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Originally Posted by UntoHim
I don't think that many of us had even a slightly unremarkable initial experience of "touching the Church". I was a 17 year old Orange County, Calvary Chapel attending, space cadet with bushy blond hair who looked like a fish out of water...but there was something about the atmosphere that attracted me. I was in a "brother's house" (with a future Blended Brother) on the weekend of my 18th birthday.
I think the thing that set my parents and Christian siblings off as much as anything else was the "Asian flavor". Even though mid-1970s Orange County did have a substantial Asian population, there was not much of an Asian influence among evangelicals at that point. To me, Chinese people were a bit of a cultural/spiritual mystery, and that made Witness Lee all the more of an attraction (much to the chagrin of my parents and family).
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There is nothing wrong with an "Asian flavored" church any more than any other flavor. And we undoubtedly did get attracted, to some degree, because it was new and different. How many 18 or 19 year olds want something new and different? Not shocking to contemplate.
It's like a young college girl bringing home an African-American or Asian man to meet mommy & daddy. The parents may be liberal, they may be conservative, but this girl is reacting, at least unconsciously, to the "same old, same old" of her upbringing. Because face it, by the time you are 18, often, what you grew up with feels old and restrictive. You want new horizons. The Lee group's strangeness was not off-putting in that regard. Its newness was attractive, the same way a young person of a different race or culture may be to a teen: all the girls or boys of your peer group are familiar, and generic (boring), and suddenly here comes this exotic person, so alluring. Lee's group in some way offered that exotic alternative to the bored and restless young American Christian. We were discontented, and "seeking"; yes, but seeking what?
Quote:
Originally Posted by UntoHim
Of course as time went by, I boldly declared to my family that "in the local church we don't have any culture!". At that point I was just a little college-aged punk who had no idea that I was firmly entrenched in one of the most "culturally intense" (if there is even such a term) religious movements to hit our fair land. But at that point if Witness Lee said we had no culture, then it must be true...we had no culture.
Looking back, it seems to me now that this was one of Witness Lee's many ruses on us gullible Americans - that we could actually establish and maintain a complicated, involved religious culture without actually having any culture.
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This is where my problem with Lee & Co comes in. Supposedly our culture was straight from the Bible itself. When Lee arrived here, we assumed that all of his "old man" had been stripped away and his ministry was only the "new man"; everything from Lee was effectively from the mouth of God. His Bible interpretation was THE interpretation. Case closed, supposedly.
But actually, that is very Asian: the Maximum Leader is unquestioned. To Asian culture, unquestioning obedience is necessary for stability, and harmonious functioning of society. Look at Singapore, for example: it's not communist at all, and is a very impressive place. But it's highly regulated - they have a different idea of "freedom" than we do in the west. To them the system comes first. To them, without the system you have nothing. So freedom is only what you get from the system; it is not an innate right. If the system is functioning well, and it gives you some human right, then okay. But if the Singaporean system decides that something like "freedom of speech" is a threat to the stability of society, guess what? No free speech.
Lee's system was derived from that culture, and to some degree reflected its cultural roots. But since he assured us it was "heavenly", we took it.