[OBW]

Back in about 2008, I added the study of the Emerging Church movement (“ECM”) to my ongoing analysis of the teachings and practices of Nee, Lee, and the local churches. While the ECM had been around for roughly two decades, it had been mostly hidden to many people until after 2000. But by about 2009 some had already begun to write epitaphs for the movement, and by 2015 it had essentially disappeared from the landscape. While I do not want to hijack the study of Nee, Lee, and the LCs and go into a detailed description of the ECM, there was one thing that those within the ECM talked about, and that was often spoken against by those on the outside looking in. That one thing was the idea of “deconstruction” of the faith.

And the idea of challenging one’s faith might seem scary if you consider the number of church participants, and even members, of groups from RCC to mainline protestant, to Evangelical, to charismatic free group that “believe” because that is what they were born into. That might even be a larger number among the evangelical end of the spectrum than is often admitted because they mostly do not bother giving their young a targeted course of learning (a catechism) that puts the core of the faith in front of them in a cohesive way. Instead, they grow up Baptist, Church of Christ, Assemblies of God, etc., because that’s what their parents were. And their parents before them. So they are ripe to have a crisis of faith at some point and need to come to understand what it is that they believe. Or don’t believe.

And then, rather than just deal with “doubts,” someone comes along and suggests that it should be more deliberate and gives it a name like “deconstruction.” Sounds like demolition. And if there is nothing to replace it, then it might be scary. And if too many in the church you lead go through it and end out somewhere else (or nowhere) it might mean a big problem for the financial survival of your assembly.

The word seems to be counter to the idea of faith and surety. And surely some who took to deconstruct their faith ultimately ended out with none. Or one not recognizable as more than barely Christian. But there was generally seen to be a vast array of outcomes from the exercise ranging from a return to their roots, but without as much of the dogmas and folk religion, to a very different base of faith, to the discovery that they really don’t have faith. Blame it on the idea of deconstruction if you will. But with or without it, it is probably evidence that they really didn’t believe what they seemed to believe before the start of the exercise. Consider it a willful act of discovering what kind of soil they really are. Probably not the best way to think about it, but still a possible result of the exercise.

“Deconstruction isn’t something that anyone just decides to do as if it is on your “to-do list somewhere between picking up the dry cleaning and walking the dog. It is simply something that happens along the way.” Something happens. There is a death in the family that seems to undermine some aspect of your faith. You lose a job. You read a passage and you suddenly wonder how they got that teaching out of it. So you begin to ask questions and the answers aren’t satisfactory. Somewhere along the way you see something that answers some of your questions and you can’t “un-see” it.

But long before I “came to” the LC, I started to wonder about the teachings of the group I was born into. Was it true that everyone needed to have the infilling of the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in tongues? While I had not yet rejected it before my 18th birthday, I was no longer so certain that it was true. Then came the LC. 14+ years of it. I left with a head full of things I thought I had come to see as true. And I lived with much of that thought for about 18 more years. Then came a reading of the God Men. And The Thread of Gold. And then an introduction to the BARM, followed 3 years later by the opening of this forum.

I had already managed to dismiss much of the complaints about Christianity, but I continued to keep many LC teachings bottled up inside. I was reading through some of the discussions I had with some friends here in those early days of this forum and came across this comment from a man who shortly afterward ceased to post here.

Originally Posted by SpeakersCorner

Back in the early 70s there was a conference in St. Louis where the theme was that we've all been "wrecked." I remember coming back to Indy and having a meeting where everybody kept jumping up and saying, "I've been wrecked for the Lord!" What a prophecy! We really have been wrecked. So very few have made it out of the LC into mainstream Christianity. Don Rutledge wrote movingly on how he is pretty much rejected by everyone in the Christian realm: the LSMers, the Christian he meets who always discover his LC past, even other LC churches who aren't in the LSM way anymore. I was deeply touched by that post. I have been wrecked in the same way. I have no where to go but to the Lord.

Now that 13 years have passed, I believe that the problem is not just that there is nowhere for us to go, but that we have not recognized that the problem was not just some abuses by leadership or one simple error in teaching, like the “ground of the church.” Instead, we needed to go through a complete deconstruction of the tenets of the LC faith/dogma so that we would no longer be LC people looking for a new LC, but Christians looking for Christians.

