Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
Localism as defined by Nee & Lee was an ideational template superimposed upon scripture. An ideal that never existed. And this ideation has never come to pass, no matter the attempts.
As long as you allow the Nee/Lee programme the "Ground" in you it will have power over your thinking. But it was just a dream. It wasn't real. It was an idea that didn't correspond to reality.
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The Localism idea as put forth was hugely successful. Suddenly Nee had dozens of groups, people streaming in out of the denominations. I believe the success of "Chinese Brethrenism" was a reaction to decades of ugly and loathsome Western domination. The foreign god Jesus was attached by not too many degrees of separation from the foreign devils who sent their troops to the Peking Legation to storm the Old City.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Peking_(1900)
So Nee's idea offered a way out. But my point has been that it had no extrinsic reality of its own save by its successful appeal to many, any more than Joseph Smith's revelations from the Angel of Moroni are validated by the millions today who adhere.
And Lee likewise; his appeal to the thousands of young people in the 1960s was based on ignorance, and disaffection. I posted a testimony by Arthur M Casci, who was going to join Moses Berg's Jesus Family, and was warned off by a friend. A couple of weeks later he met some friends who were caravanning to a Local Church conference, and he was "in the church life". But the success of the movement rested on such unsuspecting naïfs, who didn't challenge the presumptions and pre-suppositions that lay behind the message.
Until you break it down to its constituent components, and see the illogic that lies behind it, the "local" appeal can still run your thinking. The whole thing rests on a strange, subjective dualism, where the local churches are "local" but not
that local. Sorta local. "Local Church" local. As long as you swallow that disjunction, they can lead you by the nose forever. And even if you physically leave due to some bad events or personalities or just general disgust, the impact on your thinking won't abate. Your scorn for all Christian assemblies, or the vast majority of them, will continue. You'll go on forever looking for that legitimate church, as defined by someone else.