[SpeakersCorner]

Ohio, your knowledge of the Brethren has always impressed me. Also you have a way of seeing the LC situation from a historian's eyes. I recall you writing extensively about the history of the Brethren way back when. It was enlightening to me.

Looking back at the "storms" and how they were portrayed to me through filters then and how they look now with filters removed (some of them) is striking. My new metric for all Christian groups, LC included, is to measure them by the kind of person they produced. I've lived long enough to make some assessments along that line. My view is the Methodists produced the Nice Man, the Baptists the Mean Man, the Mennonites the Yes, Dear Man, the Catholics the Right Man, the Lutherans the Committee Man, the Quakers the Liberal Man, the Megachurches the Shallow Man, and so on. (Only half kidding here ... and apologies to the women for the manly language.)

And what did the LC produce? Well, sadly (to me, anyway) the Catholic Man and the Baptist Man merged into one along with a developing Quaker Man. (All conservative Christian sects eventually evolve into social liberals and I see that happening within the LC in places.)

But it isn't the Spiritual Man I see in the LC and, tbh, I'm not sure I'd want that anyway. The kind of Man (human) I'd like to see produced from a church type is the Interesting Man. The young brothers I met back in the early 70s who populated the churches were what attracted me. They were interesting guys, entrepreneurs of a sort, wild but willing to be reined in, funny, bold, pursuing. I think the disciples, all Galileans but one (guess who was the outlier), were this king of person. Interesting. Provocative. The kind of guys I'd like to hang out with.