Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
don't tell us ... that we are just "wasting our time" reading anything apart from "the ministry," and then chastise saints and elders for digging around the Bible for something fresh and new from the Lord, that's not in the latest HWforMR.
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Where in the "new testament model of the local church" do you see, either prescribed, described, or even hinted at, the "one publication" (i.e. "nobody publishes but me") idea? Where it comes from, I argue, is that it is necessary to prop up "the ministry" of "the recovery" of the supposed "new testament model of the church". So by its fruits the thing is certainly known as something
not of the new testament model.
The new testament model is to love your neighbor as yourself. Not "get married for Christ and the church". The new testament model is to follow the Spirit, not "whatever Brother X says is right". The new testament model is "all scripture is God-breathed and profitable", not "James and Peter and Job and Psalms (etc) are too natural, and written according to fallen man's concepts".
So WN may have shown us a few splinters in "Christianity", but I daresay we missed a few beams in our own, by needing to validate this "model" by invalidating everyone elses' experience.
We might never know if WN raped any sisters in the church in Shanghai. But he certainly set up an authoritarian system that allowed the rape of sisters in Anaheim by Philip Lee, and which allowed the Daystar fiasco, and which allowed Jane Anderson to be railroaded, and which allowed
awareness to be bullied by MP in Florida and
Ohio to be bullied by TC's underlings.
Many of us were drawn into this model, and kept there for years, even when it gave us nasty fruit. And some of us, like me, left it and went into other "restoration" groups even more zealous than the local churches!
I guess it's all just part of the journey. God is to be praised, as always. I am certainly glad for my time in the local churches of Nee and Lee. I met many wonderful people and was helped a lot. But today, looking back, WN's model church is not something I can support. It doesn't stand up to scripture, nor to logic, nor to the test of history (i.e. its 'fruit'), nor will you find the leading of the Holy Spirit. In an 'authoritarian church' you will only find some human authority pretending to be God.