I don't buy a lot of the WN/WN authority and submission argument.
This is the way I look at authority. If you are going to join a group, then you should respect the order in that group. If you can't, for whatever reason good or bad, then don't make a big fuss, and perhaps the answer (which might very well be fully of the Lord) is to move on.
I believe the pastors of my church should be respected. But I don't believe they have authority in the way Nee/Lee taught it. God asks me to respect the role he has given them. If I cannot handle that then I need to come to grips with why. If the why is God, perhaps I need to confront them in a respectable way. Or perhaps I just need to move on. All as the Lord leads. But blessed are the peacemakers.
But the idea that someone's "authority" looms, e.g. WL's or an elder's, over me wherever I go, like an umbrella, is, I believe, a false teaching that usurps the Holy Spirit's rightful position.
This is one of the gnarly problems with the one-church-one-city belief as practiced by the LCs. It gives way too much power to so-called local elders--effectively giving them authority over every Christian in the city. I think this idea is absurd and indefensible.
A corollary to this is the manifest weakness in the so-called practicality of the local ground doctrine. You can argue all you want that there is one church in the city. But none of that proves or can ever prove that a certain set of men are the elders of that church.
In fact, there is no way to determine who the elders of the one church in a city (if there is indeed such a thing) are. Who they are is entirely speculation. Which brings us back to the practical necessity of voluntary cooperation with the order of the particular group in which you find yourself, rather than some insistance on absolute submission to a set of elders whose ostensive position is assumed rather than proved. Absolute submission to an assumption is foolish.
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Originally Posted by Suannehill
My experience is that Authority and Submission as taught by WN was a very scriptural thing. Titus wrote a couple of books for sisters, practical and down to earth. However, it gets a little muddy in LSM practice, because I believe a great deal of the teaching had cultural roots that were backed with scripture. In other words, the culture dictated the practice, and scripture was used to back them up.
This is just my opinion...but I saw those sisters in Mansfield rise up in rebellion...they had absolutely no respect for spiritual authority. They only wanted their way. And their way matched Benson's...now there's a match, eh?
Anyway, I kept encouraging them to go back to the books on spiritual authority, because there is an authority in all of creation. Authority is position. The top branch of the tree has a higher position than those close to the ground. Not better, just different. Each branch functions in it's position. The top has nothing to Lord over, or humiliate. It is simply on top.
Sue
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