Quote:
Originally Posted by TRG
I have family in this group, so it’s really hard to get any truthful information out of them. It always some weird ways that it’s presented, as if they are not stating the truth upfront. I figured I’ll try to find something that actually isn’t twisted enough to be spoken out loud.
I’m having hard time reading through any of their explanations and interpretations of things. Again, smells like something that’s not being said there upfront. The poster “two cents” said that: “If there is not something there, they would just admit it.” I’m having a hard time finding any records of such behavior, maybe someone could point me into the right direction. I don’t mean to be a pest, but I only find a lot of doubling down, how dare you to questions type responses. Their website Shepherdingword is full of it, so please forgive for just being honest. Maybe I should just get on the phone and check out these “churches” within 200 miles of me, and see how many are actually real.
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Welcome to the forum, TRG!
I would agree with "two cents" (welcome to the forum, two cents!) that the local church doesn't generally claim there are members in a place if there really are no members, except in the situations where the data just hasn't been updated yet.
The local church would consider a small gathering of even 6-8 believers in a home to be enough to identify a place as being a meeting of the church. (I don't have a problem with that - there is no requirement that there be 20 or 50 or 100+ people for a gathering to be considered "a church"). So it may be that there are not large 300+ congregations in a particular owned or rented building, but just small groups of believers who they would say have "taken the ground". I cannot recall specific localities right now, but I know there are some GTCA cities (a GTCA city is one that the local church picked to have a "gospel push" there in order to start a new locality) that are no longer listed as a locality. If there is no one there, they don't usually lie about it.
They lie about all kinds of other things - like you rightly noticed on Shepherding Words, every single article there is packed with misdirects, obfuscations, lies, and Bible twistings.
Is there something in particular you are trying to figure out? Are you just trying to find out if they are reporting their church numbers correctly?
Trapped