Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
Hymn book Supplement #1325
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Verse 6:
As
the product, the fulfillment,
Will the church in glory stand,
Consummation of the purpose
In eternal ages planned.
God will have His corporate vessel,
All His glory to contain;
Lord, we’re wholly for Thy purpose
All Thy goal in us attain.
"the product"... Freudian slip, no? I'm sure the hymn-writer Bill Freeman got this term from Lee's messages. The "glorified church", dangled in front of the believers to draw them into this supposedly special sect, was a product, marketed and sold by the merchandiser of the age, Mr. Witness Lee... a product to be packaged and sold to the simple, trusting rubes who gathered eagerly around. And yes I was one, too; buying the books and booklets and cassette tapes and CDs, and pushing them on my family, and neighbors, and people at work, and knocking on doors and hawking them on the street. Like Bill Freeman, I was pushing Lee's products, and thinking that this was working out God's eternal purpose.
So why was Lee's product glorified, and that of Podunk Community Church rejected? I think we got taken by a confidence game, a con job. And the reason Lee was so convincing was because he'd convinced himself, and was thereby able to live with the Daystar money-laundering fiasco, his reprobate sons running his sundry companies, and the various intrigues, purges, storms and rebellions that followed, because he, Lee, was crucial to God's eternal purpose of building the church. To Lee, the ends justified the means, and all the broken and confused saints ejected from his church-building system were just collateral damage.
All the stuff in between, to Lee, was the "messy kitchen", to be overlooked and forgiven because we were building the glorious church. And yet the messy kitchen of "Christianity" was constantly dragged out onto the podium and waved in front of the "saints"! All of this seems like infantile, me-first subjectivity, covered with a veneer of spiritual and religious terminology.