I've always thought it strange that twi would be able to sustain any followers at all...considering their "leader" is about as charismatic as the spin cycle on a washing machine...Twi was built on the personality of vpw...and today, they exist on the money that HE hustled...Rosie couldn't generate enough revenue to pay for lunch...
...it's the investments! all they have to do is maintain the facade of a ministry in order to maintain their lush lifestyles...
I always thought that it was interesting that Martindale did a class called "Rise and Expansion" and then watched the ministry that was handed to him dwindle to near nothing in a few short years.
I always thought that it was interesting that Martindale did a class called "Rise and Expansion" and then watched the ministry that was handed to him dwindle to near nothing in a few short years.
Yea --he knew a lot about that subject.
It's funny how even before the Martindale scandal broke, as a newbie I could tell immediately that my Fellowship and Branch were having problems recruiting and retaining people. I've detailed my own experiences on other threads, but in a summary it seemed like both my Twig and Branch leadership were the height of incompetence. They seemed to have no idea of how to manage people, much less motivate them. They seemed to be going by some weird set of rules that came from a time when people were beating down TWI doors and begging to get in (if such a time ever existed, it sure didn't by the time I was in!). When their high-handed intimidation techniques didn't work, my leaders were clearly at a loss. I remember thinking "did these bozos have any sort of training at all???"
In the mid-nineties during a "Rise & Expansion" class our Limb Coordinator (who is out and has posted here) referred to us as "the incredible shrinking household" and to the class we were taking as "Rise & Reduction". This occurred several years after the great post-POOP exodus of the late 80's. Every week it seemed another family left or was kicked out or was M&A'd.
Despite these dwindling numbers, there always seemed to be plenty of titles to go around.
At the peak of TWI's membership, alte 70's - early 80's there was 7 or 8 regions, each with 6 or 7 states, some of which were divided into Areas or Territories that were bigger than some states. Branches typically were made up of 7 or more twigs.
But in the 90's, cities with barely enough wayfers to make up a decent-sized twig were split into 2 twigs and called a branch, the U.S. was divded into 12 regions, sometimes with the region leader directly coordinating 2 or 3 states.
Plenty of chiefs, the illusion of numbers due to bigger infrastructure, yet fewer and fewer indians.
Honestly I thought they'd be dissolved by now, but apparently they're still around and always have the capability of a comeback in numbers. This is the United States of America, with freedom of religion as one of its beloved tenets... if folks wish to fellowship in The Way its no skin off my nose. I have no hard feelings, live and let live. It is not my chosen religion at this time, but I believe they're part of that one body of Christ. I wish them well.
I've always thought it strange that twi would be able to sustain any followers at all...considering their "leader" is about as charismatic as the spin cycle on a washing machine...Twi was built on the personality of vpw...and today, they exist on the money that HE hustled...
...aaah just a question from the glass eye ball coming from torpedo ohio japan, but how l o n g did you drink from the koolaid fountain of youth? and remember being from western new york should keep you faaaway from chicken wings and beef 'n wick, or da heart atttttaaaakkkkkkkk could hit!
What kind of things did people get kicked out or marked and avoided for?
In our area, people were kicked out at the beginning for the smallest things. However, once the fellowships got pretty small, it seemed like they were less prone to toss folks out the door. When they got down to just three people, they would hang onto you for dear life. A branch coordinator had to have two fellowships to keep his/her job. Minimum three people in each. Kick just one out and, poof, no more BC. IF that did happen, we would just shuffle one of the deck chairs on the LieTannic to shore up the two person fellowship and move on. Eventually, we got down to a gag-gle of very small, boring fellowships. Couldn't combine though. That would "limit the opportunities for growth." Hahahahahaha....
