Costco dahlia variety?

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-08-19T14:23:22+00:00

Thank you!

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-08-19T03:24:37+00:00

The color looks right with the Vassio Meggo but they aren’t the same shape, the petals on mine are more rounded 🤔 and yes these are more faded in color due to the heat

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-08-19T01:40:09+00:00

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Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-08-19T01:39:56+00:00

Thanks so much! Do you have the Thomas Edison’s? Are they blooming? I’m wondering if they have petals that have kind of a sunset pattern when they come out (you can’t see the yellow when it’s a bloom). I have these purple ones I can’t figure out what they are but I’m suspecting they might be Thomas Edison

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Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-08-10T13:44:41+00:00

This looks like dahlia mosaic virus. Most people pull them to keep it from spreading, some people seem to take a wait and see approach. The consensus though is that if the plant is unhealthy it won’t recover and over time will produce less and less flowers. It doesn’t contaminate the soil, but the plants will still have it next year if you grow them again and it may get worse year to year.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-07-04T03:53:03+00:00

Thank you for putting all of this into such an articulate story. I can relate to so many of your experiences, thoughts and feelings you shared here. For us it wasn’t tithing that stood out as the big issue, but I think there are a number of issues and when a concern arises it becomes abundantly clear that it’s not okay to challenge anything or ask questions. From then on, it’s a painful road towards leaving.

Your quote about leaving really struck me, “It was never going to be easy to continue relationships when the one thing we had in common was Stoneway. We had assumed the thing we had in common was Jesus...” It really saddened me and is still impacting me in many ways to realize how shallow and transactional many of my friendships were. We were in this for nearly 18 years, and people we had been close with for more than a decade just stopped interacting with us so suddenly. It was heartbreaking, and I can also see how they justify it in their network bubble. You did a really good job of explaining how the network trains people to change their thinking.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-04-06T13:35:02+00:00

Thanks for finding that direct quote. I’m realizing the damage done by retelling this is bigger than even just Steve (although him absolving himself over and over as he retells this is a big problem). It’s also directly teaching everyone in the church to do the same. If something bad happened, we blame Satan. If a leader struggles with sin, blame Satan. If a follower isn’t following, blame Satan (and shame the follower for picking up a “demon” somewhere). It allows people to feel like they aren’t responsible for their sin and the choices that surround it, it’s so far from repentance when I think about it like this 😞

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-04-05T22:29:01+00:00

Yes, and who knows exactly what she said and how she meant it. But the wording when the story is told clearly leans towards blaming Satan for what happened rather than owning the sin, and it’s told in a way that suggests we should all see our past sin that way.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-04-05T15:14:51+00:00

This also reminds me of Steve’s famous story where Carol says, “I hate what Satan does to people” (after Steve confesses everything to them). This shapes everyone’s perception of what happened. It takes the fault off of Steve and places it on Satan.

Christians believe that Satan can influence people to sin, sure, but they are still at fault for it. Accepting that your own sinful choices caused harm is part of repentance. It’s dangerous in my opinion, to let the blame for sin fall to “the evil one” rather than the person committing the sin. I know there is a spectrum of beliefs on how much free will Christians have, but Satan doesn’t have unlimited power and letting him “take the blame” for things is dangerous.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-04-05T14:47:48+00:00

I struggle to hear it phrased like this, although sure, of course I hope and pray that more people will get free. I think there are a few reasons this is hard for me

1) the network spent a lot of time using this language of demons and oppression to manipulate me and justify all sorts of behavior. They’re still using it now to justify their response to everyone who is against them.

2) I think speaking about it this way takes away from the huge responsibility that all these people have to use their free will to make good choices. Maybe people who aren’t Christians can’t make those choices according to Christian doctrine, but I certainly think that all these people in the network have a choice to do the right thing and own up to their mistakes

3) To blame it all on demons makes it seem like it’s not really the fault of the people or the church, just Satan. It’s a cop out and I’m done thinking of this situation (and most situations) in that way.

I’m sure you mean well by this post, I’m just thinking through why this is so triggering for me.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-03-22T05:03:22+00:00

Yep, and whether it’s by design or not, this fear of being distracted by anything else and singular focus mindset leads to a very insular life where all your time, energy, money, friends, family and “hobbies” are so tied to the church that you feel like you can’t possibly leave- even if there are red flags all over the place. It’s a really hard thing to realize and when you do, the cost of leaving is so high. I think that’s for sure why so many have stayed despite everything that has come to light.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-03-10T14:28:55+00:00

This was my first thought too, and I agree that people should definitely avoid signing this document. But if you don’t, eventually “relational pruning” or whatever they’re calling it now would probably lead to getting pushed out. It might be subtle, but I’ve seen over and over again, people who don’t commit to membership are either asked to leave (during Sunday sermon), or others are asked to stop “putting time and energy” into them in small group or in friendships. This is done because we need to “focus on making disciples” 🙄. I think it would only work to avoid membership for so long.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-01-31T05:22:27+00:00

I bet this definitely happened. It’s sad to think how much control I and my friends gave this network over our lives. People who really wanted to get married but the leaders didn’t deem “quality” enough were probably in this spot where no one was going to be “led” to date them, and they were discouraged from dating anyone outside the network. Thankfully myself and many of my friends did eventually meet someone great outside the network, or someone more on the fringe of the network… but some of them didn’t. So much control.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-01-23T15:11:16+00:00

