[UntoHim]

Originally Posted by Roger

Actually, the system is rotten to the core. The tragedy is that you have these men who know nothing about the Holy Spirit, trying to tame the flesh with religious ordinances. It’s a recipe for disaster....
It has been my observation that the root problem with the Living Stream Church is an improper view of, and a dying loyalty to Witness Lee. It would also appear that with many who have left, the LSM style problems that continue to hang on with them, is still their refusal to cast Witness Lee in the proper light

Roger covered a lot of ground in this post here... I will just hit upon what I think are some of the most important issues at hand.

LCS stands for "Local Church System"...the thread starter can correct me if I'm wrong. At the risk of getting into trouble with the semantics police, I prefer to call to The Local Church a “religion” rather then a “system”, and here is why - A system (e.g. a belief system) can be examined, studied and critiqued totally apart from the people who imbibe and practice it. This is virtually impossible to do with a group such as The Local Church. Furthermore, “systems" rarely develop into world-wide cults... one never hears of a "system cult" causing all sorts of problems in society or running off to a secluded jungle to commit mass suicide. Frequently these groups developed into what is sometimes called “a personality cult”. Thankfully, most of these do not go to the extreme of the worst case scenario of mass suicide. **And no, I am NOT comparing the Local Church to Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple – only to show the extremes that some religious groups which are dominated by a single personality can go to.

For all their efforts, denials and insisting to not be known as a “religion”, Witness Lee and his followers sure did a bang up job of forming, growing and promoting a rather complex and comprehensive religious organization, complete with it’s own creeds, rules, cultural norms, leadership structure and headquarters. In retrospect, all these things existed while Witness Lee was alive as well; but at that time they were passed on directly from the person and work of Lee himself. In a sense, the person of Witness Lee continues in the form of “The Blended Brothers”, who claim to be “Brother Lee’s continuation”, and his work continues in the form of “The One Publication” – simply Lee’s spoken ministry in printed form.

For years and years, Lee claimed that the Local Churches were not an “organization” but rather an “organism”. So how is it that when the lead “organism” (or at least the heart and soul of the organism) is dead and buried for over a decade, can they still claim to be a living organism? Well the answer is very simple – it is because The Local Church of Witness Lee has NEVER BEEN an organism at all, it is and has always been a religious organization, or more simply put – A Religion.

Ok, I’m drifting here…let me try to reel this post back in…

Roger quoted: “The tragedy is that you have these men who know nothing about the Holy Spirit, trying to tame the flesh with religious ordinances. It’s a recipe for disaster....” While I think the term “nothing” here may be a little over-the-top, “almost nothing” would not be a stretch at all when it comes to Witness Lee and many of the leaders in The Local Church. Many modern-day evangelical Christians define “religion” as man’s fleshly attempt at following and/or representing God without the benefit of his blessing or presence, and the genuine love and potent power that comes with them. Church history is replete with almost countless examples of Christian groups that got a good start, only to fall away and eventually deteriorate into dead religion, or even worse. Most of the time the fall can be directly attributed to the phenomena Roger has so aptly described above… “tame the flesh with religious ordinances”. When will we ever get it through our thick heads that “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”? Ummm… the religionists there in Anaheim and on the Internet rail against contemporary Christian worship and music as “the works of the flesh”, all the while they do almost nothing that does not require copious amounts of the works of the flesh. And this is what religion does – it turns the relying on the working of the Holy Spirit to the relying on the works of the flesh.

Let’s boil this down to the lowest common denominator. Would the Holy Spirit abuse? Would the Holy Spirit round up a teenager and force her to confess before a bunch of stuffy older men that she had broken one of the cherished religious ordinances? (thou shalt not hold hands or kiss until you’re engaged to be married). Would the Holy Spirit round up a grown, mature woman, in front of those same older, stuffy dudes, and claim that she was starting some rebellion because she was getting together with other sisters, getting into the Word and other forms of Christian literature? (thou shalt only read Living Stream material) Would the Holy Spirit make some Christian brother stand up in front of hundreds of people and reveal certain peculiarities and character flaws, or have them pointed out to him from somebody behind a microphone? (remember those “perfecting” meetings?)

Bottom line: The Holy Spirit works on hearts and minds, He is saving the transformation of our flesh until the next age.