Antioch Principle vs. Jerusalem Principle of Church Administration

[Ohio]

Originally Posted by ZNPaaneah

Watchman Nee and Witness Lee inferred that these designations were “boundaries” to jurisdiction. They taught that each locality was autonomous. But Witness Lee also disparaged the autonomy, teaching that the differences in the seven golden lamp stands in the New Jerusalem were negative.

Originally Posted by Ohio

And herein is what I found to be the hypocrisy in both Nee's and Lee's teachings.

In their early ministries (Nee in China, Lee in Taiwan and the USA), both emphasized city boundaries under autonomous "city" jurisdictions administrated by the elders. Both were firm on this matter, even teaching that the elders were the "highest court" in all matters. Some have referred to this as the "Antioch Principle" established under Paul's ministry.

In their later ministries (Nee in China, Lee in Taiwan and the USA), both emphasized the "oneness" of the body of Christ, with all the churches identically the same, with workers sent out from headquarters overseeing the elders, and a Minister of the Age overseeing these workers. Some have referred to this as the "Jerusalem Principle" practiced by Judaizers who were in some cases sent out by James.

During the quarantines of the Midwest churches, this ecclesiastical change was a source of great conflict and confusion. The Midwest leaders all considered the early paradigm by Nee and Lee to be still in operation, while the Blendeds were all convinced, as the legitimate successors to WL, that the second paradigm was in operation. Midwest leaders compiled reams of old Nee and Lee quotations to support their positions, and Anaheim produced their 28 "attack pack" booklets of more recent quotations to support their positions.

Thus the Midwest battles (divisions, lawsuits, infighting, etc.) during the quarantine were very much similar to the battles Paul et.al. faced with the Judaizers sent out from Jerusalem. Though the Biblical conflict apparently was centered on salvation by circumcision, and supposedly solved in the Acts 15 council, the heart of the matter was the bigger issues of power and control. Had not Titus destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70, the latter model would most certainly have won out, and altered the entire course of church history.

Dear brother Drake has just been tormented by my post above, so I brought it forward on a new thread for further discussion. My only regret is that I no longer have any of my old highlighted LSM books to refer to, since most were sovereignly damaged in a flooded basement and the rest given away.

[Ohio]

Personally I think nearly every LC "storm" can be traced to Lee's transition from the "Antioch Principle" of church administration and ministry to the "Jerusalem Principle" of church administration and ministry. Sometimes I simply state these as "early-Lee" and "later-Lee." When LC leaders from around the globe during the so-called "New Way" clamored that the "nature of the Recovery had changed," this is what they were referring to.

Particularly troublesome to Drake was this comment I made from the above post, "Some have referred to this as the "Jerusalem Principle" practiced by Judaizers who were in some cases sent out by James." I'll try to expand on this statement, and hopefully others can wade into the discussion.

Apostle Paul fought his entire ministry with Judaizer "dogs" who stirred up the Gentiles to attack his ministry in every place. I will leave it to the readers to find all of these stories on their own; just open any of his epistles. While Paul was in Antioch, some came "from James." (Galatians 2.10-14) They came from the perceived spiritual and administrative center of the church in Jerusalem, headed up by James, the younger brother of Jesus. They brought with them great "authority," so that even Peter and Barnabas got carried away by their hypocrisy.

Apostle Paul established churches with elders as overseers, and no centralized authority. For a time he worked out of Antioch, later out of Ephesus, and still later out of Rome, but he never made any of these a headquarters for other churches. This was the Antioch Principle.

If we read Acts 15 carefully concerning the council deciding the ever antagonizing matter of circumcision, the reason it was held in Jerusalem, was not because it was some spiritual and administrative center of the church, but because it was the source of the problem. The problem came "from James," so Paul and Barnabas went to James in Jerusalem to resolve this problem.

Unfortunately for the entire church of God, the established decree (cf. Acts 16.4) by the apostles and elders had little effect. The churches in Galatia were apparently lost to Judaism. The persecutions from the Judaizers never stopped. God's solution was to destroy Jerusalem, which Jesus Himself had prophesied some 40 years earlier. Unfortunately still, the early church then made Rome and Constantinople their new headquarters.

