[OBW]

ZNP,

Based on your most recent post, it would appear to me that you spent several years dancing around the edges of something you never really understood. If you never actually read the stuff, but only existed on what you heard in various localities, it was never "perfect Lee" no matter how much we say that they are all parroting Lee.

In fact, I have found that it is seldom in hearing and speaking that I notice errors, or the questions arise. I was gone many years from the LRC before I questioned its teachings. Only when I began to read it for myself from that online treasury was the shoddy theology, illogic, and logical errors made clear. And from what I can see in the works I have read or perused, the logical errors were seldom just mistakes, but willful steps taken to force the discussion where it was wanted to go. Even Nee did it. Not at the level that Lee did.

I would suggest that you were captured by the way the LRC "does church" more than anything else. It was (even still can be) appealing. But the way you do church does not command blessing upon your errors, no matter how many times you sing Psalm 133. ("Your" is in reference to Lee and the LRC, not you.)

I'm beginning to see a disconnect between the LRC you experienced while working on the Irving hall, living in Odessa, New Hampshire, and the FTTT in Taiwan, and the LRC that Lee taught year after year. And maybe you are right that you didn't hear that much about Lee. They weren't reading sermons out on the property in Irving. And no matter what you think of George W, he was among some who were not the most lock step, turn off your mind supporters (although I think he may have simply allowed himself to slide into the background now).

I think George was a little like you in that respect. There was something about the LRC that was appealing to him and once he reached a certain age, it was hard to consider that he could be that wrong, so he just resigned himself to it. My last contact with George was quite disappointing. He seemed an empty shell compared to the man I knew in Dallas. Almost seemed to not recognize me other than someone to repeat trite catch phrases to.

And if you returned to NY where they didn't even use LSM materials for morning watch, I would say that the "church life" that you were so strong for was not the "church life" that Lee intended. Or that so many others were involved in. It was something else. Just happened to stay loosely connected with the LRC.

In an odd way, your stories about time in the LRC are like viewing the whole of the United States from the perspective of 5 different remote rural communities. Or the working conditions at a NY sweat shop as seen from the owner's office on Madison Avenue. Your experiences are real. And they are personal. But they are not the LRC. Not the one that I joined in 73 and left in 87. Or the one that send my sister to Taiwan, and holds her and my brother and father to this day. And I am sure that Dallas is not entirely representative of the most gung-ho localities. But it is far from anything that you suggest as ever being the norm in the LRC.