Quote:
Originally Posted by Truth
Sometimes finding Christ may not mean the same thing as finding another 'church'. The Lord may want us to stay where we are, in a degraded church life, and find Christ there and minister Christ to others there. There is no perfect church. We could be church-hopping forever and never find Christ.
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It is simply dishonest and unfair to categorize every member in the LC's as mindless robots following the ministry like "lemmings over the cliff." (
Fortunately for us, the more dogmatic forum posters have recently gone into remission.) Generalizations are like prejudices -- they pick the worst traits of a few, and then label the whole. God is not like that. He does not look on the outward, but on the heart.
When I entered the Recovery during the 70's, there was a continual cry to "
come out of her My people," based on a prophetic verse concerning Babylon. At the time, it made
so much sense that all of Christianity was fallen and degraded Babylon, and only the Recovery was the true testimony of the Lord. Much of the prideful arrogance that gets exhibited in the Recovery is rooted in that cry. Personally, as I entered the Recovery, I voiced nothing but contempt for the rest of the body of Christ.
Oh how things have changed. Witness Lee never had the absolute manifest godliness and lockup on the truth that he always led us to believe. Fact is the Recovery has at least as many problems as the rest of the body of Christ, maybe more. The expressly claimed exclusiveness of God's blessing and presence was nothing more than a myth. Yes, His Spirit was often with us, but He was also with all the other congregations too -- those dreaded denominations and despised free groups.
It's amazing to think back on how that exhortation in Revelation 18.4 affected me, and not for the better. How could I condemn all the systems in Christianity and not condemn the Christians too? Witness Lee (
as John Darby before him) definitely used that verse for personal gain. That teaching was so unbalanced. Perhaps I was just worse than the other brothers around me. I can never forget the time after my first Revelation Training in Anaheim that I was talking to my dear mother about destroying her idols -- eventually the brother with me started kicking me under the table to stop it.
Why did we not take our cue from all the other churches in the New Testament? They all had their problems. None was perfect. Think about what was going on in Corinth! Yet the Apostles only exhorted the believers to overcome the difficulties and not to completely forsake those churches. The answers to their problems did
not lie in the severity of God to forsake them, but in His love to shepherd them to greener pastures.