In Reply to: Re: Where did Smith get his ideas? posted by kinda gentler on May 13, 2004 at 18:40:21:
If you wouldn't mind, I really would like to hear more about your group experience, how you got into it, and the process of your getting out
I've already written about my own experience in brief here: http://hometown.aol.com/pranalite/main.html
To add detail, the reason I became involved was because I was at wits end. I was very excited about the bold Jesus of Jn 8-10 when I first began my born again adventure. After 4 years of churches and campus groups where I never saw this Jesus. Eventually, the cult preacher Woroniecki was passing through my state and he stopped by my school. I came out my dorm and there was this guy standing amidst a 100 students with a cross. The things I heard were to seek Jesus, not church... that Jesus was a fountain of living water.. still alive... and that there was power to obey him. I never heard the twisted distortions he was making, and I was much too naive to understand the motivations behind his bitterness.
So, I set out to do the very thing he recommended. I began to get alone and really seek to know who this LIVING Jesus really was. Unfortunately, while getting alone, Woroniecki made sure he was stuffing my mailbox full of his propaganda. Little did I know of his agenda of bitterness and his narcissistic need to establish himself as THE apostle and prophet of the last days. Later it would become the ONLY Christian ever saved in these last days.
My time seeking Jesus was greatly blessed despite his interference. I was still taking classes, but I spent most of my time walking out to the countryside and listening to his tapes. I eventually began camping there. I had these incredible releases of tension in my body. I wept, I danced and even laughed out loud with no one to hear me. I was sure Jesus was real, but I had associated those experiences as validation for Woroniecki's authority. They actually had nothing to do with him. God tried to make that clear to me over the years, but I was too sucked under Woroniecki's spell. I think God filtered Woroniecki's teaching for the real for my benefit, because I never understood his false gospel.
Talking to Mike was a radical difference between the peace and acceptance I felt from God and Mike's nasty, abrasive character. The man was short, snappy and manipulative. I began to become intimidated by him, but I blew it off as chastisement.
He ministered a false word of knowledge to me. I knew it wasn't the Lord, but I also knew Mike wouldn't ever accept that he was wrong in such a thing. I just knew this from my experience with his character. This was a major sowing of doubt in my mind, not only about who he really was, but my associated faith in God as well.
Mike had taught that Jesus was in him, and that to hate and reject him was akin to hating and rejecting Jesus. Therefore I struggled for years to deny the truth that Mike was full of "crap." (That's a word he just loves to say, so I thought it would be appropriate here). I believe Jesus wanted me to deeply know Him and saw this as an opportunity to do that.
I greatly struggled with the idea that God would want me to listen to that monster, and not tell me that he was a deceiver. Looking back I can now see the times He tried to do that very thing.
In my 3rd year of deception, I read a passage from one of his booklets. he had said that Jesus never returned to those "churches" after having been kicked out of the one in his hometown, and had created a disturbance the one time he returned (the temple cleansing.) I turned to that chapter where Jesus was kicked out of his synagogue for announcing he was the Messiah, and found that he went to the synagogue of the next town he entered and healed people. It became apparent that Mike had distorted the scripture, and I called another cult friend about it, but nothing came of it. We were so under his spell that it was quickly forgotten.
Looking back at it now I can see that Mike was merely reading his own experience and bitterness into the scriptures, as he does all of them.
In 1980, he had accosted a musician before the congregation for cutting into his "more important preaching time." His rage went on for 5 minutes. One member of the church was a musician too, and he said he remembered the feeling of hopelessness he left with that day. Woroniecki never returned to that church "except the one time he created a disturbance" outside in the parking lot three weeks later carrying a banner, putting tracts under wipers of windshields and telling everyone in the church that they were going to hell. So you see, Woroniecki <i>was</i> reading his experience into those scriptures!
Eventually the Andrea Yates tragedy unfolded and I began to study Woroniecki's involvement. His scapegoating of Andrea made it clear to me that Woroniecki was a hypocrite of the highest order, violating his principle teaching to "hate your life in this world." He was defending his deceitfully begotten meal ticket projecting all of his pressuring ministry onto Rusty. I became convinced that Woroniecki was worthy of scrutiny (something taboo because it's blasphemy of God's Spirit to question "God's messenger," he says) Since then I have compiled all my findings at my website.
It took me 18 years to finally realize the nature of Woroniecki's gospel message. I never heard it in the beginning. Mike preaches that you must go through a time of suffering before you can become born again.
http://hometown.aol.com/pranalite/gospel.html
It's a pre-purgatory of sorts where you must be cleansed of sin with persecution and obedience to humiliating acts first just so you can see the glorious light of God's truth. This sets up his little playground where he can torment you endlessly, as he did me. Eventually he suggests that you aren't born again. If he convinces you, you are ruined. If you leave him, he thinks you have given up on God, and he lets you know that. He wants to believe he is the only Christian who will be raptured at the second coming, him and his family. He thinks he is a modern Noah, preaching in vain to a lost generation. He is totally delusional.
http://hometown.aol.com/pranalite/Noah.html
I think the most damning of evidence is at this webpage about Woroniecki's devil mask video, http://hometown.aol.com/tensiontally/video.html where Woroniecki is seen manipulating parents of the very lifestyle (Rusty's go to work-wifes stays home lifestyle) he says will damn their children, suggesting that only his prophetic, vagabond lifestyle would teach up children in the Lord and save them from hell. It is this exact pressure that Woroniecki projects onto Rusty.
Rusty was brainwashed and couldn't see past the procreative doctrines and tempting big happy family pipedream he tempted him with to see that it was overburdening his wife and making her mentally sick. Rusty was a beguiled puppet of Woroniecki, and his wife paid miserably for it. Unfortunately, Rusty is too numbed with his brainwashing to see his own accountability in this matter. It might take him as long as it did Bill Davis (a year) before realizing he was brainwashed by Berg.
Some other Yates pages:
http://hometown.aol.com/niek0/scripts.html
http://hometown.aol.com/niek0/destroyer.html