Witness Lee Base hit/Foul ball - The Church
This one is tough to cover because no one would deny that the Church is a central and important point of God. And it can be argued that Christians for centuries did not appreciate the Church enough. Nee and Lee brought attention to the grand idea of the Church, and gave much insight into what it is on a high, deep and sometimes very practical spiritual level.
But in doing so they made a grave cardinal error. By placing so much value on the Church, they made the value of this institution much more important than the value of people. Thus, people became to them a means to the end of producing the Church, and thus were made expendable and discardable,
But, you might say, people
are the Church. Yes, and this is the fundamental error of Lee's Church view. He saw the Church as something other that just the people. He saw it as a system, an institution, a set of principles, all of which were the value and goal we were to be dedicated to, regardless of what happened to people along the way.
Eventually Lee's movement, "the Recovery," rose to equal value to Church. To LCers, "the Recovery" and the Church are pretty much the same thing. "The Recovery" is the Church they control, and no other part of the Church is really important to them. In fact, people outside of the Church are regularly dismissed and even ridiculed by them. But within "the Recovery," the movement itself and its principles are much more important than even the people in it which defend them. This is the some of the bad fruit of their error.
This clearly demonstrates a lack of love for people. It is very interesting, that for all the talk of Nee, Lee and his movement about the Church, Jesus himself really didn't have much to say about it. He had only two isolated things to say about the Church:
- He said he would build it
- He said if you have a problem, take it to the Church.
Now, this is quite interesting. The only times Jesus even mentioned the Church were:
- To show that he would take care of building it, rather than charging us to.
- To show that one reason the Church exists is to protect the rights of people.
So the emphasis of Nee and Lee is actually quite out of sync with that of the Lord Jesus.
He builds the Church, we don't. When the Bible mentions our building it says "build up each other." In other words, we are supposed to focus on the welfare of real people, not abstract institutions. If we focus on loving and caring for people, putting others first, then he will take care of the larger building work.
Second,
the only other time Jesus mentioned the Church was to emphasize how it exists in part to defend justice in the lives of wronged individuals. This shows how he cares for people first. He cares about "the least of these" and "the one lost sheep." And they are what the Church exists to care for as well. If we neglect a single "little one" the Lord has commissioned us to care for, in pursuit of grander goals, such as being for a movement, then we have missed it. We are clanging brass, all sizzle no steak, and perhaps even worse. And we are bound to do grave damage along the way, as "the Recovery" has.
God loves people. Jesus died for people. Even the least of these. If we make being like him in that way our top goal, everything else--about the Church, the gospel, how we live and behave, what our emphasases are, what our priorities are--will move into place, and we can't go too far wrong.
All of "the Recovery's" abuses are the fruit of these priorities being out of sync with the Lord's.