[Friedel]

THE TAIWAN YEARS (PART 2)

Financial Disaster for Witness Lee

Witness Lee’s first financial crisis in Taipei occurred in 1959. He made some dubious investments with church money and a big amount was lost. After this investment failure the Local Church still owed a great deal of money to outsiders because of the nature of the financial transaction.

This situation forced Witness Lee to compel the elders to sell a piece of church property in order to repay the debt. The piece of land was located at 19 East Road, Section 4. The saints had originally bought this piece of land to build a new meeting hall and a training center. Many of the believers were very unhappy with Witness Lee and he went to the United States for the first time where he stayed on the west coast.

While Witness Lee was away the coworkers back in Taiwan formed two sides: one group remained loyal to Witness Lee while the other group had serious misgivings about his activities. This split impacted heavily on the believers creating a lot of difficulty until some of his close followers begged him to return.

Witness Lee indeed returned to Taipei and quickly resolved to get rid of the coworkers who were unhappy with him. According to estimates thousands then left the congregation. Some put the number at about 30% of the total number meeting there while some estimates put the number of college students who had left at between left at between 80 and 90% of the total. (It is difficult to give exact figures because there is no official record available to provide details of the number of people meeting in Taiwan during those years.)

This “cleansing” created a permanent rift in Taiwan: those who were for Witness Lee and those who were against him.

Another Major Storm

Towards the end of the 1950’s there was much unhappiness in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia over Witness Lee’s authoritarian ways. Coworkers in these centers did not readily accept Lee’s absolute authority because he listened to nobody and made all decisions alone. Others who had contributed substantially to the coffers of the work and the local assemblies did not appreciate his financial dealings.

A total breakdown in trust had developed pretty quickly. The Philippines used to be very important to Witness Lee because some of the members of the congregations there were fairly wealthy and had financially contributed generously in the past. However, in 1960 the Church in Manila severed all ties with Witness Lee.

Witness Lee did not go to the USA in 1960 to open up a new frontier but he in fact was not very popular in Taiwan and the doors had closed to him in the Philippines. He had to find a new sphere of influence.

Witness Lee Returns to Taiwan to Seize Control Yet Again

During the years 1960–1965 the Local Churches in Taiwan suffered much. There was a lack of agreement and oneness between the co-workers. However, some faithfully carried on, trying to establish some growth in membership.

One year during the summer there was a camp in the Taipei area for young people. Many children also joined in the various activities and a period of rapid recovery and an increase in numbers ensued after years of infighting and divisions.

So Witness Lee organized a special international conference in Taipei in 1968, inviting people from all over Taiwan. About 160 members from the USA and Canada also attended, as well as about another 100 or so from various countries in Southeast Asia, Japan and Europe.

Those who had attended the conference were very impressed by what they had seen in Taiwan and went back to their own countries and implemented what they observed in Taiwan.

(One of the main reasons for the spectacular growth in membership was the fact that there was no single leader and all the fulltime workers just had to cooperate.

Another main characteristic is the atmosphere of liberty that prevailed. Members could share and express their own feelings. There was no central authority to dictate proceedings and there was no centralized teaching. Neither was there anyone who was there to give the one and only teaching to all the members.

A third factor was that co-workers could pursue what they felt the Lord had led them to do: some preached the gospel, others worked with children, others ministered to the sick. The focus also strongly fell on home meetings and the family.)

From 1970 Onwards

By 1975 the Local Church in Taipei had been divided into 22 meeting halls, 77 assemblies plus more than 200 home fellowships totaling more than 1,000 people.

The group that had suffered most because of Witness Lee’s “cleansing” in 1965 was the young people and college students. Most of the coworkers that were driven away at the time were the leaders among the young people and this had created a vacuum.

Between 1960 and 1965 there was not much fellowship between Taiwan and other countries in Southeast Asia but after 1968 this had changed. Other countries asked for workers to come and help them and consequently some went to Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. Workers from these countries also went to Taiwan to join in the work there.

And, remember, during this time Witness Lee was in the USA.

The Glorious Atmosphere Did Not Last

During the summer of 1970 a special international conference was scheduled for Los Angeles. One hundred or so came from the Far East of which roughly 65 were from Taiwan. Most of them included the leading co-workers from Taiwan.

During that conference Witness Lee spoke out against the churches in the Far East, describing them as “outdated”. He compared them to the churches in the USA and told them that should follow their example by shouting and generally being loud. They eventually agreed that they were outdated and had fallen behind in their enjoyment and expression of the Spirit.

