Roger has said it best.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger
The vast majority of the saints in the Living Stream Church are precious and sweet ... Also, the vast majority of the elders and deacons are precious and sweet. I can remember most of them with nothing but fondness.
Lest I be called a Lee hater, I must also say that I received tremendous help from the ministry of Witness Lee.
I guess all this should preface my statement that the system is rotten to the core.
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And YP has correctly noticed that the ones that seemed to want to carry this thread to the worst extremes have essentially vacated.
My assessment is that:
- While there is both sound doctrine in the LC, it is buried in leaven, self aggrandizement, and false teachings cloaked in Biblical terms.
- While the LC and the LSM are full of precious and sweet Christians, the structure around them is full of corrupt, greedy, and/or self-centered men who will use the money of the loyal for their own personal gain or that very loyalty for their personal prestige.
Don: While each church was surely unique, the spread of the “ministry’s” control was unstoppable. The church in Dallas may not have been an open source of the kind of things that BlessD and Juliep speak, but it was used for them anyway by the hierarchy that surrounded you/us. You do not do yourself any favor by seeking to spare anyone or anyplace of inquiry.
Despite my statements elsewhere that the LC is a sound evangelical group with problems, here I say that those problems are so strong and high that there is little chance of saving it. (I hope that the GLA can prove me wrong.)
Truth is in Christ, not the LC. The LC has become corrupt. It began long ago, even before Benson visited Houston to shame Jane. Much of it was for so long hidden, even from you. But you began to see it some period before you left. It has continued to grow. It is time to open the gates of the LC and let the flock out of their captivity.
For those who revere Lee, it is time to stop. He may have brought much truth together in a way we had never seen it done before (at least in the 60s and 70s). But he mixed that truth with leaven. It has been chemically changed from pure truth to yeast-truth. You can no longer separate the two. You must start over. To do so does not require Lee or Nee, else you risk reintroducing the leaven you seek to expel.
Lee also brought much of the corruption upon himself through his money schemes which he mixed with the church, then in pushing his immoral son on the churches through the LSM and lying about those who sought to bring that shame to an end.
Unfortunately, that means that those wonderful, sweet, pure Christians are constantly being inundated with that leaven, to their detriment, and associated with the sins of their leaders by their silence, especially when they simply look the other way due to following the unbiblical teachings of deputy authority.
In another post you mentioned several names and family names to suggest that those could not be so corrupt and that they would not knowingly tolerate such corruption. You may be correct with respect to the 70s, but we are no longer sure that any of those are clearly not now corrupted at some level (although I'm fairly sure that some are not). In any case, there are several leading ones in the Texas region who were that corrupt at that time. Ignoring BP, I think that at least one of them was in Dallas from about 1975. Some of the others in those meetings may have merely been invited to observe the control that others could exert. I'm sure that it was effective.