[InChristAlone]

Thank you, brothers, for your comments. I don’t have your knowledge, intelligence, and experience. So I’m very grateful to you for your comments and testimony. They have helped me not only to see the whole picture clearer but also to understand some details of the LC doctrines better. I used to think that the LRC is just another Christian church, and now I’m confident that it’s a mask, “sheep's clothing”, and an imitation of the Body of Christ. Quasi-church mimicry at its best.

I feel sorry for my wife and other sincere and well-hearted believers who are duped by WN, Witness Lee, and their teachings. Somehow these nice brothers and sisters become narrow-minded as if someone injected a mental virus into their minds. Now I am not even sure that it may take me one or two years to pull my wife out of this organization. I don’t have deadlines anymore. But I know that the truth, enduring faith, and God’s word make the best antidote. So I’ll keep doing my part. I’ll try to do what I can and let the Lord do what I can’t.

I don’t have much free time. So I am going to write less to the forum. But I’d like to share a few testimonies that I’ve read in other threads. They helped me realize some glowing flaws in WL’s teachings. Maybe one day there will be a guy in my shoes. So I hope the brothers’ words will help him in the same way as they were helpful to me. I’ll only share three brothers’ testimonies, but, of course, there were more testimonies, insights, and words of wisdom than that. Thank you all, my dear brothers and sisters.

The first quote is not about the LC. It’s about me. Though brother Aron said it to another brother on other occasions, but I think I can apply his words to my situation:

"I pray that the Lord would stay your hand from the work, and keep His upon it".

That’s very profound. I can think of many ways to deal with my wife and the LC, but only God knows which way is the best. So I’ll just submit myself to the Lord and let Him do the work – through me, through His word, and through other things which I can’t even think of.

I also liked brother Aron’s words about oneness and one accord:

"Believing into the name of Jesus brings us into an accord, the likes of which any of our own attempts to replicate cannot but pale in comparison".

In the LC, they always tell us about oneness and one accord with each other, but it’s all about striving for the unreachable. We must believe in Jesus Christ, accept Him as our Saviour, learn how to love God, learn how to love our neighbor as ourselves, and have oneness with the Lord first... the rest will come in due time. In other words, we must let Christ be our Shepherd, have oneness with Him, and He will bring us into one accord with our brothers and sisters, not the other way around.

Brother Ohio also had a very good point about WL’s doctrine about local churches:

“Though many teachings in TNCCL are good and scriptural, the Bible only describes "one city / one church," it never prescribes it. This is very important! Reading Revelation chaps. 2-3, it appears like each city was a church, but the Bible only records that it happened, and never that it must happen. In fact a careful examination of some verses (Acts 9.31; Romans 16.5; Col. 4.15) indicates that there probably was more than one church in some cities, and yet they were not considered divisions in the body.”

Brother Lisbon:

“In my 41 years in the lc, I don't think I ever heard the whole of 1 Tim 3 or 4. They always stopped at "which is God's economy." The last four words are critical and it is insane that they are so often omitted. I'm not at all saying this is typical of lcs but it is for Texas. I went to Chicago in around 74 when we marched around Moody with a "gospel march." That's my contact with GLA.

Paul said, "as I urged you when going in to Macedonia that you charge certain ones not to teach myths and endless genealogies that render confusion rather than God's economy which is in faith. To leave out that small phrase "which is in faith" is deceit. In a good sense, faith is a foundation of our belief and to obviously omit the word indicates deceit. The next verse is part of the same thing for it says that the end of the charge is wow!! love out of a pure heart, a good conscience, and genuine faith. I don't think anyone has ever come to the proper translation of oikonomia but we have spent nearly half a century talking about. The items just following, ie love, good conscience, genuine faith, we probably don't know that much but there is some light. The speaking about economy just mainly lead to the formation of another of the thousands of Christian sects which certainly lcs have done.”

Brother Ohio’s comment to the post:

“Great post, Lisbon.

If I could add just a little ...

Cannot all of Witness Lee's brief summations of church history, with the lineage of Ministers Of The Age (MOTA's) from Martin Luther until now, be considered nothing more than "myths and endless genealogies."

I agree with brother Ohio. Witness Lee's church history is just a myth, a good marketing trick that he sold to his followers. They bought it the same way that Muslims buy Mohammed’s story about the last word of God.

Brother Aron’s comment:

“The problem is that Lee took a "slightly less than traditional expression" and made it a template to over-ride the plain words of scripture in front of us. If Jesus' teaching on Oikonomia, for example, which stressed individual responsibility (note that the unjust steward has "his" Oikonomia taken away in Luke 16:2) runs afoul of Lee's extended riff on Paul's "God's economy" then Jesus' teaching must fall by the wayside. To Lee, Jesus' parable simply didn't exist.