BTW, my last three years were full of weekly and very mandatory "outreach" sessions. No one new at fellowship? MUST go out witnessing after fellowship. Even on a school night with little kids. At nine o'clock at night. (7:30 fellowship followed by mandatory refreshments) I did not see one new single person start coming, take a class and stay for even a month. The only "growth" was through way kids. Most classes were 2/3 full of 12 year olds. It got so bad they lowered the minimum number of students twice. If they hadn't, way kids would have waited as much as two to three years just to pull together one foundational class with seven recruits. They had people come from as far as two hours away just to make it work. Talk about being on life support.
As for reasons to get booted, it was usually one of two big things. Debt was numero uno. If you had a house that was bought 20 years ago with a 30 year loan, you had to sell it NOW to get out of debt. No matter the financial impact or how old you were. Refuse and you would be tormented, oops, "counseled." Any back talk and you'd likely be labelled a "homo" and tossed on your rear. No kidding.
The other was not allowing the local corpse to jump into your life and run it. NO question was too personal. Fail to comply and you were "spiritually suspect." That's one step away from "homo." Sort of like a sliding scale. :(
What kind of things did people get kicked out or marked and avoided for?
I'm one of several people I know of that were M & A'd for false accusations of being homosexual. My son is another.
A family I knew was kicked out because the husband wore his hair long and did the housecleaning. He didn't "dress" appropriately. He had worn sweats to twig. He ran a cleaning business - that was not acceptable to the leadership. The man was told he wasn't man enough to attend household fellowships. (He had been the assistant twig coordinator for several years - this came out of nowhere to him.)
A lady I was wow with was kicked out for being "a fag hag," a "homo sympathizer." She had been seen eating lunch at a rock with a (gasp) known homosexual man. She also failed to discern my and my son's homo spirit...
A lady I was wow with was kicked out for being "a fag hag," a "homo sympathizer." She had been seen eating lunch at a rock with a (gasp) known homosexual man. She also failed to discern my and my son's homo spirit...
Those are just off the top of my head.
My whole family was eventually thrown out just for showing up to twig one night and not being able to shut up because one of us had slipped some acid into the dinner juice! I think it was Sneezy! But Tom Strange knows, HE was there too!
Anyway, as if our "family" wasn't dysfunctional enough on it's own, wouldn't you know the damn married corps branch coordinator would always be getting an erection for Snowy! This would really freak us out, especially when we started having "fellowships" at OUR house. Talk about having cookies and eating them too.
He was always putting his hands on her, trying to get her to come over to his "clean" his house when the wife was conveniently "out of town". More like OUT of her MIND just to be "married" to the guy. A real power freak too.
I could tell you some other stuff too, but hey, some of you might thinking I'm making this up with coffee and a croissant stuck in my mouth!
Reminds me of another time in about 1973.. someone I knew took a four way hit of something about two hours before watching Walt Disney's Fantasia.. after about three days, he started talking again..
Honestly I thought they'd be dissolved by now, but apparently they're still around and always have the capability of a comeback in numbers. This is the United States of America, with freedom of religion as one of its beloved tenets... if folks wish to fellowship in The Way its no skin off my nose. I have no hard feelings, live and let live. It is not my chosen religion at this time, but I believe they're part of that one body of Christ. I wish them well.
"it's no skin off my nose"...is that another way of saying that you simply do not care about the victims currently being deceived by this cult?
Your right oldies...This IS the United States of America...and not only does this country afford religious freedom but also freedom of speech...and that is why I can say that twi, IMHO, is not just another religious denomination to choose from...it's a destructive cult that has destroyed the lives of many people and I DO have hard feelings...
"it's no skin off my nose"... and I DO have hard feelings...
I think the affects of the Koolaid are beginning to wear off? It's either the morning coffee or time to have quick peek into the Word of God, where it says somewhere like we possibly have to..."forgive"...those who we might not quite see eye to eye with?
...And of course, the ultimate sin - DEBT (but this was only enforced if you were not related to clergy - otherwise, it was fine.)
I never understood how far they went to find out if you were in debt. Did they run credit checks? Look at your car & home and then your ABS? Played golf with your mortgage loan officer? Seen student loans deferrment letters?