[Indiana]

http://leadersofthelordsrecovery.us/...orityisnot.pdf

Link to a view of Witness Lee's transition from the "Antioch Principle" to the "Jerusalem Principle". That is, from administration local, each answering to the Lord", to "a Jerusalem headquarters," and answering to it. This movement required "movement men" to implement monumental changes and cement "the local churches" under one man and his ministry office.

The blending brothers deserve both credit and blame for what has been "accomplished" all around the globe in "the local churches" under their ministry/leadership, being carried out in the same spirit and steps of Witness Lee.

EXCERPT
"Andrew Yu was wrong in his assessments. The men he judged had not rebelled against God’s authority. Rather, they had stood firm to represent it amid an aggressive movement by LSM to usurp it. Bill Mallon, John So, and John Ingalls each experienced the usurpation of their eldership by LSM operatives prior to their quarantines in 1990."

[Drake]

Originally Posted by Ohio

Dear brother Drake has just been tormented by my post above, so I brought it forward on a new thread for further discussion. My only regret is that I no longer have any of my old highlighted LSM books to refer to, since most were sovereignly damaged in a flooded basement and the rest given away.

Almost everything you need may be found at lam.org online for free.

Drake

[Ohio]

Originally Posted by Drake

Almost everything you need may be found at lam.org online for free.

They won't let me download / print articles.

I'm an old-fashioned highlighter and marker kind of guy.

[ZNPaaneah]

Originally Posted by Indiana

http://leadersofthelordsrecovery.us/...orityisnot.pdf....

I appreciate what was written concerning the 5 signs that someone is not a deputy authority. I think this same approach can be taken with the church. Witness Lee dismisses the idea that a meeting in the name of Jesus that has the presence of the Lord can be a church because anyone can make that claim. However, in the same context Jesus gives the signs that this is true.

Consider the hypocrisy -- anyone can claim to be a "deputy authority" and you provided quotes from Watchman Nee expressing his disgust with that, yet the Blendeds continue to do this despite the signs that the so called "deputy authorities" were not. On the other hand they dismiss the claim that that the basis for a church is that they are meeting in the name of Jesus and the Lord's presence is there (after all why was Laodicea in the process of losing their lamp stand -- the Lord's presence was no longer there).

[Ohio]

Originally Posted by Indiana

What Deputy Authority is Not

Signs of Not Having Spiritual Authority:
1. Asserting One’s Own Authority
2. Practicing Self-Vindication
3. Bearing False Witness
4. Misrepresenting God
5. Mishandling Financial Matters

The apostle Paul served the churches amidst incredible suffering and hardship. We have absolutely no history of any damage to churches due to his ministry. Contrary to his service, we have the work of the Judaizers in the 1st century and the work of operatives from LSM today -- endless stories of damages inflicted upon churches and members alike.

Both of these evil workers used their false authority from some supposed headquarters to lay waste the churches and any who would stand up to them. Except for the extreme measures they took during the dark ages, the same destructive work can be attributed to papal operatives.

Another characteristic of false spiritual authority is to always build up one's own ministry at the expense of churches. The question we must always ask is simple, "who is serving who?"

[TLFisher]

Regarding Watchman Nee's ministry, it's been documented he changed from the Antioch principle to the Jerusalem principle in 1948.

[ZNPaaneah]

Originally Posted by Terry

Regarding Watchman Nee's ministry, it's been documented he changed from the Antioch principle to the Jerusalem principle in 1948.

Wasn't that after his discipline in Shanghai? Wouldn't that be when Witness Lee began taking the lead?

[aron]

I've said this before but it bears repeating: the Antioch principle was useful to leverage the flock away from the western denominations, and then the Jerusalem principle was useful to re-consolidate them under oriental control. The pattern occurred with both ministers: separation in mainland China in the 1920s and 30s was followed by consolidation in the 1940s and 50s, and separation in USA in the 1960s and 70s was followed by consolidation in the 1980s and 90s.

