1992. 8 Points of Traillism. What A Tangled Web We Weave, When We First Practice To Deceive.

In this essay, which I wrote when I was in COBU, I was trying to make a list of all the things I was becoming aware of about life there.  I often used to compile lists like this to try to understand my situation and all the influences being exerted upon me, in an effort to clarify my thinking about it. 

This is just one example of lists like this that I made, either in print, or in my mind.  Often on job sites as I was working on a floor, when these thoughts would come to me in such clearly packaged forms such as this, I’d try to make an outline like this in my head as I was working.

(The comments [in brackets] are notes I’ve added now to help clarify some of the words I used, because there were words that we used that had meanings for us that did not have the same meaning to someone not in COBU, such as “gathering,” “sweeping.” )  There are also footnotes I’ve made to explain further, because I didn’t want to put them in the main text, because I want to show this short paper I had written as the list or sketch I had intended it to be, a way for me to organize and clarify my thoughts about life in The Church of Bible Understanding and what the terms and conditions were and how the dynamics worked.  It was life and death to me.  I needed to figure it out and to understand how it had such a hold on me, so I could break free from it.

-*-

Through gathering and furious work – Salvation is promised.

That is, if you are gathering [bringing in new converts to the church], it is the only way you will have confidence you are in God’s will – in which there is a grain of truth, maybe even more.  But invariably, these gatherers [the brothers and sisters going out to bring new people in to the church] are always told they are hypocrites and that they are ruining all the ones they are bringing in.   So we end up being trapped by our own works!  It comes back on our own heads. [1]

Alienation

I feel totally isolated from people.  From brothers and sisters.  From people in the world.  I feel I can’t talk with “normal people” because of my life, so I and we can only talk with homeless people, who don’t know their right hand from their left.

The Angry Pastor

Does he take out his own frustrations on us?  Projection?  He is a failure. [2] Nobody in the entire world will listen to him, except for this group he has gathered around himself.  (The remnant of the older brothers and sisters and homeless people who wouldn’t know any better anyway.)  Older brothers have been the favorite whipping boys since the beginning.

Our Messiah

Self-styled only true prophet in an unfaithful, deceived world.  Only true interpretation of the Bible; phase II. [3] He spoke with about 50 pastors, all of which either didn’t want to hear it, sloughed him off or laughed at him.  [4] Therefore again, all others are wrong and he is the only bastion of the truth.  This is the typical view of himself.  We all buy it.  Once more we are locked in.  The doors have shut and we are locked into our little island.

Our Lord

Absolute control of thoughts and thinking.  The feeling that you will be informed on if you speak freely, you must be careful what you say to whom.  I often feel that Stewart is our Lord – it’s actually at that level.  I am merely one of his possessions.  He owns me.  I belong to him.  I keep thinking it is not Christ I must submit to, but him.

The Law

Whatever he [Stewart Traill] says is the law.  No questions asked.  No questions permitted to be asked.  We all help one another along in this.  We have a rubber stamp parliament [the council] to ratify all decisions.  That’s what we exist for – a mere sounding board for him to expound his sermons upon.  Nobody else will listen.

New Brothers Are Just Our Slaves

This seems to be the official policy, confirmed at least in part by Brother Stewart himself – though at times we get blamed for it and he is entirely exempted.  We don’t serve their needs.  Underneath all such talk [about how we’re supposed to be helping them], it is obvious that they are here to serve the church.  All their needs, everything, (as with us) are subjugated to the great cause – to exhaust ourselves to try to build up an ailing church.  When they get too unruly, we just shove them back with, “What are you here for?!”  It is not really Christian Training, just sloganizing while burning out.  All New Disciples are very frustrated.  Most leave.  We redouble our efforts to come up with new programs, lofts and also get blamed for every failure.

Forbidding Marriage

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.   [French for: The more things change, the more they remain the same.  Traill said he repented of making it too hard for the brothers to get married.  Yet, things continue here just the same.]

It’s no different than before, when the official policy was that marriage was allowed – but that  you just couldn’t measure up to the standards.  It’s just about the same now.  Stewart hints at:  Older Brothers can get married when they are taking care of New Brothers and finally moving on to raising sister disciples.  [When we bring young women into the church and train them in this way].  ([Traill:] “How will you ever get married if you can’t handle a hundred young women disciples?”)  A long road of works is put before you which is actually contrary to the Bible’s standard of being in charge of your own household before you tend God’s church.  This is another way brothers are pressed through the grinder.  Their energies are channeled through the machine, because it is implicit that “you can’t get married until you are fully working at and going somewhere with this plan.”  It is another way in which Stewart holds the reins on our lives.  He is not going to permit marriage till we accomplish his ends [his goals or plans for the use of our lives], though this is under the counter, [he does not directly state this what his goals are for using us] but it can be brought out with a little examination.  [If you look at things, it’s evident.]

[Note: people have given up their whole lives and dedicated their entire lives to Traill's goals, and yet, they have not been able to be married, or awared marriage.]