Okay, I know that most people were honest and probably told them or they knew you didn't own your home/car out right. But if you rented and didn't have a car payment, how did they know?
I remember them runing a get a debt workshop at word & business in the early 90s... hmmm did those people get M&A?
I never understood how far they went to find out if you were in debt. Did they run credit checks? Look at your car & home and then your ABS? Played golf with your mortgage loan officer? Seen student loans deferrment letters?
Okay, I know that most people were honest and probably told them or they knew you didn't own your home/car out right. But if you rented and didn't have a car payment, how did they know?
I remember them runing a get a debt workshop at word & business in the early 90s... hmmm did those people get M&A?
I think most people just told their leadership, thinking that that would be the honest, right thing to do - that they would help them get out of their "broken fellowship." Little did they know that by admitting the "sin" and asking for help they were putting themselves up for elimination.
And leadership (at least I know in a couple of instances where people decided to buy a house) actually ASKED how they could afford the house - under the guise of "please tell us how you were so blessed to own this beautiful home debt free?"
We talked to leadership about debt when it first became a ministry issue (in like '93?) I can't remember the exact date. We had med bills due to a birth complication issue and were counseled to sell our house(though at first a mortgage was allowed)--debt being a spiritual weakness that affected our abundance) and move away from the little twig we ran to the Limb city where the Word was hot (and rent was higher than our mortgage). Being extra meek, we did as suggested and got to pay capital gains on the sale, too! Plus we still had the med bills which didn't evaporate due to our obedience and 'believing action'. And our fellowship was across town in a subdivision we couldn't afford to live in, so we got to travel 30 min or more each way three times a week with tots.
We were counseled to keep a budget in a ledger book, which we did. Leadership could look at this when they wanted to.
It took us years to get out from under those bills, I did a home daycare, we had little kids and couldn't afford the daycare if I worked anyway. Daycare left my house not so decent--toys in the living room etc. More issues. Our Leadership was obsessive compulsive about a budget balancing to the penny. At one time our leadership specualted that we were barely 'household' due to the debt.
If you were in debt in the early stages it wasn't a big deal, but of course then leadership knew who was 'weak', and as they continued to clean up the household debtors were under constant suspicion, with more and more hoops to jump through.
No one in our branch had new cars later in the nineties except one couple with family money and the corps on salary. Everyone else drove used, some more used than others.
No one in our branch had new cars later in the nineties except one couple with family money and the corps on salary. Everyone else drove used, some more used than others.
You are being nice..They(cars) were pieces of crap in our areas
My husband was an auto mechanic at one point, and I can remember so many weekends where he worked on our old car or spent a day working on a believer's old car, or shopping with a believer who had $500 to spend on a car, helping them find the best deal.
When we finally bought a new car--after we left TWi--wow! No weekends of car work! He doesn't even change the oil nowadays. We've attained middle class!
In our area, people were kicked out at the beginning for the smallest things. However, once the fellowships got pretty small, it seemed like they were less prone to toss folks out the door. When they got down to just three people, they would hang onto you for dear life. A branch coordinator had to have two fellowships to keep his/her job. Minimum three people in each. Kick just one out and, poof, no more BC. IF that did happen, we would just shuffle one of the deck chairs on the LieTannic to shore up the two person fellowship and move on. Eventually, we got down to a gag-gle of very small, boring fellowships. Couldn't combine though. That would "limit the opportunities for growth." Hahahahahaha....
BTW, my last three years were full of weekly and very mandatory "outreach" sessions. No one new at fellowship? MUST go out witnessing after fellowship. Even on a school night with little kids. At nine o'clock at night. (7:30 fellowship followed by mandatory refreshments) I did not see one new single person start coming, take a class and stay for even a month. The only "growth" was through way kids. Most classes were 2/3 full of 12 year olds. It got so bad they lowered the minimum number of students twice. If they hadn't, way kids would have waited as much as two to three years just to pull together one foundational class with seven recruits. They had people come from as far as two hours away just to make it work. Talk about being on life support.
