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The local saints also felt to promote the new Recovery Version of the New Testament in Portuguese to the positive saints in the surrounding areas, so we found a neighborhood community center similar to a chapel to host a seminar on the Lord's Day evening. The week before it, we prayed and visited homes of the positive saints to personally invite them to come. This way proved to be quite profitable, since it gave us an opportunity to visit more new faces and have fellowship with them. Twenty-four of them ended up coming to the seminar. On the morning of that same Lord's Day, the brothers had planned a blending time with a few positive saints in another city about 45 minutes from Campinas , as well as, some scattered saints in other surrounding nearby cities. The time of fellowship was so encouraging for us all. Some even testified that our blending time reminded them and had the same "taste" of when they first touched the genuine church life back in the 1970's. Our time ended with a long love feast full of delicious Brazilian food in abundance. O how enjoyable it was to see all the hearts of the saints refreshed and encouraged by the fellowship!
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Dear brother Woodrome,
To the extent that your message reflects the peculiar partisanship terminology the Local Church has now developed of "positive" and "negative" in classifying the saints of God, I would expect you would at least feel some shame, especially after the physical ministration of one of the "negatives" in offering medical care with a pure heart. To the extent that some have been damaged by all of that divisiveness and would actually condemn the medical services, no word need be spoken, even from a human perspective. It is appalling how some will act to so completely cut themselves off from fellowship with other saints in the name of vaunted religious principles.
However, to the extent that your report reflects yet another renewed time of revival for the Local Church, it should be more than clear that the comments among your group from time to time about the glory days of the 1970s reflect quite negatively on the normal situation, a fact that brother Lee himself recognized sometimes when speaking about these sorts of revivals. Moreover, as Lee also taught, such revival efforts are attempts to breathe new life into a dead corpse. The corpse is not the Body of Christ, brother, but a denomination. The Body needs no revivals because it is constituted uniquely by the indewlling Living God.
While I do agree that there is in the world something appropriately termed "the New Testament ministry," I must sharply disagree with exclusive application of that phrase to the enthusiastic LSM-branded salesmanship that bears about the quarantine-enforced "One Publication" doctrine in every place. I am not alone in this observation and critique. While reasonably advertised as the leading publisher of the Bible teachings of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee, the unsupportable claims of LSM and its associated co-workers of holding a unique and unquestionable leadership position in God's overall plan on the earth have done great harm around the globe and unfortunately the efforts of those like yourself to promote these myths at home and abroad does as much to extend the injury as anything else. I pray that you may purchase the eye salve from the Lord to see my meaning here.
You and I both are members of Christ and members of each other in reality and apart from negative and polarizing terminology such as "positive" and "negative" saints. Our oneness is in Christ alone, not in Lee, LSM or the Local Church.
Having said this much, I commend you to your labors in the Lord. And to the extent that your efforts are not designed to persuade that the Local Church is "the one true holy universal and apostolic church" I can fully join my prayers with yours. Indeed, the Spirit and the Bride say "Come!"
Just take heed how you build, brother. All our work will be tried by fire in the day and partisan and denominational efforts will certainly be consumed.
Grace to you.