Will it be election fraud and Reston Association cover up? Maybe people who are powerful and devious enough to perpetrate fraud are clever and diaboli

Will it be election fraud and Reston Association cover up? Maybe people who are powerful and devious enough to perpetrate fraud are clever and diabolical enough to avoid detection and shift the blame.

What are you talking about Rod?

The Reston Association sent out emails urging citizens to volunteer to shovel sidewalks and bus stops so that students could return to school under three current candidates board candidates in the current Reston Association Election. They are all in different races.

Notification had already been sent out by the Fairfax County School Board. So the effect of the Reston Association emails though they claimed to be unofficial was to endorse these candidates above all the other to this active voting group.

Well what if they had nothing to do with the email? Is it really their fault?

What if they win the election, won't there then be a lingering doubt that the email campaign was the thing that pushed these candidates over the edge?

Well Rod what if they are just better candidates, more civic minded and the voters just sense that?

Well then why have a election at all? Why not just allow the board to select whomever they deem best. It could save the Reston Association some $20,000 (or is it $40,000)

With these concerns in mind I emailed the Reston Election Committee. The fate of freedom of election in Reston is in their hands. I include the email address so that interested citizens might want to write the committee of their concerns.


the election committee: regarding improprieties regarding the Reston Association sending out possibly unauthorized emails having the effect of endorsing candidates for the current election.

From: Rod Koozmin
To: Sean Bahrami ; daecoassoc@aol.com; graveyel@aol.com; samstalcup@gmail.com; tim donohue 37 ; djr1622@yahoo.com; David Robinson 2 ; Peter Greenberg ; Guy L. Rando ; joe_leighton@comcast.net; Ken Knueven ; Kevin Danaher ; Kevin Danaher 2 ; Michael E. Collins ; Patrick Shipp ; Peter Greenberg 2 ; Rengin Morro
Cc: reston@connectionnewspapers.com; Observer lwtter to the editor ; fairfaxtimes 12th version
Sent: Tue, Feb 16, 2010 11:00 am
Subject: the election committee: regarding improprieties regarding the Reston Association sending out possibly unauthorized emails having the effect of endorsing specific candidates


To The Reston Association Election Committee: If I understand it correctly the Reston Association Email list was used to enlist Reston citizens to shovel snow and imply that it was the brain child of three separate citizens
who also happened to be running for three separate races in the current Reston election.

The notice which I think was great had already gone out to parents of school children by Fairfax county school board so sending it on the RA list had the effect, though it was said to be unofficial, of putting the three in a good light coming as it did from the RA with Reston citizens

I question if Reston resources should be used in this way. Reston candidates are extremely limited by the RA in words for their goals and practicality from contacting citizens. Most citizens do not vote, those on the list probably do.

I would like a investigation on how this could happen. I would also like a explanation of how it happened sent out to the list and all the candidates in the current election. And could the remaining five candidates who are not in effect endorsed also be allowed to use the list for a charity of their choosing or good works so as to balance the effect of this out before the current election is over?

-Rod Koozmin
Candidate for the at Large Seat of the Reston Association

703 945 0171 cell
Posted by Rod's Sharpening Service or Sharpening in Reston at 2:40 PM
Reactions:

the election committee: regarding improprieties regarding the Reston Association sending out possibly unauthorized emails having the effect of endors

From: Rod Koozmin
To: Sean Bahrami ; daecoassoc@aol.com; graveyel@aol.com; samstalcup@gmail.com; tim donohue 37 ; djr1622@yahoo.com; David Robinson 2 ; Peter Greenberg ; Guy L. Rando ; joe_leighton@comcast.net; Ken Knueven ; Kevin Danaher ; Kevin Danaher 2 ; Michael E. Collins ; Patrick Shipp ; Peter Greenberg 2 ; Rengin Morro
Cc: reston@connectionnewspapers.com; Observer lwtter to the editor ; fairfaxtimes 12th version
Sent: Tue, Feb 16, 2010 11:00 am
Subject: the election committee: regarding improprieties regarding the Reston Association sending out possibly unauthorized emails having the effect of endorsing specific candidates


Election Committee: If I understand it correctly the Reston Association Email list was used to enlist snow shoveller and imply that it was the brain child of three separate citizens
who also happened to be running for three separate races in the current Reston election. The notice which I think was great had already gone out to parents of school children by Fairfax county so sending it on the RA list had the effect, though it was said to be unofficial of putting the three in a good light coming as it did from the RA with Reston citizens

I question if Reston resources should be used in this way. Also candidates are extremely limited. Reston candidates are extremely limited by the RA and practicality from contacting citizens. Most citizens do not vote, those on the list probably do.