As for reasons to get booted, it was usually one of two big things. Debt was numero uno. If you had a house that was bought 20 years ago with a 30 year loan, you had to sell it NOW to get out of debt. No matter the financial impact or how old you were. Refuse and you would be tormented, oops, "counseled." Any back talk and you'd likely be labelled a "homo" and tossed on your rear. No kidding.
The other was not allowing the local corpse to jump into your life and run it. NO question was too personal. Fail to comply and you were "spiritually suspect." That's one step away from "homo." Sort of like a sliding scale. :(
JT
On another thread we were discussing how girls would lure you into the Household by acting like they were romantically interested in you. But as soon as you took the class they ditched you, and no one seemed to care if you dropped out or not. (This happened to me.) This made no sense. Why would they make all that effort to deceive you in order to bring you in, and not seem to care if they actually retained you? This seemed like a waste of effort. Someone mentioned that class attendance was very important, and if this is the only thing they were concerned with, it sort of makes sense. Did the leadership only keep track of the classes, or did they follow attendance in the Fellowship as well?
Honestly, these were some of the dumbest people I've ever seen. They didn't even have the sense to try to cover their tracks. I remember the mother of The Girl babbling about how she was only trying to being me "to the Word". So, it's Ok to lie and manipulate someone as long as it's for "The Word".
If they had had any sense, The Girl would have gradually disassociated herself from me, then after a "decent interval" broken things off over some contrived issue. Then it wouldn't have been obvious. But to do it the very next day after the class ended was just like putting up a billboard! What a bunch of morons. I called the Branch Head out on it, and point blank told him that it was obvious she was only pretending to be my great "friend" to get me to take the class. He was a total wimp and stammered all over himself. So much for the Big Bad Defender of the The Word.
It's very interesting about the "Homo" charge being used to kick people out. The Girl was best friends with a gay girl, and while her parents frowned on it, no one in the Fellowship or Branch ever made an issue of it.
I had forgotten that in addition to the guy they kicked out for letting his girlfriend move in with him, they also kicked out a whole family, but they were very closemouthed about why. So, I saw the same number of people booted vs. people who stayed. This just does not seem to be a very effective way to run a group.
Say, do you think TWI joined the CIA? They don't seem to be able to hide much, either. It would explain a lot....
Did the leadership only keep track of the classes, or did they follow attendance in the Fellowship as well?
I don't remember even seeing anyone keep track of attendance. The ONLY focus was on the money generating activities such as running classes. That's about it. There was never any tracking of how the existing people were doing. It was actually embarrassing to see how impoverished they were. (On many levels) A new person came with me once and said "your friends all look like losers. Nothin' personal. Why do they talk about abundance and look like they don't have a pot to p**s in?"
There was a time in my area where I was asked to assist my fellowship coordinator (who already had an assistant)... I had to keep track of the money from the ABS, and also WHO was at the fellowship, notes on what was taught, and who said what about the teaching after fellowship. I thought nothing of it at the time... Now it seems rather creepy and KGBish.
And I remember one instance where a new person ACTUALLY CAME to fellowship (I brought him, the poor sap.) My fellowship coordinator was angry with me because this was not planned in advance and cut into our mandatory witnessing time they had planned if a new person didn't show up.
There was no way to please these people! If there were no new people there, you were a failure, and if you did bring a new person, you didn't PLAN it well enough.
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Mark Clarke
I posted this in another thread, but it applies here even more:
Gamaliel said it best, in Acts 5, "If this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought."
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GrouchoMarxJr
I've always thought it strange that twi would be able to sustain any followers at all...considering their "leader" is about as charismatic as the spin cycle on a washing machine...Twi was built on the personality of vpw...and today, they exist on the money that HE hustled...Rosie couldn't generate enough revenue to pay for lunch...
...it's the investments! all they have to do is maintain the facade of a ministry in order to maintain their lush lifestyles...
