Quote:
Originally Posted by Terry
On the mark. If the local churches are for everyone, there shouldn't be any exclusive or sectarian attitudes.
From what I've seen and in my experience it's community churches that are for everyone.
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At various points in time,
significant pressure was placed upon me to bring "new ones" to meetings. I even remember a meeting where a brother seemed to imply that if we didn't have "new ones" to bring to home meetings that we might as well not go to home meetings. It was actually not long after that I decided I might as well not attend the home meetings. That kind of attitude was of great frustration to me.
It wasn't that I didn't want to invite people to meetings. The issue was that no matter how hard I tried, however hard we all tried, efforts at gaining people were futile. The LC that I'm from has put a lot of effort into trying to implement things like what WL said about shepherding, "vital groups", etc. It would seem that if we were doing everything that Lee said, then we could get the expected results. Not so.
I eventually got to the point where I realized the "new way" or "God ordained way" was a bunch of baloney. I accepted that it wasn't going to work. At the same time, I didn't intend to create any issue out of it, I would just go along with what they wanted. That was all fine until I noticed that leaders (both local and the BB's) liked to put blame on the saints for failure to get an increase and failure to implement things. I felt it wasn't fair and it was an attempt to ignore the larger problem at hand.
When I consider that there is also this attitude of "the recovery" not being for everyone or it being "narrow", it leads me to the conclusion that LC leadership is particularly dishonest. On the one hand, they still have these grandiose ideas that are put forth about an increase, on the other hand, they know every well that it's not going to happen.