Quote:
Originally Posted by alwayslearning
Having "open mike" is great if people aren't expected to repeat Witness Lee messages or merely confirm them with their "testimony". The focus is still Witness Lee whether 25 people jump up and say something or 1 person does.
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The problem is with those who have the appearance of being someone in the church. They have to get up and speak to maintain the appearance, but since there is no reality they have no testimony to share. Therefore the footnotes made it extremely easy to get "canned testimonies". They would feign revelation and light and wax euphoric over some footnote.
Open mike is great if you are having experiences of the Lord and sharing those. However, if you aren't it exposes the churches lack of Christ. This is why most denominations do not do it.
Again, this substitution of footnotes for real experience was tied to LSM making merchandise of the saints. Prior to the full RcV you didn't have to have a RcV in the meeting. True, we had the individual books of the Bible like John and Matthew, but many saints would just read a KJV or some other version. Since the RcV wasn't different enough to really require its purchase the footnotes were really the only thing that made it a must have. To make this work RG and EM developed a system of using footnotes for testimonies, and then they would make a big deal of that testimony. Many times I was in the meeting and some saint would give a wonderful testimony of an answered prayer or preaching the gospel or some other experience. Really the highlight of the meeting. Then EM would share some footnote and RG would then go off about all the light from EM's testimony. I would think, 'wow, I guess there are two completely different views of that meeting'. But EM was the first I saw to perfect this using footnotes for testimonies approach. Shortly after this first began in Houston RG then announced the move to Irving and his ascension in the LSM hierarchy. The RcV was called the "gold brick" and was clearly the cornerstone of the LSM publishing business. RG with the help of EM had figured out how to market it so that every saint would have to have one.