I would like a investigation on how this could happen. I would also like a explanation of how it happened sent out to the list and all the candidates in the current election. And could the remaining five candidates who are not in effect endorsed also be allowed to use the list for a charity of their choosing or good works so as to balance the effect of this out before the current election is over?

-Rod Koozmin
Candidate for the at Large Seat of the Reston Association

703 945 0171 cell

Is The Forte of our Institutions is Legaese not community

Milton Mathew the $172,000 a year Reston Executive Director wrote back me some years ago that the reason we cannot have bulletin boards that citizens can post their concerns on a public bulletin board is it will be used by pedophiles and the Reston Association would be legally liable.



Lila Gordon the outspoken Executive Director of the Reston Community Center who has contributed $200 to Cathy Hudgins similarly told me the reason why we cannot have a similar bulletin board at the community center (as well as presumably a suggestion box like the Vienna Community center has) is because their Fairfax County legal council has advised against it.



This makes me wonder is the main product of our Institutions legalese instead of community communication and links?


For about a two year period the Reston Association did provide a citizen accessible bulletin board where citizen could post their concerns. It is a requirement of the state of Virginia that Home Owners Associations be required to provide It was at the Reston Association but has suddenly with out announcement been taken down.



The Lake Ann Plaza features a bulletin board maintained for many years by the Reston Used book store. But that too has gone institutional and citizens can no longer use it to post concerns for which it looks it was originally designed as a central place for the community.



The all nationality grocery store at tall oaks shopping center used to feature two prominent bulletin boards that were widely used but that store went out of business. There are few bulletin boards the first place for our freedom of press in Reston.



I argue we need communication in Reston in order to be a community. We need to hire lawyers that will help us be a community instead of finding legal objections to communication. This should be our focus.



Our Neighborhood advisory committee which I am a member, is currently looking at plans to erect citizen accessible bulletin boards throughout Reston in compliance with the state directives. We found that we have no way to publicize Reston events like the Meeting at the Sheraton for Clusters for example. But when we express this to the board will this too be shot down again for some kind of legal reason?



For hundreds of years this country has allowed public bulletin boards. I see them in use when I travel to other towns through out the nation.


We don't need no suggestion at the Reston Community Center but in Vienna they do. This seems to be what our RCC are saying to us.Originally to have a "Community" Center was a grass roots effort. Somehow it got institutionalized and taken away from the very people that pay for it.



Citizens for example wanted and worked for a wood shop that could be used instead of having to keep large wood shop that could be shared instead of having buy and store workshop tools our small homes. But the RCC maybe doesn't like people trailing in and out with there wood projects and as a result limits it's use to just one day and one night when citizens can actually use it. And it closes it for "periodic maintenance" which no one can learn what is maintained.



I say we need to be a community and we need for our institutions to not oppose citizens wanting to express them selves.



In the current election Candidates are given 150 words by the Reston Association to state our goals. We are also given 20 seconds on their You Tube and Comcast broadcast. The Connection is giving us 100 words. The Reston Citizens Association is giving us 60 words times three. There is more that needs to be expressed as a candidate then just a few words though we are thankful for these and it is more then other citizens have.

Currently we have the Reston master plan which will effect all the citizens who live here. In order to be a community we need some way to communicate. It's the institutions that are telling us that everything is fine. We don't need any way to express ourselves we just can rely on them.



Currently only ten to twenty percent of citizens vote in Reston Association Elections. We did have people serving on the board of the Reston community Center that only had 200 voters electing them. Is it because there are so few places for citizens to learn about the issues and candidates that so few vote?