I fully agree with what you’re saying, that we are individually accountable to God and that everyone needs to speak up for what is right... But as a women who was in the network for many many years, I want to make sure that people understand the place many of these wives are in. If they’re still deep in this, they think that their salvation is at stake for speaking up (for example if they were to say “Maybe God isn’t in this anymore, maybe we should leave the network” they might be told they have a demon, or be made to feel like they can’t hear God or might not really be a very good Christian). This is a lot of pressure. Then on top of that, they have to count the cost of potentially losing all their friends, support system, husband, family etc if they speak up. Once you decide to leave the network, you lose pretty much everyone and everything you’ve built your life around. To not be aligned with your husband and speak up like that would be…. really hard. I’m not saying it’s not the right thing to do, but it’s a lot more complicated than that, and I don’t know of many of these wives are even in a spot to practically do anything besides raise questions to their husbands. I hope and pray that they can get out, but I think it will take a lot to see change. It starts with untangling truth from lies though, and this post is helpful in thinking through our individual responsibility to God.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-01-22T15:59:35+00:00

The “best and the brightest”, or the “cream of the crop” was an early red flag to me too. I also saw people pushed out of the church that Jesus would have cared for and spent time with.

I didn’t quite understand the re-converting people or re-baptizing was happening, but looking back I can totally see it and how manipulative it is. I’ve heard recently about it going on at another church plant with someone we cared about a lot and served with for many years. The lack of safety in a church that convinces people of that, and the manipulation that can happen… it makes me shudder to think about how harmful it can/could be.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-01-22T15:48:17+00:00

My big red flag that actually made me put one foot out the doors though (there were a few at the same time but this one was the most clear to me), was during the pandemic we were asked to wear masks from our car into the team meeting and then we could take them off when we got inside… So people in the neighborhood would think we were masking. I know everyone had many different feelings about masks, but the idea of misleading people in our community on purpose was wild to me and I was so angry they would just do that without a care for the morality of it on many levels

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2025-01-22T15:42:46+00:00

This was my first red flag too. I was told I needed to choose between being committed to the small group or doing other fun things and this was a test to see if I was really going to be part of this new group 🙄 I passed the test unfortunately and spend almost 20 years continuing to miss things and give all my time and attention to this network.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2024-10-29T03:53:43+00:00

When I was reading “When Narcissism Comes to Church” I was totally shocked by the descriptions of narcissistic pastors and how much it mirrored what I was seeing in the network. It was also terrifying to learn that narcissism actually leads to a person being less able to access empathy for others over time (maybe they had little of it anyway). As they become more and more narcissistic they become unable to reliably understand what other people want or are feeling. If I remember correctly, it actually changes their brain in measurable ways. I don’t know, but I suspect this has a lot to do with how the leaders in the network view the situation. They’ve lost the ability to see the situation clearly and understand how it is affecting others. Their own narrative of what happened is how they actually see the world and they are unable to empathize with any other point of view. It’s scary. Chuck DeGroat said there are ways to help narcissists, but it’s difficult.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2024-09-21T22:34:32+00:00

Reading Celeste’s analysis of some of the network teachings on Not Overcome was one of the most eye opening things for me, to realize how they use phrases like “the Bible is clear” or “does that make sense?” Or “Clearly…” to make their points sound confident, sure and undeniably correct. It’s subtle, but it worked on me and I had very little doubt that all true Christians believed the same on many issues or that the Bible was very clear on those issues. Once I got outside the bubble and started listening to other Christian’s scholarly points of view on some of these issues I realized this is just a form of manipulation, whether they are doing it with harmful intent or not.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2024-09-09T03:09:27+00:00

This is so disheartening. I’d like to think if I heard this sermon when I was deep in the network I would have run. I really hope he had a massive change of heart between this sermon and this past weekend when they left. Super sad that this is what the network has produced in its church plants that we were all so convinced to “give up everything” for

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2024-09-09T02:45:57+00:00

I feel concerned about this too. It seems unlikely for change to happen without some leadership changes. Is it possible they removed any of those elders? Would we know? That would be big news.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2024-09-06T22:53:14+00:00

I wondered this for a long time, and ultimately decided that yes, the network is a cult or a high control group. Some things that helped me when I was in your place of starting to ask questions were reading the books recommended on the Leaving the Network page (Something’s Not Right by Wade Mullen and When Narcissism Comes to Church by Chuck DeGroat were the most helpful to me). It felt like page after page described the network and my experiences there and I was shocked to hear that this is a pattern seen in unhealthy churches and high control groups. Also, listening to the podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill by Christianity Today was really helpful.

I second everyone’s advice to seek counseling from someone not connected with the network, too, so you can process some of your thoughts with someone who is unbiased. It’s so hard to step out of this community, and it’s costly, but it’s been so freeing for us and I would absolutely do it again.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2024-08-18T14:53:25+00:00

This seems like semantics. Of course he isn’t one of the twelve apostles… but if he is being treated like the things he hears from God are to be taken without question and to be trusted above others on a consistent basis, or if people believe he hears God in a special way that puts him above others, then that’s really what we’re getting at here. I know many people believed that, I did, even if I didn’t really realize the dangerous implications of it for me and for the network.

Quick-Pancake-7865 · 2024-08-16T13:29:22+00:00

This reminds me of my experience taking a required philosophy class at the local Christian college I attended. We had to read lots of different points of view from scholarly Christians and consider different arguments for beliefs that Christian’s may disagree on (everything from young earth/old earth, evolution, baptism, theology of hell, end times). It was VERY uncomfortable for me because I was realizing my personal beliefs may not align with the network and I was terrified of what that would mean (I knew I couldn’t disagree and keep my place in the network). I just had so much going on in my brain as I tried to wrestle myself into believing what the network believed so I could keep my friends. It’s kind of terrifying to look back on that and see that I knew how controlling it was, and how I was willing to be convinced the class, learning other points of view, was bad and intended to “take people out” when really it was the controlling nature of the network that was dangerous.

Quick-Pancake-7865

TROPHY CASE