[Freedom]

I want to switch gears a little now and use a LC Q&A session as a case study. In the LSM publication entitled A Timely Word, the very end has some questions that are answered by WL (circa the late 80’s ‘turmoil’). WL gets asked the following question:
Some of the saints may hear some rumors or some gossip. They may not become negative themselves or cause some trouble, but the symptom in many cases is that they become discouraged. They lose their heart for the church life. They lose their confidence in the Lord’s recovery. There are many cases where this causes them to question the leadership in their church or the ministry among us. This last training on Leviticus was a real medicine, a real balm, and a real help. But I am concerned that many of us may have certain cases in our church where brothers or sisters are not negative, but they heard some gossip or rumor, which may be totally unfounded. There may be some element in what they heard that causes them to question. They themselves are not opposing, and they do not form a party. But they lose all their enjoyment, they lose all their heart, and they lose all their confidence. In many cases they do not even express what they heard, but there is a kind of withdrawing from the church life and a withdrawing from the service. This is a real weakening to these saints. How can we help this kind of brother or sister either in a public way or a personal way?

Before we get to how WL responds to this question, I think it is interesting to consider the implications of the question itself. First off, this question is regarding those who leave the LC in a ‘quiet’ way, those who don’t voice their concerns or anything like that. If we separate ex-members into two categories – those who left vocally and those who left quietly, it goes without saying that the vocal ones are the biggest targets to get called whatever names or derogatory terms that people in the LC could come up with. So it makes perfect sense to operate under the assumption that taking the ‘pacifist’ approach to leaving would be the preferred method by the average LC member.

So in my mind, what this question is really about is basically a covert attempt to make the point that when people leave the LC, they are afraid to speak up because they know that the LC leadership loves to shoot the messenger. Let’s say someone leaves in a vocal way. It does provide an immediate form of feedback for the LC, but they don’t want to hear it. But ironically, when someone leaves quietly, no one knows what happened. Sometimes even the person is involved in various areas of service - lets say they play piano in meetings, they serve with the college students, etc., and then one day they are just gone. They stop answering phone calls, nobody knows what happened. Obviously that's very concerning, so it's perfectly reasonably that everyone would want to find out what happened.

But at the same time people in the LC very well know that the issue is more complex than the typical explanations like the person has become ‘dormant’, so nobody wants to be the one to try to initiate contact or figure out what’s going on, because if they become the new messenger, then they are the ones who get shot instead. It really makes for a bizarre situation.