[Trapped]

Welcome, sandwichboy!

Your testimony is very encouraging. Many former members in the LR want to do what they can to help people out of it, and sometimes we (I) get discouraged that I can't do much. It is encouraging to be reminded that the Lord is still working even when we feel like we can't.

You said: "The Lord also revealed to me that He loved me a lot and that I was not just a cog in the machine of His economy."

This is very touching. I remember feeling this way too - the cog feeling. I felt like what God wanted was "His church" and He would absolutely crush me and leave me obliterated if it meant He could get His church. I as a person didn't matter; only God's church mattered.

But what God wants, and what His church is, IS people! Somehow, the love that God has for each of us individually is waved away in the LC, and the "higher" vision of the church as some kind of entity separate from the people replaces it. But I'm reminded of 1 Corinthians 12, which Lee used to teach that there should be no distinctions among the members and everyone should be subsumed into a bland featureless whole, but yet if you read it, is really about how each individual member is given specific gifts by the Lord and that He arranged everyone so those who need honor and help and encouragement would get it. (Two totally different representations of God!)

I grieve for the brother who was quarantined before you simply for his stance about "the ministry", and for the treatment you received in being made to step down. I can't imagine how he and you must have felt to be on the receiving end of those kind of actions from "elders". I am sorry you had to go through the experience of being silenced by saints who you probably formerly had a positive relationship. Any given person's attitude towards Witness Lee and the ministry truly is the litmus test in the local church.

You spoke a few times of the concept of the proper ground vs a division. I'm curious where you have landed on that concept, having left the LC. The LC speaks of "the ground" concept a few ways.......sometimes it's "the ground of locality", sometimes it's "the ground of oneness", sometimes it's "taking the ground".

To be honest, I never took "the ground of oneness" in the LC as ever meaning to include all believers holding to the basic items of the faith. I always took "ground of oneness" to simply be, in effect, shorthand to say "that they see the same vision we do that there should only be one church in each city", which is really the exact same thing as "the ground of locality". So "the ground of oneness" was always just code-speak for "you must meet with us in order to be one".

But "one meeting" or "one eldership over the believers in that city" is not one of the seven "ones", and so it was yet another thing that never made sense to me.

I personally think the concept of a "ground" needs to be tested, and tested thoroughly. It's kind of a flighty one to test, because like so many of the LC's teachings, it's not overtly taught in scripture, but is cobbled together by scraping verses from all over in order to create it.

Also the similar concept of "meeting in division". I've thought about this in light of the common faith and the metaphor of a human body to help us understand the Body of Christ. If we think of a human body, we know that there will be parts of the body that simply never meet, under healthy circumstances at least. Your right foot and your right knee, for example. Your left shoulder and your right hip. They will never, ever, ever, "come together". But they are still part of the one same body, because of, as the LC would put it, the shared life. My fingers usually "come together" with the other fingers, and don't do so much with the majority of the rest of my body most of the time. But all of this behavior is the normal functioning of a human body. It doesn't mean my fingers or hand is in division though, as long as my hand, and the other members of my body, are responding to what the head wants.

So the only issue I see with what the LC calls "meeting in division" is when the Head tells members of the Body to come together to meet a particular need, and those members refuse to do so. And what I keep seeing in Christianity today is that different churches who meet separately DO IN FACT come together in this way. But it is the local church who refuses to meet with any one else to meet a need, even if the Lord is knocking at the door, asking them to do so. I know there are groups of Christians who have a wrong attitude towards other Christians in other denominations. That's wrong. But the whole concept of "meeting in division" needs to be tested in light of what the Bible says. That's my two cents. Curious what you think about those LC teachings now?

Welcome again.

Trapped