Oakspear

For me, it's been a while since I took any of the Way class PFAL or WayAP, and I don't have any of the written materials anymore, so I can't document anything, one way or the other. I know that I never heard anyone say that if you DON'T speak in tongues you're not saved, acknowledging that some folks get saved and don't choose to speak in tongues. But, WD, the way you've got it written, may have been what was taught. If you CAN'T speak in tongues, as in, you don't have the ABILITY to speak in tongues, wouldn't that mean one wasn't saved? After all, according to Wierwille, if you were not saved, you COULDN'T speak in tongues. That being said, I have no memory of anyone in TWI every saying that NOT speaking in tongues was evidence that someone wasn't saved. Only that speaking in tongues WAS evidence that you were. I do have admittedly hazy memories of people occassionally being maligned, it being suggested that maybe they weren't born again because they had never been heard to speak in tongues. As far as I remember, without having the WayAP syllabus in front of me, Martindale taught Wierwille's formula for salvation, Romans 10:9-10 in his classes. Of course, he was a lot more wordy about it, but I recall that the basic teaching remained the same. He spent a lot of time expounding on what acquiring salvation was not. For example, it was not "accepting Jesus as your personal savior", it was not "reciting the sinners prayer", etc.

That's not what he said

It happens enough.There is a tendency among many to believe that "It wasn't like that when I was in". To admit that abuses were taking place means admitting that you were either evil for supporting the abuses, or stupid for not seeing them; so they didn't happen, or they happened somewhere else where they didn't affect where you where. Few want to admit to either being evil or stupid. So we have those whose position is that TWI was a godly organization, full of sweet wonderful people, teaching 'God's rightly divided Word', until the day that they left

I would imagine the difference would be in whether an offshoot participant views the TWI of Wierwille's day as a godly ministry and PFAL as the best foundational teaching available. Of course, many of us have reassessed our earlier opinion of Wierwille & PFAL, but many still retain the positive view of the man and his class. I can see some folks believing that what they are doing now is 'The Way as it might have been'.

Good rundown on the blues, socks. Lincoln, where I've lived for 24 years, is a blues hotbed. The 'Zoo Bar', has been bringing national acts in here for over 30 years; it helps that we're on sort of a crossroads among Chicago, Denver, Kansas City and Texas. Because of the constant influence of the giants, many of the locals have taken the blues to heart. Ever hear of Magic Slim and the Teardrops, socks? Magic (Morris Holt) is a journeyman Chicago bluesman who made Lincoln his home when he 'retired' a few years back. The missus and I are going out Thursday night to see a local favorite: Electric Soul Method, a fusion of blues, jazz, funk, and some other stuff that I can't identify! They've been talking about touring the midwest, so check 'em out if they come to your town.

Okay, many of us believed at one time that we were in a 'ministry' that was God's primary plan for getting his 'Word' out to the masses. Obviously, if we have left The Way, we no longer believe that the current organization is part of God's plan. Some of us have joined churches, or have our own spirituality independent of any organization. However, quite a few ex-wayfers, including GS posters, belong to groups that are run by former TWI leaders, or incorporate TWI/PFAL doctrines, or even use the PFAL class itself. Who here among 'splinter' participants believes that the organization that they are now part of is a continuation of Wierwille's 'ministry'?

DannyIt's difficult for many of us ex-wayfers to be able to appreciate all that. One thing we learned in TWI was how to view everything through the lens of PFAL. It then becomes too easy to dismiss the different as "not lining up with the Word", when it just differs from the PFAL filtered version of 'the Word'.

The context makes clear that the rereward are guys who are guarding (warding) the rear.

Another example is when the MOG would mispronounce something, everybody would fall in line and mispronouce it the same way. Martindale was teaching from the OT and came upon the word "rereward" - it was actually an archaic spelling of REARward, but Martindale pronounced it re-reward, as in reward again. I actually heard teachings on how God "re-rewards" us based on this stupidity. Or how many people thought that pleroo was pronounced pleroko, or exegeomai pronouned exegeckomai because Wierwille had trouble with the two "o"s in a row?

