One Size Indoctrinates All

[skyrider]

Looking back.....I kinda think I've always been a rebel.

When I finished pfal, at the time....it was good enough for a starting point. Some scriptural perspective, some foundational truths,...but I wanted to see if that "christ in me" was distinctively IN ME. At the time, nothing mattered more. When I studied the scriptures, I saw individuals, not the collective, walking with God.

Yet, lo and behold.....the collective "twig" became the movement. As months passed, witnessing and undershepherding were coordinated to get a class together. The collective unit was the "one size indoctrinates all" and individual freedoms and pasttimes were frowned upon......even in the "good ole days."

Every step along the way.....Advanced Class, WOW, Fellowlaborers, WOW Vets....the collective unit was promoted as the strength of God. All questioning was suppressed or dismissed.....to hold in "abeyance" for later.

The way corps indoctrination was the worst. Even after two months inresidence, I was irritated by the CLONING OF THE CORPS. When the Christmas break arrived, I had strong temptations to leave Emporia with all my belongings and not return.....(oh, how different my life would be today). I detested the "one size fits all" indoctrination. I detested the droning and droning of teachings. Even the newer books, like JCOP was gone over chapter after chapter. Didn't they know we could read?

One Size Indoctrinates All.......One Over-Sized Ego Indoctrinates All.

Seems like everything twi taught in doctrine, they violated in practice. Twi taught that each could walk with God, yet they repeatedly said that leadership was needed to keep the adversary from us. By the mid-80s, twi leadership was more needed than the manifestations! Oh, the subtleties of the twi shell game.

[waysider]

It's all so much easier to understand when you just accept it for the multi-level-marketing scam that it was.

Edited January 15, 2011 by waysider

[So_crates]

It's all so much easier to understand when you just accept it for the multi-level-marketing scam that it was.

I had a twig coordinator once tell me Amway was the devils counterfeit for PFAL.

SoCrates

[waysider]

I had a twig coordinator once tell me Amway was the devils counterfeit for PFAL.

SoCrates

And in doing so, he acknowledged it was an MLM.

Edited January 16, 2011 by waysider

[skyrider]

And in doing so, he acknowledged it was an MLM.

MLM..........Multi-Level Marketing

MLM..........Multi-Level Masquerading

Wierwille hid behind the twi structure and faces of the youth movement.....promising all kinds of benefits and spiritual rewards. He bloviated stories and plagairisms and revelations in his classes that have been debunked. The most glaring "truth" is found in his advanced class......cancer is a devil spirit.

Wierwille died of cancer.....so, he either was possessed

OR his teaching on cancer is rubbish!

What else in his advanced class is rubbish?

Yet, in the INDOCTRINATIONAL WORLD OF TWI.....other trustees, other top-level leadership covered over the cancerous death of wierwille. Why? Howard Allen had the gall to tell the staff and corps that "wierwille died of a broken heart." Sheeeesh. The lies and perpetuation of lies had no end.

Twi's house of cards was built on a foundation of indoctrination. All of those guys, Howard, Don, Craig, Geer, Walter, Towns3nd.......running cover for the drambuie king.

Research..........

Teaching..........

Fellowship........

[Bolshevik]

. . .Seems like everything twi taught in doctrine, they violated in practice. . . .

That's what made it so attractive to so many.

[waysider]

That's what made it so attractive to so many.

I'm sure there is truth in that, especially at the upper levels. Speaking strictly for myself, though, I had no idea such a profound dichotomy even existed until decades after my initial introduction.

[Calavicci]

When I first got into the organization, I was awed by the teaching. You all know why, it was cleverly marketed and promoted with the aim of enticing/compelling you to take part. And part with your money. So it took me a bit to begin to see it.

I never lived around a fellowship, I lived right in the middle of an East coast city. At the time, I didn't have a car, and didn't need one as I lived just a couple miles from where I worked.

I noticed after two or three years and switching my "assigned" fellowship, that again, it was somewhere miles removed from me, in the suburbs where no public transit dare roam. Indeed, this was common to all the fellowship locations that I knew of. Not one of them in or near the city proper.

This necessitated procuring rides from someone I lived near enough to take public transit to meet up and carpool with. This was an unpleasant development for "independent me", pleading with whoever would be "generous" enough to meet me at a bus stop (Not even my house, mind you!) but I submitted to it so I could get to fellowship.

The thing that bothered me and seemed "unChristianlike" was the reaction if I was late, especially likely in light of my taking the bus. Public transportation is no excuse, I was admonished. Apparently, it was "believing" action to take the bus and wait an hour for them to get me, if required, no matter the weather conditions. At the time, it never occurred to me to question the words of someone who never rode public transportation in his life.

This hardness of heart bothered me, even though the people in question helped me in other situations. There was a also a palpable disdain for people of the "wrong" economic status, judging by the lack of people under a certain income range, as they were reaping the results of "unbelief". I wondered, "aren't these the type of folks that need 'the Word' most of all?" I never asked this directly, but plenty there mentioned how "spiritually dark" the city was. They thought that they were too far gone is what I deduced the reason for this was.