In both ministries the apparent reversals can be seen as internally consistent when you realize what it really was about all along: the acquisition and maintenance of temporal, earthly human power. In spite of all the glaring contradictions of Nee and especially Lee, they remained true to the vision: to get oneself ahead, and in the case of Lee, to bring family along as well.

[Ohio]

Originally Posted by aron

I've said this before but it bears repeating: the Antioch principle was useful to leverage the flock away from the western denominations, and then the Jerusalem principle was useful to re-consolidate them under oriental control. The pattern occurred with both ministers: separation in mainland China in the 1920s and 30s was followed by consolidation in the 1940s and 50s, and separation in USA in the 1960s and 70s was followed by consolidation in the 1980s and 90s.

In both ministries the apparent reversals can be seen as internally consistent when you realize what it really was about all along: the acquisition and maintenance of temporal, earthly human power. In spite of all the glaring contradictions of Nee and especially Lee, they remained true to the vision: to get oneself ahead, and in the case of Lee, to bring family along as well.

I have heard it said that, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Others, however, have said, "It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it."

My observation of both Nee and Lee is that both feared the loss of power after fiery trials in their ministries. Transitioning from the Antioch to the Jerusalem Principle of church administration and ministry assured their continued control.

They simply followed the historical course of nearly every other denomination.

.

[ZNPaaneah]

Originally Posted by Ohio

I have heard it said that, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Others, however, have said, "It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it."

My observation of both Nee and Lee is that both feared the loss of power after fiery trials in their ministries. Transitioning from the Antioch to the Jerusalem Principle of church administration and ministry assured their continued control.

They simply followed the historical course of nearly every other denomination.

.

I agree with Aron on this. Judas was a real Apostle, but he was motivated by money and saw Jesus as a way to make a quick buck. I subscribe to the idea that he thought Jesus would simply "walk out of their hands" as he did previously and he would get to pocket the 30 pieces of silver.

Balaam was also a real prophet, but what made him false was that he was motivated by money. He was a "prophet for hire". That is the line that cannot be crossed. Either you get your reward in this age or in the next, trying to have it both ways is simply self deception and proves a troubling flaw in your faith in the Lord.

Therefore I don't think they were corrupted by power, rather if you are going to make money and you are a pip squeak it makes sense to lambast the big established denominations. Once you get bigger it makes financial sense (even though the hypocrisy is blatant) to imitate the big denominations with a centralized administrative center that everyone has to bow down to.

[aron]

Originally Posted by ZNPaaneah

I don't think [Nee and Lee] were corrupted by power, rather if you are going to make money and you are a pip squeak it makes sense to lambast the big established denominations. Once you get bigger it makes financial sense (even though the hypocrisy is blatant) to imitate the big denominations with a centralized administrative center that everyone has to bow down to.

Money equals power; they're functionally equivalent. Money can be converted to power (buying allegiance) and power gets money (gifts, donations, tithes).

Here's a supposed scholar at the London School of Economics, trying to paint a patina of respectability on the LSM edifice (i.e. 'whitewashing the tomb'):

Originally Posted by Gareth Breen

Through weaving together family history and anthropological fieldwork, LSE PhD student Gareth Breen considers one Taiwanese Christian group’s ‘circular’ concept of the Body of Christ, and how this notion sustains a self-understanding of ‘one church’ increasingly spread across the globe.

Within the various histories of Christianity the ‘Body of Christ’ has been what we might call a ‘glocalising’ image. On the one hand, the symbol and/or substance of Christ’s body is ingested ‘locally’ in the intimate ritual of the Eucharist. On the other, the Body of Christ is a metaphor for the global collective of Christian believers extended across space and time. How are Christ’s body as bread and Christ’s body as a Christian collective related in Christians’ lives? The relative importance of these local and global forms of the Body of Christ is of course tied to particular Christian traditions, cultures and life-trajectories. In this article, I briefly explore to what extent the local and global are tied together in Christ’s body for a group of Christians in Taiwan I did my PhD research with in 2015 and 2016.