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mstar1
I always thought that it was interesting that Martindale did a class called "Rise and Expansion" and then watched the ministry that was handed to him dwindle to near nothing in a few short years.
Yea --he knew a lot about that subject.
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waysider
OOPS! Sorry
I thought it said The Incredibly STINKING Way.
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DocHoliday
It's funny how even before the Martindale scandal broke, as a newbie I could tell immediately that my Fellowship and Branch were having problems recruiting and retaining people. I've detailed my own experiences on other threads, but in a summary it seemed like both my Twig and Branch leadership were the height of incompetence. They seemed to have no idea of how to manage people, much less motivate them. They seemed to be going by some weird set of rules that came from a time when people were beating down TWI doors and begging to get in (if such a time ever existed, it sure didn't by the time I was in!). When their high-handed intimidation techniques didn't work, my leaders were clearly at a loss. I remember thinking "did these bozos have any sort of training at all???"
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oldiesman
Honestly I thought they'd be dissolved by now, but apparently they're still around and always have the capability of a comeback in numbers. This is the United States of America, with freedom of religion as one of its beloved tenets... if folks wish to fellowship in The Way its no skin off my nose. I have no hard feelings, live and let live. It is not my chosen religion at this time, but I believe they're part of that one body of Christ. I wish them well.
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Grumpy
...aaah just a question from the glass eye ball coming from torpedo ohio japan, but how l o n g did you drink from the koolaid fountain of youth?
and remember being from western new york should keep you faaaway from chicken wings and beef 'n wick, or da heart atttttaaaakkkkkkkk could hit! 
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Caveman
What kind of things did people get kicked out or marked and avoided for?
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JustThinking
In our area, people were kicked out at the beginning for the smallest things. However, once the fellowships got pretty small, it seemed like they were less prone to toss folks out the door. When they got down to just three people, they would hang onto you for dear life. A branch coordinator had to have two fellowships to keep his/her job. Minimum three people in each. Kick just one out and, poof, no more BC. IF that did happen, we would just shuffle one of the deck chairs on the LieTannic to shore up the two person fellowship and move on. Eventually, we got down to a gag-gle of very small, boring fellowships. Couldn't combine though. That would "limit the opportunities for growth." Hahahahahaha....
BTW, my last three years were full of weekly and very mandatory "outreach" sessions. No one new at fellowship? MUST go out witnessing after fellowship. Even on a school night with little kids. At nine o'clock at night. (7:30 fellowship followed by mandatory refreshments) I did not see one new single person start coming, take a class and stay for even a month. The only "growth" was through way kids. Most classes were 2/3 full of 12 year olds. It got so bad they lowered the minimum number of students twice. If they hadn't, way kids would have waited as much as two to three years just to pull together one foundational class with seven recruits. They had people come from as far as two hours away just to make it work. Talk about being on life support.
As for reasons to get booted, it was usually one of two big things. Debt was numero uno. If you had a house that was bought 20 years ago with a 30 year loan, you had to sell it NOW to get out of debt. No matter the financial impact or how old you were. Refuse and you would be tormented, oops, "counseled." Any back talk and you'd likely be labelled a "homo" and tossed on your rear. No kidding.
The other was not allowing the local corpse to jump into your life and run it. NO question was too personal. Fail to comply and you were "spiritually suspect." That's one step away from "homo." Sort of like a sliding scale. :(
JT
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bowtwi
I'm one of several people I know of that were M & A'd for false accusations of being homosexual. My son is another.
A family I knew was kicked out because the husband wore his hair long and did the housecleaning. He didn't "dress" appropriately. He had worn sweats to twig. He ran a cleaning business - that was not acceptable to the leadership. The man was told he wasn't man enough to attend household fellowships. (He had been the assistant twig coordinator for several years - this came out of nowhere to him.)