So we got "God's economy" rammed down our throats, literally (think of all the chanting of Lee's outlines and bullet points), while Jesus' teachings on personal stewardship, using the exact same Greek word, were ignored.

And to add insult to injury, if you didn't fanatically parrot this stuff, and actually tried to read the Bible for yourself, then you were castigated as being dangerously independent. You weren't "one" with the teaching of God's current apostle.”

Now I’ll just copy a few comments by brother Aron that he wrote in different threads:

“I tried to touch on this with Lee's "God's economy" metric, in which "oikonomia", briefly presented in Paul's epistles without much supporting commentary, gets voluminous treatment by Lee. You'd almost think the whole Bible was about nothing but dispensing.

Then, in the gospels, Jesus' teaching about "oikonomia" (there translated "stewardship") is effectively ignored. Why? Because it might distract us from Lee's "God's economy = dispensing" metric.

When I said that I felt cheated by sitting under Lee's teachings, it wasn't because they were "a subtle rewrite of scripture", or "an alternative explanation", even though that may be true. As OBW said, his pastor probably distorts scripture somewhat with his explanatory overlays, as do we all. Nobody really can be said to "cut straight the word" but God Himself, and Him whom God has sent to us, Jesus Christ. The rest of us are struggling toward the light. Only Jesus is the light. Big difference.

So I give Lee a pass there. My current claim of having been cheated stems from the fact that we were told this was the "all-inclusive ministry", which had gleaned the wheat and discarded the chaff of 2,000 years of careful Bible study. That's like saying a third grader's drawing is an accurate representation of a nuclear power plant. You really have to put so many qualifiers on "accurate" that you make it mean something different.”

”There is only one faithful witness. Jesus Christ. Not John [the Apostle], not Watchman Nee, not Witness Lee, not you or me. Our job is to witness(testify) concerning Jesus Christ. We testify concerning Jesus, not concerning the "true" church”...

“I got that line: "There is only one faithful witness" from Revelation chapter 1. Jesus is called the faithful witness. I realized that the rest of us are only partly faithful. Only Jesus is the Christ. The rest of us are failures, sinners. But when we believe into the faithful one, we begin our process of restoration. God begins to make us more and more like His firstborn Son. At that moment I stopped looking at men (Witness Lee, Ron Kangas, etc) and began looking at Jesus. He is right before us in the Bible.

And what bothered me was that Witness Lee taught in the Psalms that Jesus was not there! That it was only the Psalmist with his 'concepts'. But Peter in Acts chapter 2 clearly said that the Psalmist David was a prophet and was testifying of the one who was to come after him, Jesus the Nazarene. Witness Lee ignored that because he was focused on his idea of "God's economy". So Witness Lee missed the mark; he was not a good 'witness'.

Neither am I; neither are you. None of us are good witnesses. But we can point to Jesus, the one who is. Anyway, I stopped looking at men and began to look in the Bible and see Jesus. The Holy Spirit came and began to show me Jesus. "But we see Jesus"... Hebrews 2:9”

“If you get hung up on [WL’s] teachings about "false churches" you will forget all about Jesus Christ. That is what the local churches of Witness Lee have done. They only "care for the Body", and "for the ministry".

“Jesus taught us to have mercy on others, then the Father will have mercy on us. If you are surrounded by "false churches" go and show them mercy. It will be an opportunity for God to be merciful to you. If you judge them God will judge you...”

"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.”

“When you begin to "see" Jesus Christ in the text it literally transforms you. Now, as Paul wrote, the Word of Christ begins to dwell in you richly (Col 3:16). Witness Lee's footnotes said that the prayers of the Psalms were low, and Paul's prayers in Ephesians were high. But Paul in Ephesians (see ch. 5) pointed his readers back to the Psalms!

Did Jesus pray Paul's "high prayers" from the Epistle to the Ephesians or did Jesus pray the "low" prayers of Psalms? I believe that Paul saw Jesus inhabit the Word and express the Word and even become the Word made flesh tabernacling before us all, and in this Paul marveled greatly and praised God in his epistles.

So I guess my first point is that the Word points us to Jesus Christ, and second is that Jesus Christ told us the Spirit would lead us to all the reality of the Father's house. Not Watchman Nee, or Paul, or Witness Lee, but the Spirit of Jesus. So if you abide in the text a marvelous thing will happen. The Spirit will come. I cannot explain it: I just can tell you that the Spirit will come. And you will begin to see the Father's house emerge before you.

And you will not be "walking on your own" because the Spirit will be your constant guide. Will you obey? Will you abide? I cannot say, but the Spirit will nonetheless guide. Believe me, the Spirit is capable of overcoming our failures!

