[aron]

"The Lord is not building His church in Christendom, which is composed of the apostate Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant denominations. This prophecy is being fulfilled through the Lord's recovery, in which the building of the genuine church is being accomplished."

Look at that quote: no mention of the Eastern Orthodox churches, mainly the Russian and Greek. No mention of the Syrian or Egyptian believers. No mention of the Abyssinian (Ethiopian) Orthodox church, which was arguably founded in the pages of the book of Acts and has been there holding forth the testimony of Jesus ever since.

Witness Lee would create a "straw man" argument and then react against it. But he was just reacting to his own imagination. And thus his will was not pure. His intention was distorted, and corrupted. Lee would tell us about "Christendom" and "Christianity" and then hold forth his supposedly pure alternative. But it was an alternative to a figment of his imagination.

And as anyone who tried to follow him can attest, if you uncritically received his imagination as if it were real, and substantive, then you were subject to all the vagarities of this same fallen imagination. Various "flows' and "moves" ensued; how very apt as descriptions; how about also being "buffeted by winds" of Lee's imagination?

I also am arguably creating a "straw man Lee" here, to some extent, and likewise reacting. I do this to separate my thinking from Lee's culture just as he did to his Methodist cultural upbringing. But in my defense, I at least recognize that and admit it. I do not pretend to be pure. I am just trying to get away from Lee's ideas. As I've mentioned in the thread on "The Asian mind and the Western mind", I find them to be culturally derived and rather obstructive to the spirit of the Bible, as I see it. So I knock Lee's ideas around and throw them into the dust, where I think they belong. Please forgive me if such a violent spirit is off-putting, but I'm vociferously rejecting something that once had taken deep root within. So it's kind of "noisy" coming out -- something like the child who cried out, rolling and flailing in the dirt, when the impure spirit was ejected. Sorry; it's not a pretty sight, I know.