[Betsy]

Originally Posted by Ohio

More egregious to me was the "little savers" scheme. I don't remember its exact name, but it surfaced after Daystar in an attempt to confiscate the savings of the saints throughout the Recovery.

Once the money gets taken from them, the investors are told to "consider it an offering."

Originally Posted by aron

I don't think Daystar was an isolated incident, either, but one of a pattern of incidents. Didn't Lee also get caught trying to smuggle gold out of the Philippines?

That is so sad and not surprising.....fleecing the virginal flock.

So my lr came in and asked me what God has been telling me lately. I said, not much, but I have been reading the works of Watchman Née and Witness Lee. She likes it most when I read them. So she wanted to know what I'd been reading, so I read some of the quotes kindly provided by Indiana as follows!

"The worker to whom God has given fresh light upon His truth should encourage all who receive that truth to swell the ranks of the local church, not to range themselves around him. Otherwise, the churches will be made to serve the ministry, not the ministry the churches, and the “churches” established will be ministerial “churches,” not local ones. The sphere of a church is not the sphere of any ministry, but the sphere of the locality. Wherever ministry is made the occasion for the forming of a church, there you have the beginning of a new denomination.”
(The Normal Christian Church Life, p138-139, Nee).

"If we wish to maintain a scriptural position, then we must see to it that the churches we found in various places only represent localities, not doctrines. If our “church” is not separated from other children of God on the ground of locality alone, but stands for the propagation of some particular doctrine, then we are decidedly a sect, however true to the Word of God our teaching may be..."
(Normal Christian Church Life, pp. 113-114).

“The greater our gift is, the greater is the danger that we will take over the church and keep it in our hands. This will greatly damage the church life. We must learn not only how to minister in the local church, but also how to keep our hands off the church. This is not easy. The local church is not our personal enterprise. The local church is the property of the local saints, not some worker’s business. Some gifted persons put a local church in their pocket. Oh, this is a real problem!"

“All the local saints must realize that the local church is their church. If the local saints are not clear concerning this, they will allow a gifted person to take the local churches into his own hands and treat it as his personal property. Then the entire church life will be finished. The local churches belong to the local saints. The gifted persons are just the means to perfect the saints to function; they are only the instruments used by the Lord to build up the churches."

"Consider the situation in Christianity today. Look at the situation even from the time of the Reformation: four or five hundred years have passed, and it is still basically the same. Whenever a gifted person is raised up, a certain kind of work is established. I establish my work, you establish your work, he establishes his work. Then the church is gone. This is the source of all the divisions. However, if one gifted brother comes to build a local church, and a second gifted brother comes to build up the same church, there will be no division. All the work must be for the church, not for the workers. The ministry should be for the church; the church should never be for the ministry. We must be exceedingly clear concerning this principle. We must drop all wrong practices. A gifted brother should keep his hands off the local church. Although a gifted brother may sometimes not speak openly in a way of ministry, yet he still may quietly maneuver behind the scenes. Any such maneuvering damages the church. All gifts and gifted persons must be entirely for the local church. This is a tremendously vital matter.”
(W.L., The Vision of God’s Building, 1964)

Then lr said of course Christ is the center, and I let it go at that since she did listen to the above. Then she said of course the ministry is for the churches, Ron Kangas only makes $1200/mo and when he goes on vacation with his family he has to use a tent because he is so poor. I couldn't resist showing her the 2013 tax returns where is salary is listed at 93K / year. She wasn't so happy about that, but then decided he deserved a living wage, although she expressed a concern about all the saints being returned from Europe since there was no more money to support their work.