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Originally Posted by UntoHim
Here are some of the comments included at the end of the article:
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A C.
Not sure about suggestions of Watchman Nee's inappropriate conduct with female colleagues and prostitutes. No source is cited in the article. At most, they were just rumours.
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Brian C.
@A C. Agree. Such a serious accusation against one's conduct should be based on a solid and reliable firsthand source. Furthermore, it is not fair without providing readers any context for where the accusation originated—during a series of horrible political movements, such as the "three-anti and five-anti campaigns" and the "anti-rightist campaign" in the 1950s, in which many faithful Christian leaders, including Nee, were targeted, falsely accused, and cruelly persecuted. Also the Sufan movement (1955-1957), the term "sufan" means "to purge of the hidden counterrevolutionaries". It was when the false accusation came out.
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Nee was "falsely accused" according to Brian. If so, why then did he publicly agree with Communist accusations? Either he agreed because it was true, or he falsely agreed because he wanted to get a lighter sentence, even knowing his act of confessing would stumble many church members.
Lily Hsu's book is particularly damning in this regard. She says that they heard him confess in court to producing pornography. Either she's lying and he didn't confess, or she actually heard him publicly confess. I tend to the second view, as the Nee supporters never deny that he confessed. They just avoid the subject of his courtroom admission, at all costs. They pan the Hsu book as poorly written (and it was), pan Hsu as biased (as she was), etc. But they never deny what she claims that she heard Nee say in court.
And according to A. C. "at most, they were just rumours." If so, why was Nee expelled by his own hand-picked elders? Do you think that they'd expel their unquestioned champion based on mere rumours? There's this Local Church conceit that Nee was really, really smart, and everyone around him was really, really dumb. Maybe they weren't so dumb as we think. Why would such a smart leader pick such dumb deputies?
Quote:
Originally Posted by UntoHim
The author's opening claim that the Local Church in America "isn't slowing down" would be news to Blended Brother Minoru Chen, who has publicly admitted that the LC movement in the US has been at a statistical standstill for the better part of 40 years. Anyone who has even a casual knowledge of the LC/LSM here in America knows that any growth has come from the importation of Asian-born members from Taiwan and other Asian Local Church strongholds.
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A better subtitle would be "How an Asian-friendly church from China swept Chinese immigrants in the U.S." I remember seeing posts in the website of a Sydney, Australia group that was affiliated with Titus Chu. They periodically asked group members to pray for the "new ones". I read two monthly bulletins, about a year apart. Both listed about 15 or 20 names to pray for, and all the names were Chinese.
In the FTTA they were obsessed with getting Caucasians, "typical Americans" and so forth. A Caucasian college student was the real prize. All of this helps camouflage that this is a morphing series of Chinese guanxi networks. Whether the group in question is led by Nee, Lee, Chu, Dong, or for that matter whatever Caucasian like Benson Philips can be propped up as camouflage, the roots of the group and patterns show its motives, that it's a Chinese family-oriented business association. It's all about lines of personal authority, and who's lined up with whom. The Chinese get it, the Americans and Europeans and Australians not so much.