Quote:
Originally Posted by ZNPaaneah
If it "presented a powerful testimony to that young man" why does he refuse to talk with any Christians after that?
The testimony was that no one spoke the word to him for years, then when one group of Christians does others watch and immediately tell him "don't listen to them". That was the testimony. The very thing that we condemn WL, the LRC and LSM for. Paul says that we should not be conquered by the evil but rather conquer evil with good. By suing them they were conquered by the evil.
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Your question is a good one. But without a lot of information, it is nearly impossible to answer.
The problem is that this is an anecdote. A specific event. Given the vast array of people, personalities, interests, etc., that there is one who might be interested in things Christian from one perspective, but not any other, then become deluded when they discover that this one perspective is flawed is a real possibility. There is much to be said for the wisdom of following anyone around to warn-off those they just talked to. And I would agree that the problems that were written of in The God Men were overstated. But was the overstatement out of malice and competitive conflict, or out of concern (even if partly misguided)?
The thing is, you can't assert that the others were happy to simply drive off potential or new Christians just because it appears to have happened once.
You say in another post that you were leading someone to Christ almost every day. If we assume 7 months of the year, 5 days a week (gone to meetings all weekend) that would be somewhere in the vicinity of 150 a year. Since there was still only you on the campus there, that means that virtually all of them went on to other places to grow. If it was just about competition, then why would they complain? It seems that they got almost all the first fruits of your labors. Do you think that they contacted virtually every one of your converts that year? If so, what happened to the rest of them?
This is not an attack on what you did or what you think is true about it. But as I look at it, I believe that there may be a different view.
Maybe they actually thought that there was something amiss with theology and practices of the LRC. Maybe they really did care for those that they were warning.
Now the book was written surrounding things happening in Berkley and not Houston, and maybe those things were quite different. But if your experiences were in any way similar to those in Berkley, then maybe the LRC response was at least as wrong as they claim the SCP was in what they wrote. Maybe their "we don't talk to anyone about things" attitude was consistent with the attitude of other cults and inconsistent with other parachurch organizations.
I know that some of the campus groups for mainstream denominations are designed primarily as a way to keep their young ones in the fold rather than as an outreach to the campus. But few of them are entirely that. Do you recall the "I Found It" campaign of the BSU back in the 70s? That was jointly reaching out to the unsaved and to the saved who were on campus and disconnected from their practical faith. Maybe not as robust as the Campus Crusade efforts at times, or those of the LRC. But no one wrote anything about them. Nobody had a "they've got more disciples" view of the others.
So maybe it really was what they wrote about. Maybe they really did believe what they were told about the practices, especially the kind of controlling that often went on. It was probably seldom as extreme as the separation of husband and wife because of perceptions of how much for the church one was (or was not). But that did happen.
Just maybe the SCP really took their understanding of scripture and stacked it up against what they could discover about the LRC and found it worse than lacking. Worse than just "dead." More like "off the reservation" and actively recruiting. I think I might have wanted to at least hear it. Maybe if this had come out before 1972 I wouldn't have a reason to know enough about the LRC to be having this discussion here. And wouldn't care.