Quote:
Originally Posted by OBW
Maybe it didn't hit you the same way or at the same time, but in early 1973, I already was pretty clear that there was THE church (us) and then there were the divisions (everyone else). I had even already heard Nee and Lee referred to as apostles before Spring began that year.
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I think I had a somewhat unique experience compared to a lot of these posts. I was saved into the LC off of Rice Univ, by a brother who preached the gospel every day that I knew him, David Campbell. He was not your typical anything. The LC could not get a campus ministry on Rice because they couldn't get anyone admitted. As a result all of our fruit had to come from the gospel. As a result no one told me anything about what I could or couldn't do, I met with Campus Crusade, I took a religion course where I met my first "fruit". Mike became the 2nd brother on the campus and very soon we had 3 and then 4. I wrote articles in the school paper. I invited a professor to the meeting who wrote for a major Texas magazine and put an article about the church in the magazine.
(From what I have read this experience is quite different from what one of Jame's Barber's kids had at Austin. They seemed to treat it as a federal offense that he had met with christians on campus.)
I would credit David Campbell for shielding me from all this garbage. He was supposed to have died as a kid, but they saved his life with a very unique therapy. He gave his life to the Lord and just preached from then on. My first year in the LC I stayed at his house with his wife and son. Every Lord's day we would get up around 5 and drive out to some gospel contact of his from preaching that week. We would knock on the guys door for 5 minutes and then go back to the car. I would look at him like he was crazy, we drove an hour out here, the guys in there, I'm not leaving until he opens that door. I would go back and bang on the door for another 15 minutes until he opened the door. He would try to give us some excuse, but we wouldn't budge, then we would take another 20 minutes while he got dressed. On the way to the Church we would stop to get him something to eat. In the end we would walk into a 10am meeting about 30 minutes late. David lived across the street from the meeting hall, so we quickly developed a reputation as being the "delinquents" the guys who couldn't even get to the meeting on time.
But by my senior year on campus our gospel preaching was prevailing. No other word to describe it. There were four of us that ate lunch together (all students) and David would show up as often as he could. Each day we picked a different cafeteria. Before that year was out everyone on that campus knew who we were. We worked as a team. One brother loved to initiate the conversation and then just sit back. I would usually jump in and share something I had just enjoyed that day, something I had never shared with anyone. Before I finished Mike would jump in with his NT and point out verse references to support whatever I had shared and then David would ask the person to pray. There was no "plan" this is just how it worked out. We never tried to use the LSM, we wanted something that was fresh from our own experience.