Oakspear

I don't remember ever hearing who was supposed to do weddings in TWI. Early on I assumed it was ordained clergy. Later a non-Corps twig coordinator performed a wedding in Spanish, mainly because none of the reverends or other Corps in the area could speak Spanish. I always got the impression that they wanted to hold control of who was getting married in the hands of an area's top leadership (LC, RC etc) - and not just let anybody perform weddings.

glad that I could be of service ;)-->

Galen: You must have driven some "leadership" folks crazy :P--> Here you are, performing weddings, even though you are just a lowly "Joe Believer", getting kicked out, then resurfacing somewhere else in the world. I can just see it: "Well, we've gotten rid of him...hey, who's that in the second row?"

Dateline San Diego, February 2805 C.E. (AP) Scholars unearthed a rare English edition of Power for Abundant Living today in the ruins of ancient San Diego. As any schoolchild knows, English is a dead language that was spoken at one time in North America and other scattered parts of the world, but was supplanted by Tagalog after the Phillipine Hegemony required all public records to be in that nations language. Before today, the only Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) versions extant are translations of translations, since there are no "originals" left. Religious scholars are therefore unsure what PFAL really means due to shoddy translations, proofreaders' oversights and outright forgeries. In fact the Japanese-Bulgarian version of PFAL has Wierwille repartedly referring to "integrity" when it is common knowledge that he had none. PFAL scholars are busy fabricating new definitions of English words as this article goes to press

Hey Mike - thanks for the recognition of the partial reality of my spoof. Personally, I don't need HCW to validate my opinion that you are wrong, but it is interesting in that his previous posts indicate a respect for Wierwille on some level, yet he says that Wierwille did not put his own work on the same pedestal that you do. I don't believe that PFAL is god-breathed, then again I don't believe that the bible is either.

Of course it's possible that Wierwille figured out some things that Bullinger did independently, but I would say that itr's unlikely in light of times that he quotes Bullinger, but clearly doesn't understand what he quotes.

HCW: You were thrust into a bad situation and expected to lead. You at least recognized that your situation was impossible and you were not trained to handle the craziness that you were put in the midst of. (Have you read The Cult That Snapped? Great story by the author about his interim year as a WOW family coordinator 3 years after yours - same region coordinator too!) What turned Way Corps into Corps-Nazis was being in tough situations and not realizing that they were in over their heads. Figuring that telling people to renew their minds and to read the collaterals would solve all their problems.

LOL...me too!Actually my argument isn't with you Sirguess, it's with the "ministry" that claimed that they could discern the original intent of the guys who wrote the bible down, would get incredibly anal about some things, yet pull definitions out of their butts if it was convenient. Kark Kahler has a section in his book where he reviews his notes from a teaching tape about "athletes of the spirit". It's amazing how much butt covering and back pedaling goes on, not just from Martindale, but Wierwille and Cummins too. Anyway, I can't be the devil's advocate...I don't believe in the Devil peace to you as well

You can demonstrate why Paul would do something, why it would make sense for him to do it, but not that he actually did it. I guess it's a valid opinion as anything else, but you can't get the bible to back it up.

Sirguess: I suppose he could have, but where is the evidense that he did? Let's suppose that some military equipment carried over to athletics: spear = javelin for one. The problem is that the context is military. What athletically is equivalent to quenching the firey darts of the wicked? Martinmdale claimed it was a discus -->. The word for sword is (surprse) SWORD, not spear or javelin; the word for helmet is HELMET. Et cetera :D-->

Here's what I predict Mike will say: You claim that you heard doctor say that. That is only hearsay, since I did not hear him say it. Furthermore, what is God breathed is the PFAL book, not doctor saying that the PFAL book was not god breathed. If doctor had said in the PFAL book that PFAL was not god breathed, I would check my own understanding of what is written. Since PFAL IS god breathed, then seeing it written in PFAL that it IS NOT god breathed must be a proofreader's oversight, or a figure of speech. If Wierwille's writing cannot contradict the godbreathedness of PFAL, how can his own alleged words, reported by someone who has obviously not mastered PFAL? (which is god breathed)

I flipped open the back of my bible a minute ago and found my notes that I was required to have there before I could go to the Advanced Class, or the Advanced Class Special, or Mardi Gras or something :D--> It lists all the athletic terms in the "church" and "leadership" epistles, gives a brief definition and lsits the occurences. It's interesting that NONE of the words that TWI listed as athletic terminology in the bible occur in Ephesians 6 except for pal?, translated "wrestle". As I recall, the athletic imagery in Ephesians 6 was based on this word, everything else had to be athletic for it to "fit". By the way, I don't believe that using an athletic analogy, or image invalidates the verse about the Devil coming to steal, kill, and destroy. Metaphors, analogies and other figures of speech serve to illustrate one aspect of a concept. After all, Christians are called douloses as well...are we literal slaves? Nothing demonstrates TWI's dishonesty at research more than the athletes of the spirit.

1. Wierwille mentions in the PFAL video that Dr. Higgins turned him on to Bullinger after he had been teaching essentially the same things: "He writes like you teach". So Wierwille was claiming to have come up with the information independently. 2. The change to "with distinction came in one of the other books, JCING or ATDAN...I forget which one. 3. I'd like to see How to Enjoy the Bible to catch the whole context. Did Bullinger mean the same thing when he used those words that Wierwille meant? Wierwille had a habit of misunderstanding and confusing Bullinger's points. I wouldn't be surprised if this was another example. 4. True, most of us figured out what Wierwille meant, but how about "say what you mean and mean what you say"?

