Quote:
Originally Posted by zeek
Right. If it isn't enough to meet on the ground of oneness because you also must be one with a ministry, it seems two onenesses are required. Two onenesses seems absurd. I think only one oneness is possible. What they were advocating was twoness.
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Let's not mince words. Let's tell it the way it is/was.
The whole local church movement thrived on double-speak. I know this by my own personal experience in the local church.
There were two sides to their double-speak. On one side of the double-speak was the spiritual abstract. As long as I stayed on this side, as long as I believed the local church was God's movement on the earth, as long as I believed Witness Lee was God's spokesperson, and the elders were the local spokespersons, everything was fine.
The other side of the double-speak was the human element. That's where the troubles entered in. Once I saw that the local church movement was man led, not God led, then the spiritual bubble of the double-speak popped, and the whole house of cards came tumbling down.
This came to full light in the C. in Ft. Lauderdale when I discovered that the lead elder, Mel Porter, was seeding the meetings with a group of 14 loyal brothers, to control the flow of the "Spirit," and direct it as Mel Porter wanted.
That was the end of my enjoyment of the meetings. No longer could I believe the meetings were spirit led. I realized that I was deluded about spirit led meetings. It was all man led and manipulated at that point.
And once the human side of the double-speak was discovered, that was the end of the local church for me.
I left in the early 1980s. Eight or nine years later John I., Bill Malon, Max Rapaport, and others caught onto what I discovered long before them. They were slow learners as far as I'm concerned.