Well, it is Friday. Time to say our goodbyes. I will leave the list up through the weekend to give time for lurkers to catch up and perhaps make their final post. Please bring the other conversations to a close and focus on saying your final farewells. I will start with this one, but I plan to send some more posts where I talk about past members of TruthTalk and some of my impressions, for good or for bad. In this post, I want to talk about TruthTalk in general.
In my opinion, much of the difficulty of TruthTalk these last several years has been related to a problem described by the proverb, FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT. I have seen this same phenomena in home churches too. When a small group of people become so thoroughly familiar with each other that much of what others would say become somewhat predictable, people become more free to speak their mind and tend to focus more upon faults than strengths in the other person. Marriages often illustrate this same difficulty. The time frame for this seems to start at around 4 years, and within 10 years, it becomes rather entrenched. Those groups that tend to be focused upon itself exhibit more of this tendency than groups that tend to reach out and pull in fresh people. On TruthTalk, there was a time when that polarizing of groups became rather noticeable. There came to be the liberals versus the conservatives, which eventually turned into the liberals versus the fundamentalists. When this first came to light, I questioned the group whether we should encourage this kind of sectarian dialogue. Several on the list thought it was natural human nature and fine not only to allow it but encourage it. Interestingly, some of those most outspoken for this perspective are no longer on the list. My personal judgment in hindsight is that any kind of sectarianism like this is counter productive for good discussion. What happens is that people speak more from bias and emotion rather than engage in a teamwork of discovery. People tended to work harder on putting the other side in their place rather than trying to hear whether or not there was even a grain of truth in what was being said. Overall, I have appreciated TruthTalk very much. It has been a source of motivation for me to study issues that I might otherwise have left untouched. My heart has been warmed by many who have posted here, and my mind has been enriched with a diversity of viewpoints to consider and examine. Some on TruthTalk have steered my thinking in certain directions that I might otherwise not have gone. Some have blessed me by pointing me to resources and individuals that have previously been outside of my realm of study. In some future posts, I will discuss some of the members of TruthTalk who have most impacted me and how they influenced me. David Miller ---------- "Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer every man." (Colossians 4:6) http://www.InnGlory.org If you do not want to receive posts from this list, send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and you will be unsubscribed. If you have a friend who wants to join, tell him to send an e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and he will be subscribed.