20 seconds of fame and solar pannels in Reston

I was myself broadcasting my 20 seconds of fame on the Reston Association's YouTube and Comcast broadcasts today. Or at least recording it. All ten of us candidates will be bunched together in on kind of great big video collage leaving me to wonder if anyone would really watch despite my brilliant summation of my goals and if there was any other way reach the citizens of Reston.

Arriving early I went in to the Design Review offices to kill some time and to inquirer about if there were any restrictions (a stupid thing I know to wonder about in Reston) on putting solar collectors ( I had been wondering about saving the planet from global warming)on the roof.

Well it turns out there were some(why was I not surprised). Reston citizens are restricted to a system with a maximum size of 96 square feet or three panels maximum. I was informed by Covent Case Manager and given a application and advised to check with my own personnel Covenants Advisor . No matter that as I explained that I was merely looking through my Harbor Freight Catalogue.

But get this: while in the men's room and practicing my 20 second speech(well you don't want to get it wrong) I happened to meet a Solar Installer newly transfering from Florida who told me after noticing my regulations stacked on the paper towel rack told me that Federal Law supersedes local Home Owners Associations! Obviously newly arrived from Florida he had no idea of the scope and power of our Reston Association.

Solar Hot water heaters are cost effective while tank less hot water heaters are not he told me, the same as my heating and air conditioning guy told me.

Will Reston Citizens opt to save the planet in compliance of Federal regulations or wisely decide to comply with local Reston Association regulations? Can we save the planet from global warming? Or will our Home Owners Association be able to prevail in regulating our solar collectors so they conform to our own special regulations* here in Reston or will anyone see any of the candidates in order to vote intelligently? Stay tuned to this network.



*I was recently at a Reston Association meeting as a spectator when special counsel informed the board that special state legislation was (yes, yes, yes) being drafted to allow Home Owners to regulate solar collectors so that Home Owners regulations could have some control over there use!

Time Magazene Article, Organic Church ETC

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You wroteon May 29, 2009 at 5:55am

March 01, 2006
There's No Pulpit Like Home - TIME Magazine
"Some Evangelicals are abandoning megachurches for minichurches--based in their own living rooms." So says the sub-heading an article on simple church in the current issue of TIME magazine. Since I'm one of those people I thought I'd post the entire article from the Mar. 06, 2006 issue of TIME magazine:

There's No Pulpit Like Home
Some Evangelicals are abandoning megachurches for minichurches--based in their own living rooms
By Rita Healy & David Van Biema

On a Sunday at their modest, gray ranch house in the Denver suburb of Englewood, Tim and Jeanine Pynes gather with four other Christians for an evening of fellowship, food and faith. Jeanine's spicy rigatoni precedes a yogurt-and-wafer confection by Ann Moore, none of the food violating the group's solemn commitment to Weight Watchers. The participants, who have pooled resources for baby sitting, discuss a planned missionary trip and sing along with a CD by the Christian crossover group Sixpence None the Richer. One of the lyrics, presumably written in Jesus' voice, runs, "I'm here, I'm closer than your breath/ I've conquered even death." That leads to earnest discussion of a friend's suicide, which flows into an exercise in which each participant brings something to the table--a personal issue, a faith question--and the group offers talk and prayer. Its members read from the New Testament's Epistle to the Hebrews, observe a mindful silence and share a hymn.

The meeting could be a sidebar gathering of almost any church in the country but for a ceramic vessel of red wine on the dinner table--offered in communion. Because the dinner, it turns out, is no mere Bible study, 12-step meeting or other pendant to Sunday service at a Denver megachurch. It is the service. There is no pastor, choir or sermon--just six believers and Jesus among them, closer than their breath. Or so thinks Jeanine, who two years ago abandoned a large congregation for the burgeoning movement known in evangelical circles as "house churching," "home churching" or "simple church." The week she left, she says, "I cried every day." But the home service flourished, grew to 40 people and then divided into five smaller groups. One participant at the Pyneses' house, a retired pastor named John White, also attends a conventional church, where he gives classes on how to found, or plant, the house variety. "Church," he says, "is not just about a meeting." Jeanine is a passionate convert: "I'd never go back to a traditional church. I love what we're doing."

