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Originally Posted by Ohio
Many Christian movements have sprung up with noble aspirations to return the church to its Apostolic times. The Reformation, the Restoration, and the Recovery movements are just three of them. They all have their excesses and failures. Each of them were prone to elevate men and their teachings/ opinions above the scripture. No place in the New Covenant do we ever recognize the leadership of just one man, apart from Jesus Christ.
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Ohio,
Thanks for your input. I agree with all the above assessment of the movements. I think that I’m very much past the point of determining as to where TLR origins are as far as the Apostolic restoration goes. It’s very obvious that it’s just a splinter group of that movement.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
HWA and the Recovery may have shared errors, but an in depth study of that movement is beyond the scope of this forum. To answer your question, I am not familiar with Nee or Lee ever mentioning HWA. The Recovery "MOTA" background comes directly from the Exclusive Brethren, perhaps also drawing from Chinese culture and their history of dynasties.
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The next step on what I’m looking into, and working on, is basically to find and locate the sources of all the so called “recovered truths”. I hold to the opinion that anything was actually recovered, I mean zero things that nether of the man wrote was recovered. So, based on that, I’m very certain that all of their writings can be located to other sources where they took them from. Nothing original is or was written, but modified from someone’s prior work and experience.
As you noted, that nether man ever mentioned HWA in any of their writings. I would ask a question, if you taking someone’s work and claiming as your own revelations, would you expose yourself to scrutiny by mentioning the source? Didn’t Nee got cut doing so in multiple of his books? Only to have to address the issue after he was cut?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
The original Plymouth Brethren in early 19th century England and Ireland primarily drew from two ecclesiastical models. The Exclusives under John Darby had Anglican backgrounds with a hierarchy under the archbishop of Canterbury. The Open Brethren (Chapman, Muller, Craik, etc.) on the other hand were from Baptist backgrounds.
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I come originally from the Baptist background, I was born into it. Tree or four generations of it. I have been around it my whole life, including my great grandpa and grandpa both serving as pastors and deacons for a very long time, on both sides of the family.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
Many in the Recovery saw this transition as a horrible "change of nature," a ministry power grab, and as such a root of evil, from which many other evils sprung up.
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The authoritarian approach to churches, is not anything new. It’s been around since the first church was established, when same kind of men arose to disturb the liberty of believers by adding their own nonsense to the teachings of the apostles. It’s addressed dozens of times from Acts to Revelations. Why these people get away with it? It’s because majority of people refuse to follow and trust God on their own. The greatest example of it has already been manifested in the Bible, when the children of Israel refused to follow God themselves and ask to “give us a king”. If that doesn’t serve as an example for everyone that was saved and taken out of Egypt, so that we don’t make the same mistakes, I’m not sure if anything will. It’s easy to follow man, have a group think and mentality, operate as a forcefull ideologues, but the end of it is just futile outer form of self righteousness and deception.
The most righteous and most holy separatist, who knew everything and all the laws and commandments, all prophesy, all signs and times, missed a big one that happened almost 2000 years ago, and I’m very certain that history repeats itself, and that same thing will happen the second time around.