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Excommunication Forthcoming!
- Thread starter Off-Grid Artist
- Start date
I don't know that I'd call it the high ground, @steve(?) It's more like keeping themselves in the dark, shutting out any possible light of truth. But it's certainly another classic case of receiving the left boot of fellowship.
Welcome to the fold @Off-Grid Artist.
We stand here ready to water that seed. My first thought is that he slandered you by referring to you as an evildoer. Servant of Messiah will difnitely get messages from your brothers and sisters over here. If they refuse to hear the truth from you, they certainly cannot ignore everyone!
That’s the most laughable part of all this. The verses used paint our brother as some out of control wretch. It’s his ideas they don’t like, not his actions. None of the sins mentioned are what they are getting rid of him for. It’s an insult to the injury.
What is clearer to me by the day is that this issue divides those that are FOR marriage from those that FORBID marriage, and 1 Tim 4:1 tells us THEY are the ones in APOSTACY.
The Spirit speaks plainly that in later times some will DEPART THE FAITH....Forbidding to marry.
Pure religion is ....
It is more like what all LOSERS in a debate do...
Just know you are in good company with many others who have not declared mortal opinion to be a higher authority than the Word of YHWH.
Off-Grid Artist
Member
I'm kinda burning a little warm over this right now. I've got a very good system of emotional sobriety and internal work, but it's still kind of new.
One of my friends in the church replied back to me. He literally used AI to craft his argument against me and I called him out on it. The intro and the outro were personalized but 80% was just AI and it was obvious. It wasn't even talking about the same topic we had been discussing, it was talking about how we need to love, and be faithful, and and and. Completely missed the mark of the topic.
I keep replaying the two-hour (?) phone call with my pastor the other day. He made a lot of Biblical misstatements. He said there were no plural marriages before the Flood, then he started listing off antediluvian names which included Lamech. He's never been able to keep straight his definition of adultery. He's banned his own adult kids from the church for "adulterous" relationships although I don't know what those are. His one daughter who is unbanned is back and seems happily married to a nice guy.
I want to make clear that he is very generous. He gives immeasurable amounts of his time to others to help them out, he has helped me with coding problems, lots of kind gestures for many people. He doesn't understand Biblical marriage and divorce the way I do now though, my knowledge of which largely has to do with being a lurker on this site for so long.
Another thing I want to give him props for is that last year he tried really hard to create a patriarchal-style courtship for one of his daughters. She had found a man online who was back east and trying to build a church, and he wanted her to come join him and marry him. So my pastor inserted himself into the conversation and became the go-between for them both. He drove down there to spend a few days with the guy's parents. He flew the kid up to stay with a neighbor so the two could court under his watch. Admirable attempt, but it went very poorly unfortunately. The young man wasn't respecting him and the whole visit was icy, my pastor was inflamed and on edge, and his daughter (I think) didn't have a patriarchal respect enough for her father to understand what he was doing or the value of it. Feminist household. Soon after, the pastor was temporarily distracted by a family emergency and the daughter took all three of her kids and fled the state, heading east to supposedly be married immediately. Sadly that turned into drama and the kid was not sincere about the marriage proposal, but hey! They got an apartment. She made a mistake, it is sad.
Just remembered why I quoted Joleneakamama above:
He is REALLY feminist. Whenever there is a dispute or conversation about a person's relationships or a couple's relationships, he automatically becomes embittered and jaded towards the man. It is always the man's fault. We have some family friends with young women who are having a hard time finding a husband, and instead of being encouraged if they might find one he stays in this mindset of "is their father successful at keeping all the young men entirely away from them?"
During the phone call he very clearly defined himself as far more pro-divorce than pro-marriage. It was strange to hear it articulated. I told him that I don't believe God wants us to be divorcing at all, and that there are almost no reasons given for divorcing, and Yeshua told us that His standards for acceptable divorce were higher than the guidelines we had been given to manage our failure rate. He literally told me that there are a lot of very good reasons to divorce and that it should be an automatic outcome to many decisions a spouse might make. I was like, no man, now that I understand how Biblical marriages are supposed to work, almost every marriage failure I can see or hear about shouldn't have happened. It's all based on domination of the male through fear, shame, guilt and control. This inverts the godly hierarchy and destroys the family.
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Jesus said if you put away a wife and marry another you commit "adultery" or break faith. Putting away isn't exactly divorce. Divorce does leave the woman able to remarry....except for the radicals who put their opinion above the word of YHWH that says "she is free to be another man's"
But still, leaving or putting away a woman commited to you is just NOT HOW to get more "favor." The parable of the talents is clear, if you do well with what you have you will be given more. Who is dumb enough to think a former quitter is a good choice for marriage?