Also:  How “we” have done away with the need for marriage:

1.)           No economic basis – we have the business.

2.)           No need for progeny (for work or to continue our people).  We can just go gathering.  [This means that we don’t need to have children in order to perpetuate our “people.”  We can just go out and get new converts.]

3.)          That just leaves sex [as a reason to desire marriage], which can simply be relegated to the category of “sin.”   That is, selfishness, indulgence and immorality.  Besides, Jesus will help you overcome “sin.”  Also, because the first 2 reasons are unnecessary and wouldn’t even enter a person’s mind who is seeking marriage, aside from “I love her,” you are just saying you want to marry because you want sex.

Brothers are kept from having their own lives and are hooked up to the machine.  Obviously he [Stewart Traill] doesn’t want divided loyalties.  We have a fully dedicated workforce, a labor pool available on call 24 hours a day without other commitments, loyalties or needs.  That would dry up if he allowed Older Brothers and Sisters to get married!  Then their interests would be divided.  They would soon have to care for families.  Even if the church took care of the economic end, brothers and sisters would still want to spend “ inordinate” amounts of time with their little ones.  This can never be allowed to be!

FOOTNOTES

[1] This was always difficult for me.  We’d be pressed to go out and gather new people to come into the meeting and sometimes we’d get a number of them to come over, only to have Stewart Traill center the meeting in what was wrong with the Older Brothers and then we’d get a beating in front of our invited guests.  This was confusing to the new people, because we had told them we were bringing them to a Bible study.  Some of them would graciously excuse themselves at some point saying, “Well, nice meeting you, I’ve got to get going.”  Others were a little more vocal in their dislike for what they had been brought to.  Often when one of these people would leave, Traill would say, “you’re ruining the new people,” or, “you’re letting them go.”  None of us had the moral courage  to stand up to Traill and say that they were leaving because of what he decided to make the meeting all about.  Traill was the one who said to get new people to come over, and then made the meeting into an inquisitional session to beat the church members.  It made you not want to bring people over.  Why do that, only to get humiliated in front of them?  Some of these people had been interested in what we had been talking to them about and thought we were rather awesome and they could not understand the change we went through, now sitting there beaten, sullen and silent.  Such visitors never returned.

As far as people who we “swept up,” we then were told we were ruining them by our example, by our poor hypocritical Christian lives, as Traill accused us of “thumbing our nose at Jesus,” and “trying to have it both ways,” and that this was setting a wrong example for the “new disciples” and that we were ruining them as a result.  We had background knowledge in what he meant as the verse says, (about the millstone).  So there was always a double bind to bringing in new members to the church.

[2] The idea that Stewart Traill is a failure.  When I was there, I rarely looked at Traill as anything else but a Bible teacher who claimed to have exclusive and unique revelation (as well as someone who used to grind our faces with this “revelation”).  That is because he put out great effort to only interact with us in this apparent role.  From that point of view, I considered him a failure, because if this message was so important and it was God’s only real truth, he was a failure in getting it out there to be heard.  And as a great prophet of this age, he only had this ragged band of burned out people gathered around him to hear it.   However, I rarely looked at Traill as a businessman.  In that sense he was successful in living off others in order to live well. He was a man who preached to others that they should give up their lives in this world, in order to get them to devote their lives to work in his businesses so that he could live very well in this world.  He did not flaunt his wealth in front of us, preferring instead to wear the same uniform of work clothes and drive an old car with faded paint. Most church members have not seen his mansion in Florida, except for many of the “Gayle Helpers”  (usually the more attractive female church members who Stewart kept around as, ostensibly, helpers for his wife).  In that sense he was successful as well, if one measures success in having sexual access to young females.

[3] “Only true interpretation of the Bible, phase 2.  Before his so called repentance, Traill had claimed to have the “only true interpretation of the Bible,” which he had then claimed to be full of errors, such as that he had left the teaching of grace out.  He blamed his lack of understanding of grace as largely responsible for his own sins.  But shortly afterward again, he was inventing new exclusive interpretations of the Bible, or recycling old heresies, such as Perfectionism.  In other words, I was saying that, after a false show of humility and repentance, Traill was his old self and up and running again, business as usual.  I had initially been duped by his show of repentance and promises to change and be humble toward us.]

[4: Traill made a big fanfare about going to talk with 50 pastors about his new teachings.  He did not speak of it much after a while.  He did reply at one meeting, when someone asked about it, saying that they had all laughed at him and that none of them had taken him seriously.  We all understood this to mean that these men were not willing to accept the truth when it was presented to them, and that really, there was no one that Stewart could go to, there was no one of like mind, and that it was only Stewart that cared about the truth.  This was always a big theme in Stewart’s worldview (as presented to us), only Traill knew and cared about the truth.  Only he had it.   This gave me a sense of feeling locked away in COBU.  There was no one out there, then, that you could go to.]

-*-

Here are the last two points in my essay as they appear in the original notehand version.