[YP0534]

I was raised Catholic and my mother, being very religious, intended from my birth that I should be a priest. Excelling in school, religious as a child, I grew up according to her wishes until I got of a certain age that I began to question everything. I transferred out of the “preparatory seminary” I was enrolled in when I saw how fallen that system ultimately was. And I ended up for a couple of years in high school with the typical troubled-teen problems of drug and alcohol use, although I was spared the worst of those kinds of problems.

I was always very philosophical and introspective and throughout high school I was pondering the big life issues. I briefly explored eastern religious thought and all the great philosophy to be found in American rock music and eventually came around to a Beatles-influenced idea of being a Christian: All you need is love and Jesus was the one who said that best. I then undertook what I perceived to be the Christian obligation to propagate this profound realization that everyone just needs to love everybody to make everything work in the world. Consequently, I drove my friends and classmates nuts with my “peace and love” neo-hippy chatter.

My freshman year in college away at the state university, I was still trying to figure out why nobody cared about loving everyone like I did, but I was completely clear that love was all that really mattered in the whole sick mess of this world. One evening, while studying in the library, I wrote a single page of my thoughts of needing to be with the ones I love as much as I could rather than dedicating myself to the study of ancient Greek literature. I walked straight from the library to a meeting where a pair of unusual fellows were just concluding a gospel presentation to a group of my friends. One of my friends told me that he had been looking for me because they all thought I needed to talk to these religious guys. I’m not sure what my friends hoped to accomplish but the gospel meeting was over and I had missed all of it. Nevertheless, these two fellows were kind enough to spend a little bit of extra time to speak to the guy who showed up in such circumstances and I received the Lord that night and was baptized a couple of days later. Now I really had an idea about what being a Christian was all about.

Still, there was the matter of meeting. I and a couple of other friends of mine went about to visit with representatives of every denominational group on campus and we went to meetings of not a few. I may have received the Lord through the efforts of the Local Church, but obviously, that meant I was the Lord’s. I never had the concept that I was supposed to be theirs. Still, they took the time and made the effort to make sure I was getting nourished with the Word. I never found much to speak of in all the different places I visited other than some good singing sometimes. Nothing against them, but it was nothing to attract me. But these particular people kept bringing new ideas to me that were clearly part of the Bible but that were roundly ignored even by the so-called “Bible-believing churches” I had visited. The view was high and deep and the more those little dorm-room Bible meetings happened, the more I wanted them to happen. Eventually, I got a New Testament Recovery Version to replace my Catholic New American Bible that I had (rarely) used since I was a child. Everything was up, up, up. I had discovered a place to meet that had impressed so many before me as the place to meet. All of this happened in my freshman year of college.

In a short time, however, my companions who had been meeting with me in the same way from the same time just stopped meeting with the Local Church. I never understood why, but, not being like Lot’s wife, I wouldn’t look back and I would sing “Pressing On” with a tear in my eye and loneliness in my heart for the loss of my closest friends. I was still “in” so that was what I was supposed to do and it was they who had fallen short in walking with the Lord. Perhaps one day they would return and seek to be reconciled but if not, I surely wouldn’t wait or even seek them out.

Just about this time was the beginning of “The New Way” among us. In fact, we had sort of come in through “The New Way” but it just wasn’t called that yet and we had no awareness of such things as techniques for Gospel preaching and so forth. We gladly joined in with the door knocking and the home meetings and as my friends fell beside the way, I kept right up with it. I wanted to be the best door knocker. I was going to help fulfill Witness Lee’s vision to bring back the Lord in 13 years! We had budgets. We had strategies. We were going to take over the earth for Jesus. We could really do it. We could all see how this was possible. One in four. One in twenty. It was just math.

But even in my remote outpost, there were grumblings that filtered in about people in larger places who could not adapt to “The New Way” because they liked to sit in a proper meeting hall on Sunday and listen to one person speaking the good messages. I felt so sorry for them but I was not afflicted with their oldness. And we were so small that our “big meetings” were only a couple of dozen at most. We were perfectly poised to follow Witness Lee into the Kingdom Age! But something was wrong. Those functioning as elders themselves really hated to knock on doors because they could not stand to lose their face in it. I tried to help them by quoting the publications to show how Witness Lee said not to care for your face and to only wait thirty seconds and then turn to the right. Eventually, these elder ones said that most of these things were spoken for the benefit of other places, not ours. And I was kind of shocked, because, after all, this was coming directly from the presses of Living Stream Ministry. We had seen it on video already.

Well, one other thing Witness Lee had shared was that we did not need to wait for anyone to organize us into door knocking. He said that there was nothing wrong with anyone just going out to preach the gospel. But not in my place, because doing such things was acting independently and not in coordination. I also got in trouble by exercising to speak my portion of enjoyment in the meetings, having used the Life Studies as the groceries and standing on Witness Lee’s shoulders to see further, just as he himself had instructed. I was only supposed to parrot what I had read. Needless to say, eventually, I got the boot for following the teachings of Witness Lee too closely. And the ones who ejected me are still well-revered brothers in the Local Church.

I wandered quite aimlessly for quite a long time but never really left the Lord entirely. I could never deny what I had seen of real revelation and contact with the Lord Spirit but I felt I just could not go on properly without a group. The best group kicked me out. And I was clear about denominations, so I couldn’t go there. I was trapped. I couldn’t see how to go forward and I knew I couldn’t go backward. Eventually, I got clear that the Lord had pushed me out the front door of the Local Church but I never got the word from Him about what was supposed to happen next. I think very many of us can appreciate this awkward position. And the answer is, of course, don’t do anything. Meet with every believer you can in any context that you can and let the Lord worry about the rest of it. Don’t join anything or start anything. You are already in everything that you need to be in. Anything else is a distraction.

Consequently, the main lesson I gained from my brief time among the saints in the Local Church was just how easy it is for religion to distract us from the reality of Christ. Or, as I’m fond of saying these days, how easy it is for a notion about “universal church” to destroy the ability to have the actual assembly. It’s both ironic and sad but even those places that readily picked up the practice of “The New Way” actually practiced it in an old way from the start because there was no other way for them to do it. To put it bluntly, the definition and practice of “The God-ordained Way” could never actually BE the God-ordained way but it could only become another denomination. Just assemble freely and assemble small and let the Lord as the Head worry about the building of His Body.

The unique goal is to have the practical manifestation of God in all of our meetings.

The right kind of meeting is the wrong kind of meeting if God cannot be seen there.