Quote:
Originally Posted by Igzy
I think it started with a genuine desire to discover how to "do church."
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I wonder how much of it was a reaction by young Chinese idealism against perceived British colonialism manifested through denominational mission boards. Didn't Margaret Barber, Nee's earliest mentor, have a falling out with her own missionary board in London? In his ecclesiastical books, Nee addressed denominations and their failures head on. Lee, however, went way past this, and literally condemned all things Christian, except, of course, his own member churches.
Nee took the so-called "pattern" found in Revelations 2-3, John's 7 epistles, and then shoe-horned the rest of the New Testament into it. There's nothing wrong, for example, to say that your group is a "church in New York City," using the model of the church in Ephesus, but to use Acts 14.23 and Titus 1.5 to definitively declare that the entire "true" church in that city must be under one set of elders appointed by the self-appointed apostle is akin to those Appalachian snake handling churches trying to "recover" their long-lost "true" church based on Luke 10.19 and Acts 28.5.