[Trapped]

They are blinded. Minoru still talks to the leading brothers about showing up in a new city and "taking the city by storm!"

Whatever that means, and as if that has ever happened before.

Minoru thinks he is some kind of army general. He's really just leading a group of starved, gasping souls.

They have stepped inside the box of Witness Lee and gone to work building up walls all around themselves for decades, so all they see are their own four walls and they think that is their entire world.

They are deluded, plain and simple.

We are talking about a cult here. (We have threads on that c-word, so I don't want this thread derailed by talking about it).

One that has a hierarchical submission structure.
One that follows one man as the unique man who was God's mouthpiece.
One that threatens its members for reading contrary information.
One that severs all gifts within the body related to speaking or writing if it is anything different from what their "oracle" said.
One that keeps members unwittingly in constant fear of saying the wrong thing, talking to the wrong people, reading the wrong thing, or "touching death".
One that threatens God's wrath upon you if you leave them.

I've talked my face blue in the past to saints about problems and how to address them and the loss of church kids and the lack of love, but those things aren't important to them. I think more and more people within the lower ranks are starting to smell the dead rat, at least based on my conversations, which is just an anecdotal conclusion, of course. Their constant harping on authority is dis-affecting even the most all-in members. But they are The Recovery Which Is Constantly Under Attack and can never point the blame at themself. And for all their inward focus and inward navel gazing, they simply cannot look inward and see their problem is just themselves.

If you close the doors and lock down the facility so that everyone can only breath Witness Lee's air, you will get stagnation.

But they are so deceived they will speak information contrary to their own experience. New members leave because they realize the extreme focus on "the ministry" is abnormal, and then current members will say, "oh, they had a problem with, like, our only following one man or focus on the ministry or whatever" as if it's a ludicrous observation, even though that very thing is what they have literally lived themselves for years.

It's mind control. Thought control. Cognitive dissonance. Hypocrisy. Fear.

It's inherently un-recoverable without new information being fed in to the ranks to wake them up.