What had prompted Witness Lee to seek out the believers from the Far East for a taste of his “special treatment”? One can only guess. Was this a case of “divide and rule”?

The result was that when these coworkers returned to their home countries they introduced what they had observed in the USA. Where they had been quiet and reserved in the past, the meetings suddenly became loud and noisy. This caused conflict within the assemblies themselves and also irritated the neighbors. The churches in Taiwan were seriously damaged.

On the matter of the revised version of Against the Tide, I would very much like to see if the 50 perceived “errors” mentioned by Witness Lee were corrected in the updated version. That is, if he had ever conveyed those “errors” to Dr. Kinnear. (Witness Lee wrote that terrible so-called biography of Watchman Nee, call A Seer of the Divine Revelation in the Present Age. I have often maintained that he probably published that book so he could include the wedding picture of Watchman Nee and Charity Chang, with himself holding the marriage certificate as best man. I have established that he had been the best man but I have concluded that it was not because he had been Watchman Nee’s closest co-worker.)

I also once read that TAS was not one for small talk; he would seldom engage in discussions which had no meaning to him. He would then rather keep quiet.

What I really would like to discover (and that would explain many other things to me) is what it was in him that so affronted Witness Lee. If Watchman Nee found in him a true “match”, someone to which he could really open up his inner being, why would he have been such a stumbling block to Witness Lee? I would go so far as to suggest that had they (TAS and WN) maintained their fellowship it is quite possible Watchman Nee would have dropped his teaching on locality. But that is only my opinion.

SUMMARY

1. 1. When Witness Lee arrived in a very depressed state in Taiwan in 1949, it did not take him long to take over all the Local Churches by using the young people. That caused a storm.

2. 2. Then he had a failed business venture in Taipei, which cost the Local Church there a lot of money. It was a rebellion.

3. More or less at the same time or shortly after the fancy Japanese restaurant he and son Tim had started in Manila, put up with money from rich believers, failed. This caused the Local Church there to split. Another rebellion.

4. So he fled to the United States and to escape from the failed business ventures, he started another movement, which he labeled The Recovery. It went fine for a while until some people picked up his funny terminology, especially this God-man thing and they wrote books about it. So the next couple of years were dedicated to suing the authors and the publishers. A big storm.

5. About this time there was real turmoil in Taiwan after an international conference in the US. So he flew back, killed the turmoil by causing a split and returned to the US.

6. Meanwhile, Tim and/or Philip were siphoning money into Linko, DayStar and sports equipment at the World Trade Fair in Seattle, but fortunately he could use the lawsuits to deflect the unhappiness. Just a storm.

7. By the early 1980’s he realized he was in trouble: there was no blessing, Phillip was starting to make havoc with the Local Churches’ oversight and he decided: a new way. But he called it The New Way. The One-man Show for all Ages. He got at least 419 to initially follow him. The big storm was on the horizon.

8. So he devised a whole, intricate system, a system of error in the sleight of men, this New Way. In the meantime, Philip was making merry with new little branch offices and forcing himself upon sisters working in the office. He was dishing out hard liquor to young brothers working in the Office and showing them porn movies. At the same time he helped making $2.5 million disappear. Without warning the tropical storm had become the turmoil.

9. The choice for the oracle was simple: get rid of my troublesome, money-wasting sons or get rid of the rebels. Naturally, he chose the latter option.

10. He had deceived almost everyone, except the inner circle who knew the truth. He “fired” Philip from the office but naturally Philip still managed the board of LSM. Witness Lee was handling the turmoil with great cunning.

11. He had succeeded in keeping his sons safe and protected, he got rid of the rebels by quarantine, and he continued happily ever after. Any loss of money just went away, forgotten.

12. By this time any form of spiritual reality had left the organization. But dead or alive, the oracle still had some great things in his future: his own metal casket in his very own mausoleum, his own cemetery, a new lawsuit to deflect from the inadequacies of his systems of error, some more turmoil and division (like Dong in Brazil, Titus Chu in the Mid-West), a team working fulltime regurgitating his “vision” into new messages, a campus with its own dean, fulltime trainings (Witness Lee Duplication Centers) in several places across the globe, many faithful parrots repeating his very words and defending everything he ever said, the introduction of a new fashion item: God-Man socks, and still many parrots signing up regularly.