These Christians are part of an international Christian primitivist group founded in the 1920s by a Chinese itinerant preacher who later named himself “Watchman Nee”. Escaping communism in the late 1940s, much of the group moved to Taiwan and grew sevenfold there under the leadership of Nee’s ‘co-worker’, “Witness Lee”. There were 70,000 participants in 1949. Now, according to church estimates, there are up to two million. A basic principle of the group is that there is only one church in the world and that it should be divided only by geography and not by doctrine or name. Thus my informants called themselves only ‘the church in Taipei’. Those meeting in Palo Alto, California call themselves ‘the church in Palo Alto’, and so on. There are many such ‘localities’, as they are termed, worldwide. A very frequently used metaphor which the church employs to describe itself as a global social entity is “the Body of Christ” or, more often, just “the Body”.

I first encountered the church when my parents joined what their Christian friends at the time called ‘a Chinese church’ as I turned 13. The life of our family shifted in many ways at that time, but a key difference demarcating the period before and after this transition, in my memory, was the taste and shape of the Eucharist bread. Fifteen years before joining this church, my father read a translation of one of Watchman Nee’s key texts and left what Nee, and now he, called “Christianity” for good. Before discovering the church Nee founded, my father met several times a week with a few other Christians, disillusioned with Christianity, in our living room. They wrote their own hymns, baked their own Eucharist bread and communed over their mutual love for Nee’s teachings and biblical exegeses. The bread my mother baked on Sunday mornings was unleavened. This practice was based upon Corinthians 5:8:

Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened [bread] of sincerity and truth. (KJV)

But all my age-mates and I knew that it was fragrant and tasty. A dense, doughy, sweet lump, topped with a flaky crust, it probably did more work than we knew in keeping our little house church together. After joining the now-global church that Watchman Nee founded and Witness Lee expanded, the taste of the standardised circular wafer that arrived in bulk at our house paled in comparison. Of course, this wasn’t a major concern at the time: I only associate the two breads with the two life-stages in retrospect. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the circular Eucharist wafer is part of a transnational set of standardised, but dynamically employed, affordances which give rise to a sense of the church’s globality. If each locality were to bake their own bread, the sense of sameness across church localities would, to an extent, be undermined. While the doughy, unleavened lump tasted of home, the disk wafer tasted of the global Body.

The circularity of “the Body” is not limited to these wafers, however. An important foundation of the church’s ministry is that ‘Christianity’, especially ‘Western Christianity’, has long lost contact with God because of its assumption that humans are composed solely of a body and a soul. To demonstrate this idea, the church has a very important diagram to educate its participants and potential converts. The diagram is simply three concentric circles which demonstrate that humans are made of three distinct parts, or ‘organs’: body, soul and spirit.

It is only with the realisation that one has a third distinct organ to ‘contain’ God, the human spirit, that God can truly ‘enter into’ you and ‘flow’ around the Body, members say. What I want to draw out here is the distinctive way in which the human bodies that compose the divine, collective ‘Body’ are also imagined to be circular by my informants. Paying attention to the particular shapes which collective, transnational imaginaries take is important for our understanding of how religion connects and separates people across purported ethnic, political and cultural boundaries.

Circularity extends beyond even the shape of objects and ideas within the church. From the beginning, Watchman Nee and those who understood him to be a modern-day apostle rejected ‘the sin of denominations’. If the purpose of the universe was that Christians would become the living Body of God, then denominationalism was a dismemberment of that body. Many denominational Christians understand each group to be fulfilling a separate function of the Body – just as the hand does something very different from the eye, so too do Charismatic denominations, through the ‘gifts of the Holy Spirit’, do something very different from traditional Anglican churches, for example. Thus it is natural for such Christians to ask one another, ‘what church do you go to?’ This question, to those committed to the church in Taiwan, sums up a lot that has gone wrong with ‘Christianity’– there is only one church and it is the Body of God in becoming, they say. Though using the same term as denominational Christians, Nee clearly had very different ideas about what ‘the Body of Christ’ looked like.