Can someone tell me what the "Corps Coordinators" did, as opposed to the Corps DIRECTOR? I remember reading in The Way: Living in Love that Duncan was the "coordinator of the second year (First) Corps, while Martindale was coordinator of the first year (Second) Corps. Both these guys were in the Way Corps training program at the time. At some point Martindale became the Corps Director succeeding George Jess. Also, Don Wierwille was the "dean" of the Emporia campus, and there have been "campus coordinators" at the training centers. -->

I think that the intermediate class was done in 75 or 76 - plaid jacket, wide tie & lapels, poofier hair :P--> - ya know seventies!

TWI liked to use examples and analogies in their teaching. That's great, but the problem that would come up is that we would spend so much time explaining the analogy and not really looking at what the bible said. Their explanation of "interpretation" being like dogs running wild was wrong. It was another example of Wierwille misunderstanding Bullinger and Martindale mindlessly parroting Wierwille. (Belle, I think this is one of the ones that you and I hammered out together via email) When I pointed out what I thought was error, and asked for clarification, all that I reeceived was an explanation of how dogs had to be trained, and how we shouldn't let our minds run "vagrantly" like wild dogs, etc. Not one rference back to the context of the verse, or the actual meaning of the word translated "interpretation".

Indeed it was! Who were they? Why did they go to five and then why back to 3? Following the reading of the POP Ricardo Caballero and John Townsend were added to the Board of Trustees. I don't know if they resigned or were forced off as Martindale regained control.References to the Trustees in the 90's omitted these two

Wierwille originally taught this and Martindale ran with it and expanded it as a mistranslated athletic analogy. The only problem is that there is no evidense that the words are mistranslated. All are clearly military.

Jonny Lingo & Linda Z: The Corps that I am mainly talking about were new ones who got in in the nineties. Most of the Corps that I encountered in the nineties were either relatively new grads (20th, 21st etc) or top leaders. Several specifically told me that they were trained to "confront" and to "smoke out" weakness.

With all due consideration to you GSers who were in the Way Corps. I believe that these people were doing just what they were trained to do.

The whole Jews = Khazars thing didn't bother me so much; if it was true it was true, if it wasn't it wasn't; it didn't seem to have too much impact on my life. What bothered me, especially after I actually read The Thirteenth Tribe, was how it was misrepresented in TWI. During my whole time in TWI I only knew of ONE other person who read it all the way through, yet almost EVERYONE that I knew in TWI owned a copy. Most people simply went by what Wierwille wrote in his appendix to JCOP, "Jew and Judean". (That's another thing: "Jew" is simply a worn down version of the word "Judean", which Wierwille actually demonstrates in his appendix, not a name that describes a different people - in many languages the word for "Jew" sounds very similar to "Judean".) In my observation this was simply another example of how wayfers would blindly accept whatever Wierwille said, despite glaring evidence to the contrary. Hey Jonny Lingo: I know I'm continuing your slight derailment, but... There were a small number of Jews living in Palestine/Israel at the turn of the century, more came in every year after WWI, but mostly settled in areas that the Arabs were not heavily settled in. When the U.N. partitioned Palestine after the British gave up the job there was to be a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish state comprised areas that held a majority of Jews, the Arab state areas that were mainly Arab. The Kingdom of Jordan was left outside this plan due to separate agreements made with the Hashemite clan of Saudi Arabia to give them their own kingdom. When the neighboring Arab countries attacked the newly proclaimed Israel, many Palestinian Arabs fled to neighboring countries and lived as refugees. When the dust cleared Israel still stood, but the planned Palestinian state had been absorbed (occupied if you will), by Jordan (amazing how Palestinian supporters rarely mention how an independent Palestinian state could have been established fifty years ago if Jordan hadn't occupied it.)

Koestler's work was plausible, but I never thought he sufficiently proved his thesis. He strung together a lot of documents, but they didn't add up to the sum at the bottom IMHO. As has been stated, Koestler did not suggest that all Jews were descendents of the Khazars, just those who were in Eastern Europe in the 1800-1900's. These are properly called the Askenazim. Those who were decsended from the Jews of medievel Spain and Portugal, and those who were found in the mediterranean area and middle east were termed Sephardim. Wierwille (and later Martindale) misrepresented Koestler to the extent that they taught that all modern Jews were descendents of the Khazars. Whether this was intentional or one of Wierwille's failures to understand what he read, I don't know. But there are continuous records of Jews in Europe from biblical times through the late Roman empire and all through the Christian ascendancy in Europe. Wierwille also incorrectly taught that Yiddish was a form of the Khazar language written with Hebrew characters. In fact Yiddish is considered a dialect of German, with many additions from Hebrew, Russian, Polish and other Eastern European languages. Khazaric was related to Turkish.

Each theme since 200 has started off with "The Promised Land of the Prevailing Word: ..."

When I first got involved with TWI, one of the things that attracted me was the admonition to "search the scriptures whether these things were so". Wierwille presented a way to do that, despite disguising the sources. We were told, at least publically, to not take his word for it, but to "make the Word our own". Great theory. In practice, it wasn't quite like that. If your own research came up with something that differed from Wierwille's teaching, you received a pat on the head and a suggestion to "hold in abeyance" your questions, since surely you were not seeing it, weren't mature enough, or were missing some key point. God forbid that Wierwille was actually wrong! Of course some doctrines did change, but until the edict from above came down, you had to adhere to the old doctrinal position. More and more "research" came to mean going to TWI books and other publications to find out what to believe, then using "research" materials to solidify that belief. We were told that "research" means "to search again" (it actually means to search thoroughly). The application of that was to treat TWI writings almost as holy writ.

No garage, no driveway. Just an alley behind the apartment building with four or five spots to park.