Martindale decided, sometime in the late nineties, to send in-residence Way Corps out to live with Corps who were "out on the field", maybe running a limb or a region, for a portion of their training. As he's talking about it on a Sunday night tape, he realizes that he can make a joke out of the name: The Way Corps Field Training program, and starts making WC Fields jokes, and ends by calling it the WC Fields Training program. Everybody gets a big laugh. Except in the next Way magazine there's an article about the program, which they mention that Martindale "in his wisdom" has named the WC Field Training program! And Corps that I encounter call it, with a straight face, the WC Field Training program! Was everybody too scared to ask the MOG if he was joking?

George Harrison maintained until the day that he died that his drug use was a good thing, and was of great benefit to him. I too remember many good times when I was stoned, drunk, or under the influence of some substance or another. I had a lot of good friends during those times, no one can tell me otherwise. The so-called harmful effects of drug use should not overshadow the good that it did for me.

I was a WOW in 1980-81, so I was living in One-Horse, Nebraska as 1981 dawned. It was late 1980 that Wierwille announced that Martindale would succeed him as prez of TWI. I remember thinking "who the heck is Craig Martindale?" Getting involved in TWI in a large area that had few Way Corps, you just didn't hear about LCM all that much. especially since these were the days where "phone hookups" were relatively rare. My WOW year was the first time that I was around Way Corps much. I tended to view the guys in the "chain of command" of the Way Tree like Vince, Ralph, and JAL, as the likely heirs to the MOG. Our Limb Coordinator came out to visit us shortly after the announcement and asked me what I thought about the "President-Elect", which is what Wierwille and everybody else called Martindale. The title didn't sink in with me, since nobody elected him, and we had a real president-elect, Ronald Reagan, waiting to take office in a few months. So my response was "we'll have to wait and see, he doesn't seem too awfully bright". I wish I had a picture of ol' Ronnie's face at that moment. When my WOW year ended I stayed in Nebraska and ended up coordinating a twig and a Way Home. I was also apprentice Corps, but never went in because I was no good at raising money. During this year I really saw how "leaders" in TWI felt that they had a mandate to interfere in peoples' lives. Without getting into a lot of details, I saw in my own life, and the lives of those around me, "leaders" inserting themselves in every aspect of the lives of those they supposedly led. I got married right before ROA '82, and saw the interference continue. I disassociated myself from TWI in early 1983, but was convinced that the problems that I saw were local, and not part of a larger pattern. During the year following ROA 1981, although branch and limb coordinators were no fun to be around, twig was fun, and we enjoyed what we were doing. There were a lot of wayfers in their late teens and early twenties, so there was an active Way social life. Witnessing was a natural thing, because we were always out together doing things. Toward the end of the 1981-82 "ministry year", things began to get more regimented, and got even worse after ROA '82. There was also some lying about how many people were actually active in local TWI. The outgoing Limb Coordinator had split all of the twigs in Lincoln around New Year's 1982, so that there were around ten smallish twigs. However, before ROA, most of the "new people" had left, about half of the twig leaders went into the Corps, and a sizeable group went out WOW. Outgoing LC failed to mention the reduction in numbers, and still had "on the books" ten twigs. The incoming LC was assigned to be the Branch Coordinator of six or seven of these paper twigs, and a Corps grad held over from the previous year had been assigned as a Twig Area Coordiantor of three or four others. Imagine the surprise of the new LC when he found enough people for about four medium-sized twigs, including the one he and his wife were going to run! To me, mid 1982 into 1983 was when things began to really go downhill. Not at all the "best of times".

So pretty much you're saying that you pulled that average out of your a....., er, your ear.

WordWolf isn't filibustering, he's addressing points and pointing out inconsistancies. I'm glad that he has the time for it. ...and Johniam, I don't need a remdial bible-reading course, I know what it says, I just don't accept it as my only source of truth.

