Quote:
Originally Posted by Trapped
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.
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The LC finds itself in an increasingly hypocritical position. They will give messages lamenting over the lack of increase, then in other instances, they go back to giving the same old messages on authority and submission and making sure everyone knows that the LC is a “narrow way” with no room for personality, gifts, opinions, ministries, etc, etc.
A big eye-opener for me was when some local elders started making a big deal about getting an increase. As expected, the effort didn’t amount to anything in terms of an increase, but they sure did succeed in getting everyone to feel like a failure. One of the elders even went so far to say that if we were going to home meetings and not bringing “new ones” then we were wasting our time. I actually stopped attending the home meetings because of that (mostly in order to make a point about). By that time I didn’t take anything they said seriously.
So this actually brings me to the main reason that I started this thread. Let’s take for example the situation that I just described. It is a classic example of a hard-line LC elder who pushes something, and in doing so ends up driving people out of the LC. Don’t get me wrong, my intention here isn't to look back and wish that things had been different. And actually that kind of stuff ended up being a blessing in disguise in the sense that it served as a bit of an awakening. But when looking at the issue from the perspective of the LC members and the problem that they are trying to deal with, it’s not really that complicated of an issue. The problem is more apparent than they even realize.
What about instances like when an elder tells a young couple in college that they need to drop their relationship? Or what about when a college graduate gets chewed out for not wanting to go to the FTTA? What about when a serving one goes off on a young person for wearing a hat in the meeting? These are all things I actually saw happen in the LC, and in some case it literally amounted to some overly-zealous LC member who was trying to "follow the ministry" undoing months or even years of work in a matter of minutes. Can people in the LC truthfully say that they don’t take issue with this type of nonsense? Do they even care that that perhaps it undermines everything they work so hard for? In essence, it is a simple issue and even simple changes could likely go a long way. But they’re not really interested in that, and you have to wonder what world they are really living in. Their leaders like Minoru certainly aren’t living in the real world.