The third and final point is that all this is not for your amusement or "enjoyment", but so that God can use you. You will meet a non-believing person, looking for reality. You will meet a new believer needing help. You will meet an ancient and feeble believer, needing confirmation and support. You will meet someone who is lost and needs to hear the Name of Jesus. You will meet the hungry, the sick, the poor, the despised. And as you despair in your helplessness the Spirit will come in a rush of power to help you; the same power that raised Jesus from the dead will flow through you to the 'dead' ones around you. Then you will be serving God.

This, my friend, is the "new testament church life". It will fulfill and satisfy you beyond your dreams. It is right there in front of you. You already have it. If you keep looking for "the right church" you will be in for a long and disappointing search. One day, many years after leaving Lee's local church, I stopped seeking something new and better and different and began to seek God in the Word. At that point everything began to change.

Have I done a good job of it? Probably not. But I stopped looking for "Mr. Right". Mr Right is already here. His name is Jesus. He is clearly portrayed before us in the Word, not only in the NT but 'especially' in the OT. In fact, the entire NT could be seen as a brief outline telling you how to find the Christ in the OT!

His Spirit is here. The hungry poor ones are all around us. The fields are white for harvest. He told us, "Blessed is the one who is feeding others when the Master returns." (Matt 24:46, Luke 12:43).

The "proper church life" is right in front of us. It has been there all along. We just didn't know what we were looking for, and were easily misled.

And occasionally on Sunday morning I "go to church". But I don't go to despise, or judge, or be superior. I am just another loser on the "Jesus bus". So I go the same as everywhere else - I go to try and take care of 'my neighbor'; to try and feed and shepherd (see John chapter 21: Jesus speaking to Peter). There really is nothing else. Love God with all your heart and soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. And some of your neighbors go to church”.

“The danger here is to oversimplify. First, look at chapters 2 and 3 of the Book of Revelation. This is one of the ‘proof texts’ that the local churches used when I was there. ‘To the church in Smyrna’, ‘to the church in Pergamos’ etc. Right? It doesn’t say to the “Baptist Church in Smyrna” or to “the Presbyterian Church in Laodicea”. Right?

But if you look at it more carefully it says “To the angel of the church in Ephesus”. Eventually, after many years, I realized that these people don’t want you to look at the Word of God. They want you to look at what they say about the Word of God, not the Word itself. They call it “the interpreted Word.” They don’t trust you to read it for yourself. You might see something they don't want you to see. So be careful with Watchman Nee. He didn’t give you the Word, but rather his interpretation, his reading of the Word. Big difference...”

”At its core our faith is simple: Repent, believe into Jesus Christ, love your neighbor. The rest is not so important. Watchman Nee's "Normal Church" became very abnormal. Believe me; I was there. No love. Just a zeal for the program. For "the church". No more love for your neighbor.”

“Let me simply ask two questions, which helped me: First, if the first-century church life was so “normal” then why was the aged apostle John writing to seven churches in Asia and telling five of them to “repent”? Secondly, if things were so bad (“Jezebel’s teaching” [2:20] was there, and the “throne of Satan” [2:13], and so forth) why didn’t John leave and start his own “pure” or “recovered church”? Why did John stay with the degraded saints?

Look at Revelation 1:5,6 “and from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to be a king-dom and priests to serve his God and Father—to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.”

“Jesus freed “us” from our sins by his blood. We are all imperfect, and we are all freed by his blood. Eventually I stopped looking for “proper” people and realized that all these “improper” people were opportunities to minister.

Also, I realized that Watchman Nee didn’t really see that much. Yes, he realized that “the de-nominations were degraded”. But was his model better? Jesus taught that it is very easy to see the splinter in your neighbor’s eye and miss the beam in your own. It is very easy to see the splinter in “Christianity”. Yes, it is degraded. But anyone who thinks they have “laid hold” on this side of the Judgment Seat of Christ is, in my opinion, deluded. By the time Watchman Nee and Witness Lee were old enough to realize their shortcomings they were too busy trying to prop up their empires to do anything about it. Remember in the story of the sinful woman in John 8, it was the older ones who became ashamed first and left (v.9). When I was younger I would agree with all your statements concerning the “unbiblical
denominations” and would probably leave (I did, for many years); today I still agree but feel that God loves them as much as he loves you or me.

As I said, showing mercy to others is an opportunity for God to show mercy. And the Bible is much deeper than Watchman Nee realized. But he got caught up in “church building” and never got around to reading the whole thing. He just read the parts that he could use for “church build-ing.” So he ended up with a rather small Bible.

When you are in first grade, the third-graders seem very sophisticated and mature. And it is easy for the third-graders to judge the first graders. Nee was like a third-grader, judging the first-graders. But who wants to stay in third grade forever?”

"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".

“The practices and teachings in the NT[ New Testament] are for us to love one another, and forgive one another. The rest is not so important. Don't get lost in the details.”

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Thank you, brothers!