Summing Up

[Cal]

It’s been a few months since I’ve posted. I hope everyone is doing well. I wanted to step away for awhile and have been busy with a new business, but I felt to come back and sum up my life experiences related to the Local Church.

Let’s start out with a good thing. The LC introduced me to a personal Christ and a life in community with other Christians. These two simple things, in their purest form, were always the best thing about the LC. I will always be grateful for that.

Unfortunately, the LC included a lot of baggage with those two things. The “experience of Christ” was warped from a simple spiritual relationship to an esoteric labyrinth of “the law of life,” “the anointing,” “the sense of life,” “intuition”, “flow”, “the enjoyment” etc, which complicated and confused. “Christ” was shifted from being a person to almost a thing, a commodity. Oddly, what was supposed to be an intensely inter-personal relationship became impersonal.

This was also true of my community relationship with others. A simple, pure brotherhood became an impersonal relationship with a movement. All that was important was how I meshed with “the cause.” My personal needs were completely discounted.

The isolation of the LC gave me a very narrow and warped view not only of Christian life, but also of earthly life. This was probably the worst thing that the LC did to me. It urged me to embrace ignorance, which had devastating effects on my life. My worldview revolved around falsehoods and cluelessness. The LC’s teachings exist in a bubble. They seem powerful as long as they are not tested in the arena of ideas and of life itself. They cannot stand up to real scrutiny, which is why the LC will not discuss their beliefs in an open honest forum. If the LC’s teachings are failing a member, the member is blamed, but the teachings are never questioned.

I never received much practical advice or instruction about life, love, sex, marriage, relationships, conflicts, work, children, extended family, hopes, dreams, doubts, fears, weaknesses, personality, temperament, gifts, skills, fun, hobbies or any of the other practical life issues we have to deal with. I look back and can only shake my head at how terribly ignorant and naive I was, really about just about everything. The LC did me a terrible disservice by suggesting that none of these things really mattered and that somehow simply reading Witness Lee, calling on the Lord and attending church meetings was all I needed and would solve everything. It only solves everything if all you ever do is read Witness Lee, call on the Lord and attend meetings. Unfortunately, God made us to deal with much more than that and the LC left me and many others horribly unequipped to do so. This cause me much so much pain and confusion I don’t even like to think about it now.

The LC’s version of oneness is divisive. I was deeply saddened to read on the website of “The Church of the Chicagoans” how they continue to use the same old reasonings and prattle to justify their divisive view of oneness. Oneness is a heart matter. Simply getting rid of a church name does not make you more inclined to be one. In fact, it’s clear in the case of the Chicagoans not having a name contributed to them being more proud and exclusive than they might have otherwise been, given how they crow about it on their website.

Receiving others does not just mean you allow them to join you. In fact, it means something quite opposite. It means you continue to view and honor them as just as much the church as you are even if they choose NOT to join you. Being the church can never mean that people need to join YOU or your little subsection of the Body of Christ. It means you are willing to join hands with them as much as possible to cooperate for God’s kingdom. And their “having a name” is a pathetic excuse to not join hands with them. The Bible in no place prohibits churches taking names; it’s simply not Biblical. Saying a church should take no name other than the Lord’s is like saying a wife should take no name other than her husbands, including his first name. So if Mary marries John, she must start calling herself John. It’s just a shallow, childish idea.

The LC’s theology is warped because Witness Lee was closed-minded. I don’t have the space or time to go into much detail, but again it goes back to his ideas not being vetted by the rest of the Body. Witness Lee decided at some point in his life that he was right and everyone else was wrong. Apparently he held onto this idea until the day he died. We all sometimes have to stand against the crowd. But the wise person always keeps the door open to being proven wrong. Witness Lee not only closed that door, he slammed it, locked it and established a culture that threatened anyone who tried to open it. There is no precedent in the Bible for such a mindset. The Bible in fact establishes a principle where many can contribute in parallel. Paul’s style and focus were very different from John’s, which were different from Peter’s. None of them attacked or compromised the others, none of them claimed to know it all, and, most importantly, none of them set themselves up as the standard by which all other teachers and teachings are judged. Lee and his followers did just that. In fact, the purpose of Living Stream’s publication Affirmation and Critique is to judge other’s teachings based on how they line up with Lee’s. I’m not sure what’s worse about this, its arrogance or its stupidity. But both are disgusting.

Lee’s attacks on “Christianity,” still preached by some in the movement, were never fair and often simply wrong. One example is the idea that Christians have no concept of being judged someday. This is simply false. The truth of judgment of Christian life and work is known and shared by almost all evangelical Christians these days. Another is the idea that Christians (Protestants) are dead. This may be true of a small minority of mostly non-practicing Christians. But I have met very, very few serious Christians in the last 20 years who seemed really dead. Life is rich and flowing in most community churches and denominations today. God is active and working. To say otherwise is to be ignorant, dishonest, or both.

Other teachings like mingling, God being wrought into our being, metabolic changes, Satan dwelling in man’s body, losing the soul, and many of the esoteric inner-life meanderings just don’t stand up to scrutiny and experience. Other teachings like localism, "the Recovery," one eldership per city, minister of the age, isolationism, one publication, etc. clearly serve to extend and support an exclusive movement rather than God’s kingdom.

Let me finish on a positive note. Many LCers are mellowing. I mean that in a good way. Though they still love their LC culture, they know in their hearts that Lee and the LC were fundamentally wrong on many counts. They have a hard time admitting it straight out, but they know it. They try to get along with outsiders. I had dinner with my old best buddy from the LC a couple of months ago. He had the patience of a saint as his listened to my objections to the LC. He admitted many mistakes were made. He even apologized. He seemed genuinely sad and sorry. This is a guy who has been an elder. One moment kind of sums it up. I mentioned the way the LC characterized the rest of Christianity as Babylon. He chuckled and said, “I don’t think I’ve heard the word ‘Babylon’ in fifteen years.” The feeling I had was that he genuinely wanted to move on from the baggage and mistakes of the past, while holding onto the things of the LC which were important to him. I feel that many LCers must hold the same conviction and aspiration quietly in their hearts. If so they will eventually win out.

Change in the LC is inevitable. It must change to survive. When the original crop of leaders pass the torch, it will change more. There may never and likely will not be a public announcement refuting prior stances; but there will be the continued inertia of members like my friend who are mature enough and wise enough to no longer deny the grave mistakes of the past. I hope the weight of their conviction wins the day sooner rather than later.


My LC experience shaped my life in many ways. It is human nature to want to think you are right, to latch onto something you think is right and enjoy the feeling of having figured it out. Add to that the peer approval that comes with agreeing with those who share your beliefs, along with the naiveté of youth and grave warnings about changing, and you have the prescription for dwelling in entrenched ignorance. This describes my LC legacy and that of many others. The good news is that God is able to save us from all that. But for that to happen we must eventually admit that “maybe, just maybe, some of my most dearly held beliefs are wrong.”


"I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly." John 10:10

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” – Matthew 7:7