Quote:
Originally Posted by UntoHim
Speaker, I would be very interested in you expounding upon what you mean by "an Local Church environment". Do you and the brothers and sisters in your fellowship still use the Recovery Version with the footnotes and the messages of Witness Lee has your main source of teaching? Do you still consider your fellowship as the only genuine Church in your city? Inquiring minds want to know!
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UntoHim,
Thanks for asking. Here's a thumbnail sketch of who we are in my locality.
We are still a "local church" because we do believe all the believers in a community are one body, one church despite the walls erected around them (including our own). Time and tears have helped us to see this reality. So how are we different from other assemblies in our town? Well, besides the style of meetings, teaching, etc. (the minor things) the only real difference is that we have made a conscious decision not to divide ourselves by name. I myself have struggled mightily with this and I do believe I've come out the other side of the tunnel on it. It's a big deal simply not to take a name. The "Church in ___" is not our name, despite the fact that we are registered as such. By standing naked in name, we are declaring, "Lord, we have no strength to be one with others but we do have the strength and the vision to say this is our hope and calling."
I know that will seem ridiculous to some of you, but it is a big point to me. It is simply a contract we signed with God to stand for oneness despite our inability to back up that stand.
As for the particulars in questions you asked, we do not use the Recovery Version as our standard. A few still bring it to the meetings, but it is rarely what we read from. That said, I myself do refer to it when I prepare to speak in meetings (which I do from time to time) just to see what Witness Lee had to say about matters. I find I usually not only agree with his take, I cherish it. But not always. I recall at Lee's memorial service one of the soon-to-be Blended Brothers stood in front and declared, "In 397 (or whenever it was) the Bible was canonized and in 1997 the interpretation of it was as well." That statement marked the day I realized these guys have gone off the deep end.
Witness Lee is not the main source of our teaching, at least not directly. But those of us who have been around (some since 1969's famous Erie Conference) cannot and do not desire to purge ourselves of the truth we found over the years in the (I hate to use this word) "Recovery." It's in us till we die. So indirectly, Lee influences us still. But we seldom read anything in the meeting from him. I must hasten to add, however, that in recent days, we are becoming less afraid to use his name. I think maybe the half-life of his toxicity is about up.
Our particular locality has long been an outlier among the churches. We never really bought into a lot of the strange practices that evolved in the churches. We used to pray-read in meetings, but not aggressively. We never did the mandatory calling on the Lord in the meetings. One travelling brother who came through once told me after the meeting in which he spoke, "Get the saints to make some noise!" I guess, compared to other assemblies, we were the Quakers.
So there's a little view as to where we are. I think if you came to one of our meetings, you would recognize us as a "local church" but certainly not a typical one.