Quote
incarnate soul
You are not rambling, this is important to you.

We were all involved in one way shape of form simply by being a part of the whole. You need to release this and move forward in your life.

How do I contact you off this foram?

If you click on "Reply Via PM" under any one of my messages you can send me a message and I'll be notified by email. I don't really want to give out any personal info. Thanks again...

Dear Incarnate Soul,
Charlie? It's you right? I recognize the poetry.

Dear Incarnate Soul,
OK...it cannot be Charlie. I just did the math. If you joined in 72 then you would be older than this Charlie I am remembering.

Damaged 13,
What incident are you asking about? Is it about members being kicked or hit? I only heard personally of one member that that happened to. Oh but, you know, if you want to know about sexually perverted acts...I could ramble on a bit. They are all disgusting perverts.

Dear Incarnate Soul,
One more reason I thought you were Charlie is that, Charlie had talked about starting his own cult out in the midwest. He actually called it a cult....an Indian cult he wanted to start. He said that people ''needed'' spirituality and so it was perfectly fair to feed them what they needed and request money in return. I remember he was big into pot and hallucinagenics...this Charlie that I remember. Here's a poem of mine...
Student.
Tabla Raza
Only self...ego...on the slate
Student
Watching cult leader
Now the slate becomes a mirror
Student

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Sallie
Damaged 13,
What incident are you asking about? Is it about members being kicked or hit? I only heard personally of one member that that happened to.

I want to know about the one incident mentioned in the Newsday article, about the man that was brought into Hickman's office and beaten/kicked. The article said it was because he went to the Olympics and spent all of his wife's money, or something to that effect. I wanted to know if anyone knows which elders actually participated in the beating. Again, I hope that any answers will be given by way of Private Message. Thanks.

I could not have said it better! Jack Hickman "took us" so to speak, we gave him our spiritually (sp), it is our choice to take it back.

Sallie - Sorry, not Charlie ........... liked what you said (except the older part LOL) though. So you are not the only one who guesses who is who.

Dam13 - I will PM you.

Hello to all, I'm new to this conversation. I'm the Lutheran Archivist for the New York Metro area, and I've received some requests for information (baptism and confirmation records, etc) from St. John's of Massapequa and Christ Lutheran. That's when I became aware that these congregations were removed from the American Lutheran Church in 1978. Turns out I have quite a file in the archives about what happened. But no parish records. These would have stayed with the congregations.

Does anyone have any idea if these records still exist, and if so, where they might be? It would be very helpful to my work if I could at least get copies of them.

Thanks in advance for any information. Please reply via PM if you don't want the information broadcast.

Would you be willing to share what is in the archives. Many people would like to hear what offically transpired. It is a matter of public record correct?

I'm pleased that someone who shot hoops (played basketball) with me has advanced to writing poetry.

How Shall Jewish and Gentile Believers Worship Together?

Although I write below about something positive in the Community, I left the Community in 1983, I do not have any information about the Community after I left, and I agree that many people including myself were hurt. I have previously posted negative assessments of aspects of the Community. So I think I’m not blinding anybody here. I refer to one aspect of the decision to expel St. John’s from a Lutheran synod. I do not have knowledge about other aspects, which might be more compelling. I also acknowledge that one of the book publishers below, Fortress Press, is Lutheran, and that Pro Ecclesia was started by two Lutherans. Both are to be commended.

One of the great attractions of the Fellowship and Community for me were their grasp of the Jewishness of Jesus and its value for an understanding of Jesus and for the life of his followers. The Fellowship and Community as I knew it in 1980 had correctly grasped that Jesus, (Hebrew: ”Yeshua”) and his Jewish followers lived Jewishly within the Jewish community, that God calls Jewish believers in Jesus today to a Jewish way of life, and that the church had seriously erred by teaching differently.

The Lutheran body that expelled the congregation the Church of Jesus the Messiah (formed from St. John’s Lutheran and Christ Lutheran churches) in 1978 cited a fundamental confusion of law and gospel. I am no more in agreement with that judgment than I was at the time. In a 1996 article by Daniel Boyarin in the Lutheran journal Dialogue, he showed how one stream of Lutheran theologians misunderstand Paul to teach that Jewish sin was in keeping the law rather than in failing to keep it. (Torah, translated “law”, more broadly means “instruction”.)

Subsequent credible scholarship has strengthened these and related points. (None of the authors I cite has any connection to the Community.) In 1996 Fortress Press published R. Kendall Soulen’s, The God of Israel and Christian Theology. A salient point was that the teaching that the church had superseded the Jewish people was pervasive, wrong, and had systematically deformed Christian theology.

In Paul Among the Postliberals (Brazos, 2003), Douglas Harink explains Paul’s letter to the Romans as addressed to Gentile and Jewish believers who were both worshipping in the non-Jesus-believing synagogues of Rome. Paul agrees with this. The election of the people of Israel was central to Paul’s theology.

In 2005 Brazos Press published Post-Missionary Messianic Judaism, by Mark Kinzer. (A review of this by Soulen can be found in the summer 2007 issue of Pro Ecclesia.) Kinzer summarizes other scholarship and argues for a primary Jewish identity and behavior among Jews who believe in Jesus.

The website of Mark Nanos (www.marknanos.com) contains essays in which a persuasive case is made that Paul the apostle was Torah observant. Paul wrote to Gentiles against Torah observance by Gentiles, not about Torah observance by Jews. There are many re-readings of New Testament passages using rhetorical criticism. Nanos has been published in respected venues.

With the exception of the first generations of Jesus’ followers, the church has prohibited Jews who believe in Jesus from living Jewishly. Augustine, for example, taught that the apostles were permitted to continue to live Jewishly, in order to establish God’s faithfulness, but later the law became not only dead but deadly, and thus a sin to observe.

Jews and Gentiles were able to worship together because the Jews were required to act like Gentiles when they joined the church.

In the Shoresh Yishai Community of 1980, Jews and Gentiles were able to worship together because the Gentiles acted like Jews. The Gentiles were adopted in Abba’s family, thus becoming Jews. (This adoption was built upon fraudulent claims by Hickman.) One mistake was corrected, i.e. that Jews need to act like Gentiles, but Paul’s argument that Gentiles do not need to become Jews was slighted.

The unsolved problem for those who think that Jews who believe in Jesus should live Jewishly, but that Gentiles who believe in Jesus should remain Gentiles, is how these two groups can worship together. It is unsolved partly because it is such a new question, asked by so few. In my opinion, this joint worship is an implication of Jesus’ gospel of reconciliation, just like blacks and whites worshipping together with their own cultures. The operative image is the mutual blessing by people who are and remain different. It is very hard. This goes beyond the vision of the Community as I knew it in 1980.

I do not deny, of course, that other, foundational teachings by and about Jack Hickman were false. See my previous postings.