Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
I find contextual factors to be key to understanding what happened. "Many [Chinese] Christians desired to distance themselves from the denominational model, which they considered to be a Western import." Also we see Cheng Jingyi's "impassioned plea" to the 1910 Edinburgh Conference for the Chinese church to be free from foreign entanglement.
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I agree 100% that understanding the contextual factors helps to make sense of it all. Nee created a model that remained successful in China as communism took over. It worked in China, but anyone who is honest with themselves will admit that it didn't work so well elsewhere. LSM has claimed that some large number of believers in China have been influenced by Nee. I won't argue that. But when you look elsewhere around the world, the same cannot be said of Nee. Why is that? It seems to me that context has everything to do with it. The conclusion that we can arrive at is that the local church model cannot work in a cookie-cutter fashion, deprived of the context under which it was envisioned. This is what I think a lot of members are ignorant of. They feel Nee/Lee presented them with a viable model for the "normal Christian church life", yet there is no honest assessment of the current state of the movement, especially the failures along the way. Had the door been open for assessment and revision, I don't think the LCM would exist today as we know it.
Besides an ignorance of the contextual factors, I think what has really plagued the LCM is idealism. The article makes mention of this as a point of criticism of Nee (which I believe applies to Lee as well). Consider the following statement: "
According to Dennis McCallum, Nee was not only idealistic, he was hyper-idealistic. The word compromise was not in his vocabulary." Idealism can be blinding, and I speak that from my own experience. I was once immersed in LC ideals, so much so, that I was completely oblivious to what the LC really was or how outsiders viewed us. Take someone like Nee who had a good grasp on scriptures, who was an avid reader, who probably knew a bit too much for his own good, and then let him begin teaching others at a young age. That was just begging for idealism to creep in. Nee's whole ministry was centered on ideals. He "saw" the inner-life teachings from the writings of others, and presumed that everyone else was solely focused on outward things. He "saw" the problems associated with denominations, and he presumed that he could create a better model. I don't necessarily fault him for wanting something better than what he saw, rather, I think people were too quick to follow him, to provide unquestioned support of his ideals.
Ideals are born when there is something supposedly inferior to which there can be a contrast. If something is perceived to be a big enough problem, then it's hard to have compromise. I think that's what happened with Nee. He began viewing things as bigger problems than they really were, so everything became a black and white issue. Everything not of Nee (and later Lee) became viewed as inferior when contrasted to the LC ideals, and that type of thinking has blinded the movement. It is good to have ideals, however, when everything becomes a black and white issue, trouble is ahead.