[aron]

"Despite her unfulfilled dreams of a university education, her literacy was apparently not insignificant, for she soon began to pour out streams of prophecies that blended the incoherent and the indignant with the startling and the heartening. Here word were then recorded, edited, and compiled into several volumes by seven unmarried women whom Zhao appointed as "the seven stars" and "the seven Spirits" to serve the "female Christ." Zhao himself assumed the new office of "the high priest" (da jisi) to manage the merging enterprise in her name. In Xiao shujuan, or the Little Book, which also reappeared under several other titles displayed her considerable command of the mystical , eschatological vocabulary beque3athed by the Little Flock. She announced the passage of the Age of Grace, the second period of human history that Jesus had inaugurated, and the dawning of the Age of the Kingdom with her own appearance.

The claim may have been extravagant, but it required no great leap of imagination her part: in transplanting premillennial dispensational claims (with its basic tripartite structure) from the West into Chinese soil more than half a century earlier, Watchman Nee not only secured for the Little Flock the preeminent place dint God's end-time scheme, he also inadvertently - and continually - dangled in front of the eschatologically astute fresh messianic possibilities. Since the current age was soon to expire, a new cosmic age with its new revelations waited at the doorstep."

Redeemed by Fire: the Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China, by Xi Lian

And when Lee died, they told us, "It is now the Age of Small Potatoes. The Age of Spiritual Giants is over." Not coincidental at all, I'd bet. Same cultural lens.