIP protocol. If you didn't understand what I just wrote, it suffices to say that you need to put something between your computer and the internet. There are some great free personal use firewalls, such as Zone Alarm and Sygate (which is quickly becoming my personal favorite). If you are running windows 2000 or XP do not leave your machine logged in with administrative privileges. Use restricted user only. Unplug your Windows 95, 98, & ME from broadband unless you have a router between you and the internet or a good firewall. I recommend firefox and mozilla's thunderbird. I only use IE when i must. OpenOffice is a great alternative to MS Office and it's free. Tzaia (Tech Zone: Amy's Internet Answers) What luck for rulers that men do not think. --Adolf Hitler