Quote:
Originally Posted by awareness
Maybe you've told it and I don't remember. Between what years were you in the local church?
And RG taught that Lee was the minister of the age? What was that to you? Didn't that imply that Lee was something special?
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I came into the church in the Spring of '78 and left the same weekend that WL died.
In the Spring of 1981 RG began sharing something that ultimately congealed into his MOTA teaching. It started with the concept that if an apostle is a sent one, and that anyone who is a "sent one" is an apostle then surely WL is an apostle. This would receive a response from some as though this was some great, and deep truth. To me it was "yeah, so what?" But not disrespectfully. He then added to this the verse about how "you owe me even your own life" and started talking about how we owed WL. My response to that was "what are you talking about", but of course I never stood up and said that, more of a keep that to yourself response. Finally, he would say something that I felt was stupid, something to the effect that even if you don't know what you are doing, the safe choice is to follow WL. My response to that was that if you don't know what you are doing, that is the issue. Solve that problem. But all of it seemed contrived to me, he seemed to feel he had some great and deep revelation, and to me it was nothing but foolishness.
In June I went to Irving to build the meeting hall and everything changed. We worked 16 hour days, and we worked 7 days a week. Taking time off to go to the meeting was discouraged. I ignored that and went to the Lord's day meeting. I was asked directly to stop going, but again I just ignored that. My feeling was I'm a volunteer, if you want to send me back to Houston because I am only giving you 100 hours a week on the jobsite instead of 108 go ahead. However, while there I never heard anything more of this teaching by RG.
18 months later we had the Peter training in Irving and immediately after that I moved to Odessa, which was a home meeting at the time. Again, while in Odessa I never heard anything more of RG's teaching or the teaching of the MOTA. I spent one year in New Hampshire in a situation with an even smaller home meeting. Then I went to the FTTT.
I don't really recall ever hearing anything of the teaching after leaving Houston, but I may have heard the term "Minister of the Age" prior to coming to this forum. While in Taiwan I was forced to listen to meetings through translators, so you can miss a lot of what is going on.