Since the 1990s, the ascendant mode of conservative American faith has been the megachurch. It gathers thousands, or even tens of thousands, for entertaining if sometimes undemanding services amid family-friendly amenities. It is made possible by hundreds of smaller "cell groups" that meet off-nights and provide a humanly scaled framework for scriptural exploration, spiritual mentoring and emotional support. Now, however, some experts look at groups like Jeanine Pynes'--spreading in parts of Colorado, Southern California, Texas and probably elsewhere--and muse, What if the cell groups decided to lose the mother church?

In the 2005 book Revolution, George Barna, Evangelicalism's best-known and perhaps most enthusiastic pollster, named simple church as one of several "mini-movements" vacuuming up "millions of believers [who] have stopped going to [standard] church." In two decades, he wrote, "only about one-third of the population" will rely on conventional congregations. Not everyone buys Barna's numbers--previous estimates set house churchers at a minuscule 50,000--but some serious players are intrigued.


The Maclellan Foundation, a major Christian funder based in Chattanooga, Tenn., is backing a three-year project to track Colorado house churching. The Southern Baptist Convention, with more standard-church pew sitters than any other Protestant group, has commissioned its own poll and experimented in planting hundreds of its own house churches. Allan Karr, a professor at the Rocky Mountain campus of Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary who is involved in the poll, guesses that three out of 10 churches founded today are simple and that their individual odds for survival are better than those of the other seven. House churches are not known for denominational loyalty. That doesn't bother Karr, however. "I want the denomination to prevail," he says, "but I have an agenda that supersedes that: the Kingdom of God at large."

House churches claim the oldest organizational pedigree in Christianity: the book of Acts records that after Jesus' death, his Apostles gathered not at the temple but in an "upper room." House churching has always prospered where resources were scarce or Christianity officially discouraged. In the U.S. its last previous bloom was rooted in the bohemian ethos of the California-bred Jesus People movement of the 1970s. Many of those groups were eventually reabsorbed by larger congregations, and the remnants tend to take a hard line. Frank Viola, a 20-year veteran Florida house churcher and author of Rethinking the Wineskin and other manuals, talks fondly of pilgrims who doctrinairely abjure pastors, sermons or a physical plant; feel that the "modern institutional church does not reflect the early church"; and "don't believe you are going to see the fullness of Jesus Christ expressed just sitting in a pew listening to one other member of the body of Christ talking for 45 minutes while everyone else is passive."

More recent arrangements can seem more ad hoc. Tim and Susie Grade moved to Denver a year ago. They had attended cell groups subsidiary to Sunday services but were delighted to learn that their new neighbors Tim and Michelle Fox longed for a house church like the ones they had seen overseas. Now they and seven other twenty- and thirtysomethings mix a fairly formal weekly communion with a laid-back laying on of hands, semiconfessional "sharing" and a guitar sing-along. Says Tim: "We have some people who come from regular churches, and were a little disenfranchised. And people who joined because of friendships, and people who are kind of hurting, kind of searching. My age group and younger are seeking spiritual things that they have not found elsewhere."

Critics fret that small, pastorless groups can become doctrinally or even socially unmoored. Thom Rainer, a Southern Baptist who has written extensively on church growth, says, "I have no problem with where a church meets, [but] I do think that there are some house churches that, in their desire to move in different directions, have perhaps moved from biblical accountability." In extreme circumstances home churches dominated by magnetic but unorthodox leaders can shade over the line into cults.

Yet the flexibility of simple churches is a huge plus. They can accommodate the demands of a multi-job worker, convene around the bedside of an ailing member and undertake big initiatives with dispatch, as in the case of a group in the Northwest that reportedly yearned to do social outreach but found that every member had heavy credit-card debt. An austerity campaign yielded a balance with which to help the true poor.

Indeed, house churching in itself can be an economically beneficial proposition. Golden Gate Seminary's Karr reckons that building and staff consume 75% of a standard church's budget, with little left for good works. House churches can often dedicate up to 90% of their offerings. Karr notes that traditional church is fine "if you like buildings. But I think the reason house churches are becoming more popular is that their resources are going into something more meaningful."