The bodily image that denominational Christians give to the church as a whole, Nee, Lee and my informants in Taipei give to a single ‘locality’. All members there have very different roles to play in maintaining the health of the local group. There is no clergy and all are expected to speak in church meetings and evangelise outside of them. Nonetheless, it is recognised that every ‘saint’, as participants are referred to, has their own ‘function’. Some may be better at cooking, others better at looking after newcomers, or conducting children’s meetings, or updating the church’s social media sites etc. The church as an international entity, however, is not to be divided up this way. I want to suggest then that the ‘Body of Christ’, on this scale at least, is imagined in the way that the human body and the Eucharistic Body are – as circular. Structurally, unlike the outline of a human body, a circle looks the same whichever way one rotates it. Whenever I ask church participants what they feel is distinctive about their own locality they invariably preface their reply with ‘the church is the same everywhere’.

Finally, in contrast to how the church in Taiwan imagines the situation to be in “Christianity”, in almost every church meeting – whether there are three or three thousand participants – members sit in a circle. In this church then, the global metaphor of ‘the Body’ takes an implicitly circular shape in idea, object and practice. It is the circularity of the Body metaphor in this church which is moved and moves across the globe.

About the Author: Having studied anthropology at UCL before starting his PhD in anthropology at the LSE in 2013, Gareth is now writing his thesis on transnational Christianity in Taiwan. His research interests include Chinese and Taiwanese histories, religious experience and urban living, rhythm, metaphor and social epistemology.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religiongloba...an-and-beyond/

"The church is the same everywhere"? So the church in Antioch should have been exactly the same as the church in Jerusalem? I don't think Paul thought so, per Galatians chapter 2. Who's going to buy this pseudo-scholarly sociological drivel? A few Chinese grad students? Probably there are some enrolled at LSE, so Gareth's work can pay dividends for his handlers. And maybe a few gullible teens? (He says that he was 13 when his parents joined). But beyond that, how many with discernment buy into this? Precious few, I'd warrant. It's the classic Trojan Horse: "Everyone must be the same". . . the same as who? Duh. . . how many simpletons do you think are out there? How many gullible naifs out there that will bite on your hook, thinking it's a tasty worm? Not many.

[aron]

Originally Posted by aron

"The church is the same everywhere"? So the church in Antioch should have been exactly the same as the church in Jerusalem? I don't think Paul thought so, per Galatians chapter 2. .. It's the classic Trojan Horse: "Everyone must be the same". . . the same as who?

The idea that "every church is the same" as a corollary to one church (e.g., Jerusalem) imposing universal compliance and conformity on all local churches everywhere suffers from two logical faults.

The first fault is that if this "the same" is based on eternal and heavenly attributes then every local christian church is the same already and should be received as such. If they meet the minimum basic requirements as suggested by the Acts 15 conference, then they are already "the same" and any distinctions beyond that are irrelevant. If they confess Jesus as Lord, whether they call themselves "X" or "Y" is not an issue of any importance, and to make it an issue is to leave the Lord.

The second fault is that if this "the same" is based on some human, earthly idea of what a "normal" church is supposed to look like, i.e. outward conformity is required, then who are we conforming to? Whose idea of normality? Jerusalem, or Antioch, or Alexandria or Constantinople? Or Rome, or Chinese cultural norms via Taiwan and Anaheim California? Sooner or later you're conforming to human hands; you're once again building with the "bricks and slime" of Genesis 11:3 (KJV). The Great Stone is not cut with human hands, per Daniel 2.

[awareness]

Originally Posted by Indiana View Post
What Deputy Authority is Not
Signs of Not Having Spiritual Authority:
1. Asserting One’s Own Authority
2. Practicing Self-Vindication
3. Bearing False Witness
4. Misrepresenting God
5. Mishandling Financial Matters

Brother Indiana forgot one :

6. Sexual misbehavior (Nee)