Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
And lastly, in a highly-charged charismatic environment, where feelings can become overwhelming, and "experience" or sensory response our primary focus, relying on your feeling of "life" can be an awful trap. Then the Bible itself becomes "dead letters" to you if you can't extract "life" out of it; conversely, anything barely related to the Bible can give "life" if you get sufficiently excited about it. Thus came the equivalent of braying "four legs good, two legs bad" at meetings: we thought if we shouted something loudly enough, for long enough, it would become real. "It's the life, life, life, that makes me want to shout" went the LC song. But we shouted a lot of slogans that were tenuously related to the Bible, if at all. Our focus was not on Jesus Christ, good works, or even "life"; it was on the experience of repetetive shouting.
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I agree. In the LC, whatever it is that constitutes "life" is something that is highly subjective and usually it is a matter of an elder calling something life, and then calling the alternative death. For the rank and file member, they think Lee's ministry makes them feel happy or excited, so they say it gives them "life" while other ministries don't. It is indeed a trap.
Because they feel that "life" can only exist in the realm of Lee's ministry, they have already narrowed what they are willing to accept as "life". If someone criticizes Lee's ministry, that automatically is labeled as "death", and it might not even be necessary for a brother like Ron to come in and say that. The rank and file member already believes that speaking positively about Lee's ministry is imperative for "life" to exist.