I like that term Abrie Killian uses, Covenant fidelity. THAT is what integrity in marriage, and especially plural marriage is about!
That should have been a dead giveaway of where this was going to end up before you even got to this point.
A mindset like that will never see biblical families the way we do. It has to be purged. Man blaming is way too common in the West.
Off-Grid Artist
Member
Okay so I don't know when I'm just going to stop updating this thread but newsflash I guess.
One old man who is very dear to me and not very judgemental texted me about an hour back and told me that I'm banned from that property as well. He is not the one banning me, he was the messenger. He just lives on the property in a trailer.
This couple were the ones we started out doing Bible studies with. Well, the lady and her family. We are close family members with all of them. The husband married in later on. I illustrated their wedding ketubah and they married at our church although they were not regulars.
So I was able to share my actual whole story with him over text. That's nice. He said he is unhappy about everything happening and doesn't want to talk about it anymore. He knows me very well, he knows me better than anyone else up in this part of the country I think.
That's two people today who have been able to hear my side of the story. Anyway this one doesn't really matter much because since those two married (our female friend about my age and her new husband) we haven't really been allowed on the property anyway. Not much changed here.
Our female friend here is actually a massively aggressive feminist battleaxe. I suspect that she has been a big part of this week's crazy social unraveling. She told my wife last week that she would have us banned from her father's property. That's just down the way about twenty minutes. He's another old man who really likes us. She HATES polygyny discussion. Her dad actually has talked with me about it a lot. I considered her a potential second for a little while quite a few years ago, but although she's our friend and dear to us she's so very anti-male and anti-patriarchy that there's just no way I would let her around my family on our own turf. She has two single younger sisters at her dad's property who have both been approached by men to be second wives, so they have a very "no polygyny talk" kind of mindset. But, their dad and me still talks about it. He understands it's lawfulness and I kinda think he enjoys me bringing it up in front of his wife. He's great, I really look up to him a lot and he's been a lot of help for us.
We might get banned from his property. I think he's probably had enough of his daughter's drama though and I've always been respectful to his daughters so he might actually stand up for himself and not ban us from there. She had a little vein wiggling on her neck when she was telling my wife she was going to ban us from there. I worry about her a lot, she's really unhappy and can't understand that she's doing it to herself.
Man, I really feel like a gossip on here. This is so much personal stuff I wouldn't bring up but right now I'm just swimming in all these people attacking us at the same time.
One old man who is very dear to me and not very judgemental texted me about an hour back and told me that I'm banned from that property as well. He is not the one banning me, he was the messenger. He just lives on the property in a trailer.
This couple were the ones we started out doing Bible studies with. Well, the lady and her family. We are close family members with all of them. The husband married in later on. I illustrated their wedding ketubah and they married at our church although they were not regulars.
So I was able to share my actual whole story with him over text. That's nice. He said he is unhappy about everything happening and doesn't want to talk about it anymore. He knows me very well, he knows me better than anyone else up in this part of the country I think.
That's two people today who have been able to hear my side of the story. Anyway this one doesn't really matter much because since those two married (our female friend about my age and her new husband) we haven't really been allowed on the property anyway. Not much changed here.
Our female friend here is actually a massively aggressive feminist battleaxe. I suspect that she has been a big part of this week's crazy social unraveling. She told my wife last week that she would have us banned from her father's property. That's just down the way about twenty minutes. He's another old man who really likes us. She HATES polygyny discussion. Her dad actually has talked with me about it a lot. I considered her a potential second for a little while quite a few years ago, but although she's our friend and dear to us she's so very anti-male and anti-patriarchy that there's just no way I would let her around my family on our own turf. She has two single younger sisters at her dad's property who have both been approached by men to be second wives, so they have a very "no polygyny talk" kind of mindset. But, their dad and me still talks about it. He understands it's lawfulness and I kinda think he enjoys me bringing it up in front of his wife. He's great, I really look up to him a lot and he's been a lot of help for us.
We might get banned from his property. I think he's probably had enough of his daughter's drama though and I've always been respectful to his daughters so he might actually stand up for himself and not ban us from there. She had a little vein wiggling on her neck when she was telling my wife she was going to ban us from there. I worry about her a lot, she's really unhappy and can't understand that she's doing it to herself.
Man, I really feel like a gossip on here. This is so much personal stuff I wouldn't bring up but right now I'm just swimming in all these people attacking us at the same time.
Man_in_the_Middle
Seasoned Member
I just want you to know that we feel your pain! Not just because you describe it but because we have all walked this out in many different ways. So, no surprises to anyone here on the reaction to your families defense of Biblical Families.