Evangelical boosters find revival everywhere. Barna says he sees house churching and practices like home schooling and workplace ministries as part of a "seminal transition that may be akin to a third spiritual awakening in the U.S." Jeffrey Mahan, academic vice president of Denver's liberal and institutionally oriented Iliff School of Theology, doesn't go that far, but he does think the trend is significant. American participation in formal church has risen and fallen throughout history, he notes, and after a prolonged post--World War II upswell, big-building Christianity may be exhaling again in favor of informal arrangements.

If so, he suggests, "I don't think the denominations need be anxious. They don't have a franchise on religion. The challenge is for people to talk about what constitutes a full and adequate religious life, to be the church together, not in a denominational sense, but in the broadest sense." Or as Jesus put it, "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I."

http://www.time.com/t...

Posted by Jon Dale on March 01, 2006 at 07:36 AM | Permalink



also see:

Please try and listen to this interview with Frank Viola the author of "Pagan Christianity " "Reimagining the Church" to get a understanding of what Frank means by Organic Christianity and the DNA of the Church. Let me know what you think.He is interviewed by a Welshman.-Rod


http://www.organicchu...


http://homechurchhelp...

I have a dream that groups everywhere will begin to flesh out the New Testament reality that the church is a living organism and not an institutional organization.

I have a dream that multitudes of God's people will no longer tolerate those man-made systems that have put them in religious bondage and under a pile of guilt, duty, condemnation, making them slaves to authoritarian systems and leaders.

This group wasn't a Bible study, a prayer group, a healing/soaking prayer session, or a worship service.

Please keep in mind that when I use the term "institutional church" I am not speaking about God's people. I'm speaking about a system. The "institutional church" is a system-a way of doing "church." It's not the people who populate it. This distinction is important.

I will be referring to those churches which people are familiar with as "institutional churches." I could have just as easy called them "establishment churches,"
"basilica churches," "traditional churches," "organized churches," "clergy-dominated churches," "contemporary churches," "audience churches," "spectator churches," auditorium churches,""inherited churches," "legacy churches," or "program based churches."

I was no longer satisfied with watching a performance. In this organic meeting, I began to want to share with my brothers and sisters what I had seen of the Lord. Instead of being passive I now thought it was easy to function and contribute. Every one of our meetings was free to be different. sometimes we sang for hours. Sometimes the believers were bursting at the seams to share what Jesus had done in their lives that week. Sometimes we revered the Lord's awesomeness in silence. No one had to tell us to do these things. The Spirit was moving in these ways and they just spontaneously happened. We often ate together as one family. Sometimes we shared scriptures with each other. Other times we enacted scenes scenes and stories from the Bible that shed light on Christ.

The Organic church focuses on relationships with God and brethren. The institutional Church paradigm is sustained by a clergy system where as the Organic Church paridygn knows nothing of a clergy system.

The institutional church paradigm seeks to energize the laity the organic church paradigm doesn't recognize a separate class called laity.

The institutional church renders the bulk of it's congregant passive in the pews where as the the organic church paradyne allows and encourages all Christians to engage in whatever ministry God has called them

The institutional church limits many functions to the ordained the organic church paradigm makes all members functioning priests

The institutional church paradigm associates church with a building a denomination or a religious service while the organic church paradigm affirms that many people do not GO to church; affirms that they are the church.

The institutional church paradigm builds PROGRAMS to fuel the church; treats people as cogs in the machine where as the organic church paradigm builds PEOPLE together in Christ to provide momentum for the church


The Institutional church paradigm encourages believers to participate institutionally and hierarchically where as the organic church paradigm invites believers to participate relationally and spiritually.

To try to establish two way communication both between the RA board and citizen to citizen communications.

To try to establish two way communication both between the RA board and citizen to citizen communications. I feel this is essential for Reston community building. I became convinced of this during the Brown’s Chapel Recreation center in which I saw the board proceeding in a certain direction with very few citizens in agreement. We are most of us strangers to each other; this should not be. The Virginia legislature requires home owners associations to provide a means for its members to communicate with each other. We spend 1.5 million providing institutional information but nothing for its members to communicate.

My 20 seconds to try and communicate my message

Hi I hope to try to help encourage lines of communication both between citizens and the Reston Association board and citizen to citizen communications. I feel this is important for Reston to be the community it should be.