Quote:
Originally Posted by rayliotta
I'd like to pose a simple and straightforward question to this forum:
Why do we seem to spend so little time discussing Recovery practice?
It's my personal belief that it's Recovery practice, more than Recovery doctrine, that has caused so much harm to so many people (and families) over the years.
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I would agree. But it is so difficult to generalize the practices. Listen/read the accounts from the people who are from different cities and regions and the kind of experiences and practices are all over the map.
That could be because the underlying issues that bring certain practices to the surface are not uniformly occurring everywhere. So it would take a rather large body of people who actually see all of the practices to dig through the causes (if they are aware of them) and build cases for some common body of practice. Ohio has some amount of understanding of the things that TC did in the GLA. And that probably had a discernible effect on the other leaders in the region, although not necessarily in a uniform way (other than being submissive to improper punishment).
Someone just suggested that the whole idea of sending people out to different cities all the time was a way to take the "local" out of the core of almost any church. While the idea of "missionaries" or a preacher in a church plant is quite acceptable, it is somewhat out of sync with any claim of a special, local church. Unlike Paul who kept one from afar while otherwise identifying and keeping locals as the elders, the LRC seems to thrive on external influence.
Of course, some will then determine that every denomination is deficient because they often have their upper leadership elsewhere and send in the top local leadership. And they would be right if there was either some clearly defined "how to" in the area rather than just examples that are inconsistent. But it seems that to be the forte of the LRC. Find an example, declare it to be a principle, ignore the inconsistent examples, and beat on everyone who does not follow their determination. So the only problem with having leaders from outside the immediate assembly is that it violates a "principle" that is not clearly a principle.
I've been warned about saying things about the past, but we started into this kind of inquiry before and when every city didn't look like the proposed grand error, there were accusations going both ways — overextending an example to the whole or dismissing the example because it was not observed somewhere else. It was rather ugly. And it was almost like the thread was cursed. It would lie fallow for a while and then someone would come along and add a new thought, and the black and white thinking would reemerge.
Does that mean we can't do it? It does not. But we have to be prepared to either limit the kinds of things we talk about so that there is commonality between most to all cities, or we have to be careful about over-applying the things we see in any one place.
And it is so hard to generalize off of observations. Is Mel Porter the way he is because of the LRC, or are his natural inclinations well-suited for being in leadership in such a group? Do the two aggravate each other?
Or maybe we limit the discussions to some of the more mundane practices. I don't think that any city just dreamed-up the groaning thing as a means of passively shutting up those who don't speak according to "the ministry." Yet can anyone find its origin?
The problem with so many of the practices is that they are not the cause, but the result. Orthopraxy came to be because of the variant in Orthodoxy. The question is whether we/they practice what we preach. It starts with a skewed Orthodoxy and plays out in a skewed and dysfunctional Orthopraxy. But fixing any particular aspect of Orthopraxy does not cure all. It is only the symptoms of the underlying Orthodoxy. If you have "true religion" then you have good Orthodoxy. Otherwise, you don't.
There was a reason that Lee didn't want us looking at James in a positive way. It exposed the crappy Orthopraxy as crappy Orthodoxy rather than the yen and yang of life (or the two sides of every truth).
The practices caused real damage for some. And the instances of that are damnable. But even when understood as excessively numerous "isolated" cases, it is the underlying theology/Orthodoxy that permits it.
Yet it may be re realization that the Orthopraxy stinks that will cause some to open their eyes to the underlying Orthodoxy.
So what do we benefit from wasting time talking about other errant religions, like the United Theocracy of America? Not much other than to see the propensity of some to see the Bible as a book of hidden secrets that needs an expensive decoder ring to decipher. That was Lee. And that is Cahn (and many others). And some of us need to be special. To be part of something unique. And look what it gets us.
Well, we are all unique, just like everyone else.