[Hope]

Terry,

I would rather say that all the flows came from a wrong understanding of God’s purpose and administration. As long as WL stayed in the background and fulfilled his role of a teacher who could assist other gifted persons in perfecting the saints that they, the saints, would do the work of ministry to build up the Body of Christ, the Lord could flow according to His plan and way. When WL decided to put out his exposition of the Bible and use ten day trainings to provide an audience the blessings began to wane and eventually “the Ministry” completely replaced the vision of “Christ and the Church.”

The idea of following the flow was a development under the promotion of brothers such as James Barber, Max Rapoport, Benson Phillips and Ray Graver. They believed that the various local churches were parts of a network with the anointed minister of the age as the spiritual and deputy authority or today’s Paul. Each of these promoters desired to be an instrument to carry out what God was doing and that was not the building of the local churches directly but was realized in some proposal coming from the center.

Those who promoted “the flow principle” actually despised the blessings the various churches had known and declared repeatedly that the old was holding back the implementation of the latest flow. The keeping of the “Oneness of the Spirit”, which was and is vital to the experience of the riches of Christ and to Christ being glorified in the church, was replaced with “oneness with the ministry, the office etc., and any and every mention of previous times of blessing was dismissed and seen as competition to this new fangled invented oneness.

I understand that the LSM is putting out their version of history now. They will not say much at all about any blessing the churches and saints knew except to relate it to something of WL’s ministry. I am in a bit of a quandary. I have been advised to move forward and cover the history from a high level rather then get into too much detail regarding the many times of the rich experience of our wonderful Lord Jesus Christ. I agree with this and now will concentrate on my original plan to tell the story from the perspective of the leadership, their good points and positive contributions and their errors in truth and practice and failures in character and virtue.

But I am very concerned that what we learned of Christ not be lost in all the commotion of the leadership problems. Eph 4:20-21, But ye did not so learn Christ; if so be that ye heard him, and were taught in him, even as truth is in Jesus: For several years our experience was just what is referred to in the above passage. We heard Him almost daily and in nearly every meeting. In my home where my family and several single brothers lived, oh how rich was our daily living. We all looked forward to the evening meals and sweet fellowship. My children loved the brothers and waited excitedly for their arrival each afternoon. The brothers were constantly bringing friends, classmates and co-workers over for meals and fellowship. Many young unbelievers found Christ at my table or in my living room. We all laughed and cried and rejoiced together and there was real love among us. Perhaps I should add an appendix after the main account is finished regarding what the church life was like in pre LSM days.

But back to Terry’s question. None of the flows was an attempt to recover former blessings but were the exercise of the point of view that all that the Lord wanted came from a single source and was contained in a new activity, “flow.”

A believer in Jesus Christ who is seeking to be a true disciple,

Hope, Don Rutledge