"Against the Tide" by Angus Kinnear

[Ohio]

Posted by Testing123

As far as I know, Kinnear (now referring to Angus) was never himself in Mainland China, having met Nee in the 1930s when he spent significant time at Honor Oak in England. Kinnear would later go on to serve many years of medical missionary work in India where he was involved with the Bakht Singh movement. It was there, in Bombay, that he first started publishing his own editions of Watchman Nee, which he edited together from notes compiled of Nee's speaking in England and Denmark. Angus Kinnear was very much spiritually related to T. Austin-Sparks and the other workers coming out of that center in England. However, none of those brothers ever worked with Nee directly.

Kinnear (p.312) writes the following about Lee restoring Nee to the ministry ...

In the hearts of those bearing responsibility in the Assembly Hall churches, the concern occasioned by Watchman Nee's prolonged absence from their ministry was very great. Already in 1946 Witness Lee had challenged the Shanghai elders: "Were you in the Spirit when you made the decision to reject him? And what was the effect? Can you say it brought life?" "No," they had replied sorrowfully to each question. The remorse felt among the fellow workers, and their patient search for a way back, is well expressed by one of them in April 1947: "Brother Nee's case was a mortal wound to us, and words cannot tell how far the consequences go. The charge that he collaborated with the enemy is entirely groundless, and much else that has been said was not based upon pure facts. This was the work of the devil, and shows our own spiritual deficiency at that time, but we hope we may have learned our lesson.

Kinnear's account begs the question, what were his sources? Did Kinnear, who never set foot in Shanghai, receive his account of events from Lee, or others who were not actually members of the church in Shanghai? Kinnear's book came out in 1973, and China had been a closed country for decades.