I also noticed the "whitebread" composition of fellowships. No matter which suburban location, it was usually 90-100% white. And this near a majority-black city. Which also gives the real explanation for why almost no witnessing attempts took place there. The leadership implicitly believes there's no money it for 'em, so why bother.

Don't get me started on the teenaged children of various "long-standing" corpse members or leadership there. Their arrogance and conceit were astounding. Because Mommy and Daddy were leadership/ veteran corpse/ way disciples/blah/ blah ..., they could look down upon us who were late to the game. They were generally more unpleasant to be around, though marginally less stiff, than their high-horsed parents.

Edited January 23, 2011 by Calavicci

[waysider]

Good post, Calavicci. It's amazing, in retrospect, to realize how one sided it all was.

[outintexas]

We used to sing "Farther along we'll know all about it..."

Well that turned out to be right, didn't it?

[So_crates]

Noticed the same thing in the twigs I was in in Indiana. If I wasn't hitching 12 miles to get home after twig, I was walking an hour and a half one way.

SoCrates

Edited January 23, 2011 by So_crates

[skyrider]

Indoctrination...... top-down bureaucracy....... pyramid structure....... conformity...... shunning merit-based performance..... strict evaluations..... regulation driven..... favoritism.....

What could go wrong?

And, when wierwille structured twi, he placed the corps graduates at the top levels of his command center. All twi promotions were based on CONFORMITY TO WIERWILLE DIRECTIVES....from pfal --> WOW --> Corps.....obedience to "jump" was the basis of promotions and positioning it twi's hierarchy. Wierwille declared this when Martindale was president-elect in 1981.

From 1970 onward, wierwille was gearing his ministry towards corps leadership. More than any other criteria, the corps program fast-tracked an individual to a leadership position. Not education. Not skill-sets. Not decades of experience. The old guard of hq-staffers were being replaced by corp grads......most notable as the 6th corps grads came upon the scene. Yet, many non-corps in all areas of twi had great ability and skill sets.

IMO.....the glaring inconsistencies became apparent after about 6 or 7 years. I contend that many corps were seeing the same things I saw in 1978-80. Corps were busting at the seams.......military experience, medical care professionals, psychiatrists, building professions, tradesmen, performers, singers, artists, writers, cartoonists, etc.

Indoctrination and strict conformity was the demise of twi.

Happens in other walks of life....click here

Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving

Why are so many of the most talented officers now abandoning military life for the private sector? An exclusive survey of West Point graduates shows that it’s not just money. Increasingly, the military is creating a command structure that rewards conformism and ignores merit. As a result, it’s losing its vaunted ability to cultivate entrepreneurs in uniform.

By Tim Kane

Image credit: The Heads of State

John Nagl still hesitates when he talks about his decision to leave the Army. A former Rhodes Scholar and tank-battalion operations officer in Iraq, Nagl helped General David Petraeus write the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual, which is credited with bringing Iraq’s insurgency under control. But despite the considerable influence Nagl had in the Army, and despite his reputation as a skilled leader, he retired in 2008 having not yet reached the rank of full colonel. Today, Nagl still has the same short haircut he had 24 years ago when we met as cadets—me an Air Force Academy doolie (or freshman), him a visiting West Pointer—but now he presides over a Washington think tank. The funny thing is, even as a civilian, he can’t stop talking about the Army—“our Army”—as if he never left. He won’t say it outright, but it’s clear to me, and to many of his former colleagues, that the Army fumbled badly in letting him go. His sudden resignation has been haunting me, and it punctuates an exodus that has been publicly ignored for too long.

Why does the American military produce the most innovative and entrepreneurial leaders in the country, then waste that talent in a risk-averse bureaucracy? Military leaders know they face a paradox. A widely circulated 2010 report from the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College said: “Since the late 1980s … prospects for the Officer Corps’ future have been darkened by … plummeting company-grade officer retention rates. Significantly, this leakage includes a large share of high-performing officers.” Similar alarms have been sounded for decades, starting long before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made the exit rate of good officers an acute crisis. When General Peter Schoomaker served as Army chief of staff from 2003 to 2007, he emphasized a “culture of innovation” up and down the ranks to shift the Army away from its Cold War focus on big, conventional battles and toward new threats. In many respects (weapons, tactics, logistics, training), the Army did transform. But the talent crisis persisted for a simple reason: the problem isn’t cultural. The military’s problem is a deeply anti-entrepreneurial personnel structure. From officer evaluations to promotions to job assignments, all branches of the military operate more like a government bureaucracy with a unionized workforce than like a cutting-edge meritocracy.

After interviewing veterans who work at some of the most dynamic and innovative companies in the country, I’m convinced that the military has failed to learn the most fundamental lessons of the knowledge economy. And that to hold on to its best officers, to retain future leaders like John Nagl, it will need to undergo some truly radical reforms—not just in its policies and culture, but in the way it thinks about its officers.

All They Can Be?

It would be easy to dismiss Nagl’s story, except you hear it almost every time you talk to a vet. In a recent survey I conducted of 250 West Point graduates (sent to the classes of 1989, 1991, 1995, 2000, 2001, and 2004), an astonishing 93 percent believed that half or more of “the best officers leave the military early rather than serving a full career.”....

[Broken Arrow]

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Edited January 23, 2011 by Broken Arrow