Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul H B Chang
Part of the success of the FTTA is due to its extensive integration into a larger network of churches. The FTTA publishes no advertisements and has no staff devoted to expanding its outreach or enrollment. Its growing student body is almost entirely a testament to the examples of its alumni in their home congregations. Most trainees enter the training after being inspired by their interactions with training graduates. Training graduates thus produce more entering trainees, in a rapidly repeatable cycle.
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This is a lie, as
Freedom's testimony has shown. College conferences are peppered with exhortations by LSM employees and all year long, students are continually pressured, often with subtlety but often overtly. "Stay in the pipeline, don't be a dropout. You want to be an overcomer, right?"
I view the paper as a thinly-veiled whitewash, attempting to cover the absurdity of an institutionalized movement which was founded on rejection of every other movement as the product of fallen humanity's organizational efforts. Somehow this new organization wasn't one at all, but a living organism. Yet every other organization by contrast was dead, lifeless, hopelessly corrupt. So you see naive statements like "no staff devoted to outreach or enrollment" when it's exactly the opposite. All those help-ful "co-workers" and "trainers" exist to suck others into the same system.
These pseudo-scholarly efforts remind me of the Mormons holding a conference in Provo, Utah, and inviting Christian scholars to participate. They don't care for the Dead Sea Scrolls, but they want to use reputable scholarship, so they hold a conference to paper over thier cult status.
I don't consider the LC to be a cult on par with the LDS, but the principle this is the same: a post-protestant fringe sect reliant on the legitimacy of Protestant institutions it left, even while it decries them as whorish Babylonian abominations. What hymns do they sing in the FTTA? Ones by Luther, Darby, Wesley, Crosby, Cowper, Newton et al. - while they deny any association with "Christianity", which in their narrative has fallen into institutional torpor.