[aron]

In Watchman Nee's biography we see a lot of women having influential, even prominent roles in the early narrative: Margaret Barber, Peace Wang, Dora Yu, Jessie Penn-Lewis, Madame Guyon, Ruth Lee, Elizabeth Fischbacher, Mary McDonough, a certain "Miss Groves" (a co-worker of Barber). Then once he and then Lee were fully "raised up by God", suddenly women were supposed to be "silent in the church"? Anyone else notice this big change?

The obvious answer is that everyone was supposed to be silent in the church, once Nee began to speak. There was thenceforth to be "one trumpet", and it was "God's oracle" (who was the same person teaching that there should be 'one trumpet', naturally). It wasn't that the role of women in the church was suddenly eliminated, it was that every role was eliminated! Women were to be silent and men were to be feminized, quiet and docile. Just repeat what the oracle says. "Elders" were leading repeaters and cheerleaders, with women as associate repeaters and cheerleaders. There's no longer male nor female, as Nee's "normal church" only recognizes one "giant" and the rest as "small potatoes", and both are gender-neutral (except maybe the giant can't be a woman?)

What's the thinking here? Did this ever get explicated? I know that Nee was also influenced by men - Robert Govett, D.M. Panton, John Nelson Darby, Father Fenelon, Brother Lawrence, Evan Roberts... but the incongruity of women taking an initially prominent role in his movement, changing to women taking NO role whatsoever, is so striking that you'd think that some apologist for the Nee/Lee system would try to address it.

My possible LSM-explanation is that women like Peace Wang and Dora Yu and Margaret Barber and Mary McDonough and Jessie Penn-Lewis were able to minister independently in the "wild" years pre-Nee, who we all know was thenceforth God's "Seer of the age". Once Nee began to minister there was no need for a Dora Yu or Peace Wang or Ruth Lee to function as teacher, shepherd, evangelist or prophet. Suddenly "order was restored in the church" and sisters could once again become silent, as Paul had urged (right after he told slaves to be obedient... ha-ha). The church became "normal" again under the apostle of the age.

Any other ideas? Have the apologists for LSM, or Nee or Lee for that matter, ever addressed this? Something doesn't seem right here.... did the official "history of the church and the local churches" ever try to paper over this glaring incongruity -- that women went from having key roles in the movement's formative years, to having no roles whatsoever outside of children's service? Or was this large shift something whose existence we shouldn't acknowledge? As in, "Lee never talked about it, therefore we ignore it".