I realize that it was part of the rhetoric in the LC to say that we are just Christians willing to fellowship with all Christians. And we may have intended to mean that. But the truth is that we expected that our special and superior teachings would eventually win over so many who are “real seekers.” But as we learned those teachings, we were unaware that there was a kind of system of error built into them that even infected what was otherwise quite true. As a more obvious example, we were taught that the core tenets of the faith included the fact that the church was “on the ground.” So while we agreed with all true Christians about the actual core of the faith, we had one additional item that made true fellowship with the “others” (think ABS’s LOST) difficult and eventually impossible.

Now I remain quite fond of Don Rutledge, but I think that his problem, like for many of us, is that we have retained a lot of baggage from the LC that we are unwilling to deconstruct. We are unwilling to admit that we might have been duped into believing something that was not true. We want to be able to point to those years — even decades — as truly positive. To not discover that we got excited or emotionally “high” because of something that we cannot point back to as being the truth.

We are quite capable of going through a kind of “valley of the shadow of death” and even having doubts related to our faith over the suffering and death of a loved one, a period of mental illness of our own or another’s, the long-term impacts of a serious accident, or even just a lengthy period during which we do not have a sense of God’s activity in our lives. And when we come out on the other side, we may find that we have some wisdom gained. And also find that we think about things differently. We are less inclined to have tip-of-the-tongue scripture pick-me-ups for everyone else. It might even affect aspects of how we view and practice our faith.

But we are unable to accept that maybe we could be tricked into following a snake oil salesman and accept his modifications of the Word of God. And admit that part of it was because we were convinced that it was superior to all the thinking of all the Christians that had gone before us. That there was so much that had been hidden from Christians for 2,000 years and was now revealed by Nee and Lee (or whoever else we might be following).

If there was ever a way of thinking that is begging for serious deconstruction, it is anything that has direct or indirect links to the teachings of Nee and Lee. Even links that you don’t think are there.

And one of the reasons that I have included this post in my blog rather than in the general forum is that I believe that this is important for even our general faith that has nothing to do with the LC. As you might see in my testimony (see post #86, above), I have a history that includes 18 years in the Assemblies of God, 14.5 years in the LC, 33 years in Bible churches, and now the last year mostly online, but headed in a new direction. I have hinted at that direction but will not deal with it now. Still very Christian, and consistent with so much of what I have always believed. But also different.

And the reason I am arriving at this new place is that I have taken time to ask questions. Questions that got odd stares and push-back. I never questioned God, or Christ (being God born as a man, lived, died, resurrected, ascended), or the Holy Spirit. I have never questioned that salvation is by faith in Christ (and that only Christ saves us, not even the faith we need to obtain Christ does it).

But I no longer believe that an understanding of substitutionary atonement (or even knowing that it exists in the manner described by evangelical theologians) is important. Not saying I don’t believe it, but that I do not believe that an understanding of or belief in it is important. I do not think that predestination, as taught by true Calvinists, is true. Yet neither is the simplistic “you can lose your salvation” of the Arminians. The verses that each relies on have contexts. I do not understand what a less-than-certain salvation might be, but I do understand that John 3:16 did not say “he who believed in me shall not perish.” It is not sufficient to consider a former state of belief as evidence of salvation. But the importance of it is not to what I think about someone else’s salvation, but how I deal with my own. From an LC perspective, I believe that in 1 Cor 3, Paul is talking about the builders, not the building, when he mentions the whole wood, hay, stubble, gold, silver, and precious stones thing. And just before that he defined who the builders were. And it mostly did not include you and me. “We (Paul Apollos, Cephas) are the builders, you (the church in Corinth) are the building.” Similarly, the “Great Commission” is not a charge to every believer. Look at the context. Now I do not say that my take on these last two means we have no part in them. But they were not simply general charges to everybody. There is a context. And whether by Lee or evangelicalism in general, we have been taught something that does not fit its context.

And all the discussion about them — even that of whether you can or cannot lose your salvation — is mostly unimportant to those who are diligently obeying/following all that Christ commanded. For those, there is no worry about salvation. It doesn’t matter how predestination does or does not apply. There is no need to make your goal the New Jerusalem (see recent post in “106 things not many Christians know (but Witness Lee knows)”) — no matter what its ultimate manifestation is, you will be there.

And there is no command to say it better, so a superior lexicon won’t help you.