Quote:
Originally Posted by Unregistered
Something that always nags me is the end result, why do they want this much control? What benefit does it give?
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If you're a long-time lurker then you probably can guess my answer, but I'll make it brief - it's 100% sourced to its native culture. There are control freaks in every culture, but in Asian culture it makes its home with a preconceived disposition as to what's normal, creating the perfect storm. In my old local church 50 years ago it was 80% Caucasian 10% Chinese 10% Hispanic/Black/etc. Now it's 70% Chinese 15% Caucasian 15% other. Reason being is the Chinese cultural expectation is conformity, not individuality. In the West it's different. In the West, the faceless-nameless-group thing is "cultic". And the uniform and uncritical expectation of conformity is the foundation of control. Yet in Asia that's the way the group goes on. Is it coincidence that European Karl Marx' idea of the 'proletariat' only found safe haven in China? I doubt it.
Let me give an example: in both of his sons, Timothy as President of Daystar being funded by church members' life-savings, who then were told to consider it a donation, to Philip repeatedly molesting women serving in LSM offices, with victims and witnesses relocated, there were clear violations of NT principles found in Matthew 18, Titus 1:6 etc etc. Any Western-sourced Church would have blown the lid off such abuses. Even the RCC couldn't eternally hide their predator-priests. Yet in the LC life went on. Why? Because the Chinese culture absorbed it, covered it - it was necessary for the group cohesion. Individuals had to be sacrificed for the "Church", which was nothing but cover for a guanxi network run by a Chinese expatriate.
Similarly, WL saying all local churches must be "absolutely identical" with "no differences whatsoever" in the footnotes to the seven lampstands in Revelations 1 and 2 is biased and self-serving interpretation. Have you ever seen a hand-beaten metal calyx or pomegranate? Are they "absolutely identical"? No - but the Chinese orientation insisted it must be so. The fable that God got "virgin soil" in China is just that - a fable. They're fallen like everyone else. Their trick was to convince others that their culturally-sourced interpretations were spiritual. They weren't and now we see the evident fruit of our unquestioning and uncritical reception of those ideas as though they came from God.
The point of control is to fund the Witness Lee Guanxi Network - I believe that even today his heirs get residual checks in the tens of thousands - and the mirrored point of allowing and fostering such control by group members is group cohesion, the so-called "normal church life" or the "building up of the body of Christ". A control freak meets his willing and expectant audience. This was covered at length in the thread "The Asian Mind/The Western Mind". And I'm not pushing racial or cultural inferiority, either here or AM/WM thread. There are things that work well, that must work well, in a society thousands of years old - look how few died in China during the recent pandemic, for instance. And the "freedoms" and "rugged individualities" of the West have their dark side - civil unrest accompanying BLM protests and recent elections in USA. But the question was on a church that demands absolute conformity, even when there's little if any scriptural basis. I say, it's culturally-based.