Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
"It's the life, life, life, that makes me want to shout - Hallelujah!! Praise the Lord!!"
So went the song. Life was pouring in, through our youthful and ignorant enthusiams, trained and manipulated by Lee & cronies. But what happened when the enthusiasms got too extreme? Clamp down time. Beat on a few sheep, and although some will leave, the rest are now cowed into submission. Perfect cult fodder. In Lee's phraseology it was a turn in focus from "life" to "truth".
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Either extreme of the LC is something that can be attributed to WL, and it's funny how he was not willing to take responsibility for either one. When things got out of hand, he was nowhere to be seen. When the legalism became too intense, he blamed it on his minions.
A pattern that I noticed in the LC is whenever a troubling situation arose (locally), there was the tendency to dismiss by saying that the brothers aren't perfect, or that the saints are "still learning", or that the church-life is just a big 'hospital'. There are all kinds of excuses, and all these excuses lead members down the path of viewing themselves as inferior and stupid. Of course, WL is viewed as the wise one who had all the advice to 'fix' everything.
In essence, the underlying message becomes that because the average Joe can't seem to do anything right, there is a need to be trained and 'perfected'. The train of though goes down the path of "
only in the FTTA can someone learn how to practice the church-life correctly, only in the FTTA can someone learn to not make the silly mistakes that everyone else seems to make. Two years in the training = twenty years in the church life" It all misattributes the real problem at hand. The real con-man remained at large until the day of this death. And his seven-fold-blendified continuation would have nothing to do with holding him or themselves accountable.