A lady I was wow with was kicked out for being "a fag hag," a "homo sympathizer." She had been seen eating lunch at a rock with a (gasp) known homosexual man. She also failed to discern my and my son's homo spirit...
Those are just off the top of my head.
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Grumpy
My whole family was eventually thrown out just for showing up to twig one night and not being able to shut up because one of us had slipped some acid into the dinner juice! I think it was Sneezy! But Tom Strange knows, HE was there too!
Anyway, as if our "family" wasn't dysfunctional enough on it's own, wouldn't you know the damn married corps branch coordinator would always be getting an erection for Snowy! This would really freak us out, especially when we started having "fellowships" at OUR house. Talk about having cookies and eating them too.
He was always putting his hands on her, trying to get her to come over to his "clean" his house when the wife was conveniently "out of town". More like OUT of her MIND just to be "married" to the guy. A real power freak too.
I could tell you some other stuff too, but hey, some of you might thinking I'm making this up with coffee and a croissant stuck in my mouth!
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Ham
I dunno. I might believe the first part there..
Reminds me of another time in about 1973.. someone I knew took a four way hit of something about two hours before watching Walt Disney's Fantasia.. after about three days, he started talking again..
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GrouchoMarxJr
"it's no skin off my nose"...is that another way of saying that you simply do not care about the victims currently being deceived by this cult?
Your right oldies...This IS the United States of America...and not only does this country afford religious freedom but also freedom of speech...and that is why I can say that twi, IMHO, is not just another religious denomination to choose from...it's a destructive cult that has destroyed the lives of many people and I DO have hard feelings...
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Grumpy
I think the affects of the Koolaid are beginning to wear off? It's either the morning coffee or time to have quick peek into the Word of God, where it says somewhere like we possibly have to..."forgive"...those who we might not quite see eye to eye with?
Yikes!
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JavaJane
Hmmm.... Reasons for m&a?
In my area -
A family was m&a-ed because the father liked to gamble (legal in this part of the country).
My family was made m&a because my mother is a "domineering b***h" and my father is "balless"... (No, they just made decisions TOGETHER)
Homosexual fantasizers (how do they know this??)
and uncontrollable children... my family was told they needed to throw out my 16 year old brother - which they did.
And of course, the ultimate sin - DEBT (but this was only enforced if you were not related to clergy - otherwise, it was fine.)
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fooledagainII
I never understood how far they went to find out if you were in debt. Did they run credit checks? Look at your car & home and then your ABS? Played golf with your mortgage loan officer? Seen student loans deferrment letters?
Okay, I know that most people were honest and probably told them or they knew you didn't own your home/car out right. But if you rented and didn't have a car payment, how did they know?
I remember them runing a get a debt workshop at word & business in the early 90s... hmmm did those people get M&A?
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JavaJane
I think most people just told their leadership, thinking that that would be the honest, right thing to do - that they would help them get out of their "broken fellowship." Little did they know that by admitting the "sin" and asking for help they were putting themselves up for elimination.
And leadership (at least I know in a couple of instances where people decided to buy a house) actually ASKED how they could afford the house - under the guise of "please tell us how you were so blessed to own this beautiful home debt free?"
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Bramble
We talked to leadership about debt when it first became a ministry issue (in like '93?) I can't remember the exact date. We had med bills due to a birth complication issue and were counseled to sell our house(though at first a mortgage was allowed)--debt being a spiritual weakness that affected our abundance) and move away from the little twig we ran to the Limb city where the Word was hot (and rent was higher than our mortgage). Being extra meek, we did as suggested and got to pay capital gains on the sale, too! Plus we still had the med bills which didn't evaporate due to our obedience and 'believing action'. And our fellowship was across town in a subdivision we couldn't afford to live in, so we got to travel 30 min or more each way three times a week with tots.
We were counseled to keep a budget in a ledger book, which we did. Leadership could look at this when they wanted to.