Furthermore, it is good an proper to express yourself when in these situations for two reasons. First, it provides an outlet for the offense. We need to be able to express it. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, for the opportunity to be corrected by those that are choosing to walk out this lifestyle in honoring the word of God. When we bring our stories here, we don't always receive hand holding, when appropriate, we are also scolded.
This helps us to test our actions and reactions and ensure that we are indeed acting in a Godly way.
I encourage you to continue!
Shalom!
Sometimes the only people you can get through to, are those members who reach out to you and send you messages like this. Craft a polite response where you tell him that you are willing to sit down with him over lunch or a cup of coffee. Come armed with Scripture. It was said of Vince Bantu, that he could run circles around the other pastors; it was one of those pastors who said so. Unfortunately, he wants to pretend that he is not one of us, but he has been borrowing our arguments and thoroughly defeating the lame arguments of the godly men in his accountability group. For all we know Vince could be lurking here!
When you do have that one on one encounter, #1 control your emotions (I have been in situations where I allowed their slander to get to me and it was unproductive), and #2 capitalize on them getting flustered. When they start raising their voice, and they will when you defeat their arguments, calmly respond that they need to calm down, and keep their blood pressure under control, and that cooler heads will prevail! Win over every member of your congregation as God lays out those opportunities for you.
Or shake the dust of that apostate, marriage forbidding church off!
"Let the dead bury their dead" and find fellowship with people that are not suffering STRONG DELUSION because they rejected the truth!
That would work pretty well, if you are also capable of performing some of the signs and wonders that the disciples were given authority to perform when Jesus sent them out.
We do NOT need signs and wonders to give validity to the written word. They had that to validate Yeshua/Jesus as the Messiah.
It sure wouldn't hurt! Of course our brothers and sisters in Christ already hold to a belief in Yeshua/Jesus as the Messiah. I don't think shaking the dust off our feet, is the way to go, when we are not healing the sick, casting out demons, and preaching in their synagogues.
Really? Like Mark C points out. They dont believe in the one who is the same yesterday, today and forever, who said he came NOT to destroy the law. They have not accepted a spirit or thirst for truth, but rather a spirit of RELIGIOUS SUPERIORITY, and an apostate one at that.
They say the words, but without even understanding the substance that Yeshua represented as THE WAY. He was the word (including the law) made flesh. They believe in a fairy tale version that has been spun by pope's, bishops, pastors, and others who also suffered STRONG DELUSION and "Thought to change times and laws."
If you think those churches are beneficial? You are not gonna convince me. It's like trying to convince someone with zero chronic disease who has never been vaccinated that vaccines are needed. Ain't hapoenin!!
Off-Grid Artist
Member
Well I just got served a cease and desist and a no trespassing notice via email. Earlier today I emailed the young husband with the "polygyny is lawful but not good" views (whose wife is our longtime personal friend and who is a driving force of the attack on us) asking him how he could square away agreeing with my pastor and I about that view and still participate in the attack. He responded with a cease and desist.
I also asked him who the head of his household was. Probably didn't help. It was a polite letter though.
I need a nap. I feel like lodging a defamation suit against someone and that's just not rational.
(edited to add) Basically about the same time I got a text from the old female friend who this all started with telling me that she is placing herself under the headship of our pastor and that I am not allowed to contact her any longer, nor anyone from the entire church. I can't assume these were coordinated since they are two separate but overlapping friend groups, but it does kinda feel coordinated.
None of this is making sense to me. It was all a conversation in her kitchen when she was feeling depressed about all her divorces, and now it's this crazy character assassination / legal action thing. I've been through things like this with my public life due to politics and a similar family thing with basically all of my family, but this one is even bigger and more aggressive I think. I've got pretty thick skin but it's getting me down and it still doesn't really make any sense to me.
I also asked him who the head of his household was. Probably didn't help. It was a polite letter though.
I need a nap. I feel like lodging a defamation suit against someone and that's just not rational.
(edited to add) Basically about the same time I got a text from the old female friend who this all started with telling me that she is placing herself under the headship of our pastor and that I am not allowed to contact her any longer, nor anyone from the entire church. I can't assume these were coordinated since they are two separate but overlapping friend groups, but it does kinda feel coordinated.
None of this is making sense to me. It was all a conversation in her kitchen when she was feeling depressed about all her divorces, and now it's this crazy character assassination / legal action thing. I've been through things like this with my public life due to politics and a similar family thing with basically all of my family, but this one is even bigger and more aggressive I think. I've got pretty thick skin but it's getting me down and it still doesn't really make any sense to me.
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@Off-Grid Artist, take a breath, sit down and read the final chapters of each of the gospels. Jesus was perfect in His life, yet look how He was treated by the religious people of His day.
Having a biblical framework for your daily living is going to have you living a life often in conflict with the majority. Take courage brother, others have walked this same path and survived. Shalom.