Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
It all depends on which side of the divide one stands.
I left the Recovery in 2005 during the lead up to LSM's official Whistler ITERO quarantine of Titus Chu. What troubled me so much was the simple fact that we were forced to choose sides. I thought we were a "local" church, with local autonomy. Not so! All my brothers and sisters were forced to choose between regional headquarters in Cleveland, and national headquarters in Anaheim. Things got real ugly.
Martin Luther was condemned and targeted for assassination by the Pope and his thugs. There's a reason why the mafia grew up in Italy. Since I grew up with Prussian ancestry in a Catholic home, Luther was viewed with mixed feelings.
The church in Moses Lake was condemned for no other reason than they wanted to remain true to their vision: a "local" church, with local leadership, answering only to the Lord. LSM will never accept that! They condemn it as "independence," but consider that every single positive example in the Bible exhibited "independence" also. What about Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua and Caleb, David, Samuel, Jesus, Stephen, Paul, and so many others I left out? They all were independent, and dependent on God alone! Otherwise they could never be faithful to their Lord and God.
We applauded W. Nee for leaving the "system," but now that same "system" inside the Recovery goes after those who leave for the same reasons!
|
I think you make some marvelous points here. But also it's nuanced. On the one hand the brothers in Moses Lake seemed right for not bowing down to Lee when Lee was wrong. On the other hand they left the recovery which is what God is doing in this age. So it's a catch-22. I think they felt they were right to break away from corrupt leadership, but they also didn't consider that there is nothing else to go away to. What Nee did was unique and absolutely part of God's movement. It was also 100% biblically correct and because of that there is the blessing on the local church members from God. Make no mistake God WANTS one church per one city
That notwithstanding I've read the history of Lee and Nee's personal problems and the accusations against them. And I believe a lot of it is true. They are fallible humans after all and the amount of reverence placed on them is almost deity like from many of the local church members
So it's all nuanced and hard to decipher which way is right. Ultimately I was born in Moses Lake in 1983 and my parents stayed with Brother Lee. In fact my mother wrote him a letter asking if it was ok to leave the church there because of their rebellion and Lee wrote her back saying it was ok. So our family left when we had an opportunity in 1990, but we didn't meet for around four years after their rebellion
The proof is in the results. The results is that the church in Moses Lake ceased from being a local church and they became a local sect. I can't imagine they had much blessing or spirit after that happened
Maybe neither here nor there, but actually Moses Lake had a church life culture. And it had ambitious member such as Ken Sandburg and Bill Freeman, who would go around Washington and hype up his own ministry. But anyway, my older brother and sister were often spanked publicly in their little daystar church school when they were wrong. And they advocated for public punishment to be meted out by the adults.....any adult. In other words you could spank children who weren't yours whenever you decided they did something wrong, all at their own discretion. And I remember they were big advocates of violent spankings as punishment and my ignorant father thought that was the right way and he ended up beating us often when we were wrong. This was the result of the local church practice in Moses Lake and I believe this greatly affected all of our lives even to this day. We have pain and psychological trauma from that. They also singled out the children from our family because we were poor and we didn't quite fit in with the inner circle there. They treated us as less than, which exposed a lot of their cliqueyness and means that they had certain classes and ranks within
Btw, I've talked to my mom a lot about what happened and she doesn't know details, but from gathering a lot of information over the years it's possible that Bill Freeman from Moses Lake was in competition with brother Lee and when brother Lee got exposed this brother saw an opportunity to capitalize and attempted to gain more power for position by "quarantining" his locality away from LSM. I don't know if that's truthfully what happened, or if that was in his heart at the time, but it's something to consider. Brother Lee felt there was a lot of brothers who were trying to take over localities and regions and he did a lot to throw water on that fire. But on the other hand one has to consider what he himself was doin to control localities and how he propped himself up like the one and only speaker of the age. Which doesn't seem Biblical as at many times in the Bible God spoke through various channels, and these channels being obscure men who have no mention before or after in the word. Which goes to back up the point that God is not a respecter of persons and he will use whomever he chooses to use, for whatever purpose, at whatever time he chooses. I think that at least Lee had a preoccupation with leadership and somewhat of an obsession with it. In the Bible we see many instances of God sending two or more speakers out to preach and establish churches. Lee's preoccupation with their being only one human leader as head oracle doesn't seem Biblical, in fact he himself splintered up the leadership and speaking amongst the "blended" brothers- Kangus, Marks, Taylor, etc. so why on the one hand would he call himself the minister of the age, and on the other hand say that the Lord's recovery is uniquely the Lord's and it's not in anyone's pocket? I suppose you could argue those things aren't mutually exclusive, but you could also argue that all of the major affairs of the local churches went through brother Lee before approval or a decision was made. so how exactly would he NOT be the big exclusive leader of the recovery? It seems that was was said in his messages, and what was actually practiced are two different things. And as others have said it's sometimes imperceptibal that there is administrative control over the churches UNTIL you run up against it in a negative way, and then it glares its ugly head out at you