It took us years to get out from under those bills, I did a home daycare, we had little kids and couldn't afford the daycare if I worked anyway. Daycare left my house not so decent--toys in the living room etc. More issues. Our Leadership was obsessive compulsive about a budget balancing to the penny. At one time our leadership specualted that we were barely 'household' due to the debt.
If you were in debt in the early stages it wasn't a big deal, but of course then leadership knew who was 'weak', and as they continued to clean up the household debtors were under constant suspicion, with more and more hoops to jump through.
No one in our branch had new cars later in the nineties except one couple with family money and the corps on salary. Everyone else drove used, some more used than others.
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frank123lol
No one in our branch had new cars later in the nineties except one couple with family money and the corps on salary. Everyone else drove used, some more used than others.
You are being nice..They(cars) were pieces of crap in our areas
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Bramble
My husband was an auto mechanic at one point, and I can remember so many weekends where he worked on our old car or spent a day working on a believer's old car, or shopping with a believer who had $500 to spend on a car, helping them find the best deal.
When we finally bought a new car--after we left TWi--wow! No weekends of car work! He doesn't even change the oil nowadays. We've attained middle class!
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DocHoliday
On another thread we were discussing how girls would lure you into the Household by acting like they were romantically interested in you. But as soon as you took the class they ditched you, and no one seemed to care if you dropped out or not. (This happened to me.) This made no sense. Why would they make all that effort to deceive you in order to bring you in, and not seem to care if they actually retained you? This seemed like a waste of effort. Someone mentioned that class attendance was very important, and if this is the only thing they were concerned with, it sort of makes sense. Did the leadership only keep track of the classes, or did they follow attendance in the Fellowship as well?
Honestly, these were some of the dumbest people I've ever seen. They didn't even have the sense to try to cover their tracks. I remember the mother of The Girl babbling about how she was only trying to being me "to the Word". So, it's Ok to lie and manipulate someone as long as it's for "The Word".
If they had had any sense, The Girl would have gradually disassociated herself from me, then after a "decent interval" broken things off over some contrived issue. Then it wouldn't have been obvious. But to do it the very next day after the class ended was just like putting up a billboard! What a bunch of morons. I called the Branch Head out on it, and point blank told him that it was obvious she was only pretending to be my great "friend" to get me to take the class. He was a total wimp and stammered all over himself. So much for the Big Bad Defender of the The Word.
It's very interesting about the "Homo" charge being used to kick people out. The Girl was best friends with a gay girl, and while her parents frowned on it, no one in the Fellowship or Branch ever made an issue of it.
I had forgotten that in addition to the guy they kicked out for letting his girlfriend move in with him, they also kicked out a whole family, but they were very closemouthed about why. So, I saw the same number of people booted vs. people who stayed. This just does not seem to be a very effective way to run a group.
Say, do you think TWI joined the CIA? They don't seem to be able to hide much, either. It would explain a lot....
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JustThinking
I don't remember even seeing anyone keep track of attendance. The ONLY focus was on the money generating activities such as running classes. That's about it. There was never any tracking of how the existing people were doing. It was actually embarrassing to see how impoverished they were. (On many levels) A new person came with me once and said "your friends all look like losers. Nothin' personal. Why do they talk about abundance and look like they don't have a pot to p**s in?"
No wonder TWI was shrinking...
JT
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Bramble
In the nineties attendance was an issue. You had to call and explain why you couldn't make it.
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JavaJane
There was a time in my area where I was asked to assist my fellowship coordinator (who already had an assistant)... I had to keep track of the money from the ABS, and also WHO was at the fellowship, notes on what was taught, and who said what about the teaching after fellowship. I thought nothing of it at the time... Now it seems rather creepy and KGBish.
And I remember one instance where a new person ACTUALLY CAME to fellowship (I brought him, the poor sap.) My fellowship coordinator was angry with me because this was not planned in advance and cut into our mandatory witnessing time they had planned if a new person didn't show up.
There was no way to please these people! If there were no new people there, you were a failure, and if you did bring a new person, you didn't PLAN it well enough.
WTF??
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