Quote:
Originally Posted by HERn
Pre-church life I was given a copy of "The Economy of God" by WL and after reading a chapter or two my thought was "this guy sure repeats himself a lot" and gave it up as being too difficult to read to be useful. A few months later I asked my relative why he only read material by Lee and Nee and he said "I only have a limited time to read and only want to read the best stuff". OK, made sense to me to only spend your time on what you think is the best material...to each his own. After coming into the Lord's Recovery (LC-speak for "joining the LSM-controlled LC") I sensed that there was a strong undertow of opinion (but since it came from the elders it wasn't "opinion") that no other material was to be used in the prophecying or home meetings, or any other meeting where two or more saints were together. Oh, there were a few approved authors (long since dead) that you could acknowledge as having touched God's economy, but only in a superficial way. Something happened to my thought processes that made what I previously thought as redundant and boring writing to become what we all called "living". I think there were two parallel phenomena occurring in me. One, was a non-LSM-dependent revival of my love for Jesus fueled by a Spirit-led turning of my heart back to Jesus (I believe this could have occurred in any christian venue, but for some reason the Spirit chose for it to occur in a LC). A second thing I think was also occurring and that was a self-arousing neurotransmitter flush associated with my mind being able to "see" or "perceive" the connections among many of Lee's weird opinions, statements and beliefs. I think the best analogy is the satisfaction one feels when he learns the trick of solving a difficult puzzle or problem. Having learned the trick I could repeat it anytime when reading the ministry. From what I've read on this forum I think Awareness has the best understanding or at least explanation of this phenomenon.
I got the quote from another thread and posted my reply here because it is part of my testimony.
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In many ways, I can relate to your post. First of all, I still don’t fully understand what causes people to go off the deep end in regards to Lee’s ministry. I readily agree that there has to be some psychological explanation to this phenomena. Let’s face it, the vast majority of those in the LC now haven’t met or received direct help from Lee, therefore, their loyalty lies in how “helpful” they find his printed ministry.
It’s hard to pass off the Witness Lee fanaticism in the LCM as mere “appreciation” of his ministry. What compels someone to collect a whole wall of WL books? Most who have such a collection probably haven’t even read most of those books, or if they have, don’t have anything to show for it. It’s more of an obsession than anything else. If someone really wanted to study the Bible, I could see having a bookshelf full of various reference materials. Having hundreds of WL books doesn’t amount to anything more than being a WL expert (assuming the books have actually been read).
At one pointed in time, I was attempting to become a WL “expert” by reading the Life-Studies. I actually found the Life-Studies a bit more interesting than other of Lee’s books. There was one book I tried reading several times and I could never get past the first chapter. Like HERn mentioned, it also didn’t take me long to realize that not all of Lee’s books were something that I needed to read. I eventually stopped reading the Life-Studies, because I never felt them to be of any practical use. I got to the point where I knew exactly how Lee would interpret a given part of the Bible, but there never really seemed to be any use in knowing that. The Life-Studies also got to be pretty repetitive. It seemed to me that once you’ve read a few, you’ve read them all.
When I was younger, I did feel that because I was a church kid I was somehow “indebted” to Lee and therefore, it was in my best interest to read at least some of his ministry. It never became anything more than that. The side motive I had for reading Lee’s ministry is that I wanted to “impress” others with what I was reading. When I look at my experience with Lee’s ministry, however, I cannot understand why anyone would want to obsess themselves over it. Sure they might like it, and I can understand that, but there is a line that has to be drawn somewhere. People in the LC have gone far beyond just appreciating it. They “collect” all his books. They recite his ministry, they declare it, they “respeak” it and they pray-read it. It all brings certain questions to my mind. Are the people who are doing this really that appreciative of Lee, or are they just trying to fit in with everyone else who is doing it? I don’t have the answer, but even at the height of my appreciation of Lee’s ministry, I never felt the need to go that far with it. Those ideas was something completely external, mainly being pushed by older brothers. I still don’t understand what it is that compels people to get that fanatical about Lee. Maybe we will never know...