Quote:
Originally Posted by HERn
If you sense that your locality may be under the influence of evil spirits, then pray that the Father would open your eyes to what you need to see, and close your eyes to things you don't need to see.
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Forgive me if I drag this thought astray. But there are arguably evil forces working throughout the world. Who is pure? God. The Baptists, the RCC, the EO all have non-divine, i.e. 'fallen' influences at work. So the LC faithful look at the world, and decide to prefer the devil they know, than the devil they don't.
In the LC I remember the schema of Israel = the Church; Babylon = Religion, and Egypt = the World. In the LC we were attuned to accept the darkness in the [LC] church life while rejecting the darkness everywhere else. WL called it the "messy kitchen" - we were supposed to overlook ours, and have patience with its imperfection, while constantly highlighting that of others'.
I believe that this has its source in cultural influences. You must begin to appreciate the amount of resentment in China during the first decades of the 20th Century. This was a civilization with centuries if not millennia of development. And along come these people, the "barbarians", who take over essentially because they have more guns. Technology. Remember that this was 19th century foreign policy. The whole continent of Africa, for instance, was divvied up by the people with the most guns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Conference
And Asia was no different. So even though the simplicity of the gospel had its attraction - believe into Jesus Christ and be saved - its association with the hated, feared, and resented Westerners was very problematic. Watchman Nee thought that he'd cut the proverbial Gordian Knot with his indigenous localism. Tens of thousands agreed, and streamed in during the 1920s and 1930s. Whole churches abandoned Western affiliation and came onboard with the "normal church model" proposed by Nee.
Now the problem is, as I see it, that a model built upon intrinsic criticism and rejection of the previous version is itself going to be blind to its own faults. Because its existence owes itself to the rejection of "other" (non-self), then it cannot take input from that which it rejected. Even though Nee supposedly read all the Christian classics, and drew from them, once he got the "localism" revelation/virus he was perforce cut off from fellowship (read: guidance, critique, adjustment) of those "non-local others" who'd also drank from the same Christian well. Thus, any errors or darkness which he'd missed lacked the way to be pruned over time, and grew and grew until the whole thing became a great tree, lodging many dark birds. And the entire Nee tree continually owes its existence to the idea that it's without birds... so the branches groan, and bird droppings magically appear everywhere, but there are no birds here!