...and by the way, I can reject PFAL as a primary source for truth without rejecting any truth that may be contained in it. There are things in it that are true, some that he plagiarized, some that he came up with on his own. Nonetheless, Wierwille, in my opinion, discredited himself as someone that I would trust to present me the truth. So, mastering PFAL? Mastering any other of Wierwille's writings? I don't think so. Again, does that mean that I think it's all false? Not at all. Do I think it's not useful on some level? No. Can I deny that PFAL was a vehicle for many people to learn how to read the bible and to some extent understand it? Of course not. The plagiarism, the lying, the invented definitions of Greek and Hebrew words, the unsupported assertions all make it difficult to accept PFAL as something that should be utilized, let alone mastered. Wierwille's presentation of himself as a scholar of biblical languages was not true, and his understanding of some of his primary sources, like Bullinger, was incomplete. Frequently Wierwille's premises are false, rendering any conclusions based upon them false as well. "Working the Word" and "checking it out for oneself" takes more work than most of us ever put into it, or were even equipped to do.

Rejection of PFAL = rejection of God :o

...and of course it's not arrogant to think you have the nature of God and his (or her) dealings with man all figured out

It was Christmas 1977 when I first heard of TWI, or rather when I first heard about the people who were running a "bible study" in their apartment, that I later found out were part of TWI. My cousin was attending twigs at the home of a co-worker. My aunt asked that I go with her to look after her or something. I began attending sporadically myself; I enjoyed the discussions about the bible. In March of 1978 I decided to take the PFAL class. There was no pressure to attend twig or take the class, or if there was, it was subtle. There were nine or ten branches located on Long Island at the time, none run by Way Corps grads. Few twig leaders were even advanced class grads. For the months leading up to ROA 1978 I was involved only superficially, and that seemed okay with everybody. After the ROA I became more involved. Many of the "original" wayfers who got involved in TWI during the early to mid seventies had left to go WOW or into the Way Corps, although a few were still around. As I got more involved after ROA '78 and before ROA '79, I perceived an attitude that we were in the midst of a changing of the guard from the "good old days" to the more structured times.

'80-'81 Definitely. I was a WOW that year. we saw them in Cheyenne, Wyoming (we lived pretty close, in western Nebraska) and in Minneapolis. Yeah, all my buddies and buddettes got sent to the big "outreach cities"; I was in a town of 5,000.

Ummm...weren't you "weeded out", Oldies?

In my opinion it is a waste of time to wade through Wierwille's works looking for "the baby" or "fish", and throwing out the bones with the bathwater. It is established, in my eyes anyway, that the man was a liar, and a thief and a con artist. Why would I want to use his works as a source for truth?

"The Fog Years" was a term, if not invented by Martindale, was used by him to describe the fog that he felt himself in from listening to Geer. He also used his explanation of what went on in those years to cast a fog over what really happened.

Mex: Don't assume that we all agree that all the things that you mentioned are true.

In the early days of Christianity, it would have been fairly easy for competing factions to spring up. Each of these factions would produce their own literature, some from pure motives, some in an effort to discredit those that they disagreed with. As one group became dominant, literature that supported opposing viewpoints would be supressed or destroyed. Again, some of the surpressing might have been done with pure motives, i.e. to guard the church against what it saw as heresy. As the dominant group consolidated it's power, it gained the means and motive to present the "other" books as heretical. Eventually one set of books were canonized as "The Bible", and anything else was viewed as simply not from God. Not all that surprising. The compiling of the canon of the new testament took place over a long period of time. Even when it was complete, there was not universal agreeement. Anyway, that's my view, based on my interpreation of the available facts. Opinions vary.

The Way, in my opinion, could never make up it's collective mind about Christmas. On one hand, they taught, ad nauseum, about how Jesus wasn't born on December 25th, the wise men weren't there and angels don't sing or have wings. On the other hand, they observed all the cultural Christmas traditions: trees, gifts, decorations, etc. On the gripping hand, they changed the name to "Household Holiday". The Jehovah's Witnesses, agree with 'em or not, are at least consistant in this regard. They say that they're not going to observe holidays, and they don't. TWI talked big, but never really gave up the traditions. And "Household Holiday" was so stupid, it was almost beyond comprehension. What 'holiday' was the 'household' celebrating anyway? And if that wasn't stupid enough, it was shorted from HOusehold HOliday to Ho-Ho. P.S. What I was trying to say in the description following the Thread title was I'm Amazed That I Never Kicked the Crap Out of Someone for Saying 'Happy Ho-Ho'