House Church Talk - Re: The Local Church (history)

[tim dei comuni]

Dear Thomas, Paul, and all,

>>>>>>>>>>
> Before he died, as the story goes, he entrusted his ministry to his
trusted and closest protege Witness Lee who then continued the LC legacy in
Taiwan and then the States in the early 60s, when my parents came into the
group. By then, Witness Lee ("Bro Lee") had become the undisputed leader of
the movement, who founded LCs all across the States, as he took more
authority upon himself and even demanded absolute obedience to his ministry
called Living Stream Ministry (www.lsm.org)  He started to criticize the
rest of Christianity for not seeing the "light" (proper "ground") about
meeting as The LC in each city (which meant meeting under the auth of
himself & the LSM).And became increasingly proud and exclusive as the
present-day "Oracle" of God. Essentially, the inclusive LC light of Watchman
Nee that ALL local believers constitute the local church in any given
locality degenerated into the Exclusive LC light promoted/practiced by Lee
and his circle as only those local believe!
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Okay,

here is another side of the story.

before Watchman Nee and the "age-senior" co-workers went back to China, they
were in Hong Kong and were praying for guidance in the future.

Witness Lee had voiced his decisive plan to avoid the communists.  Watchman
was not a controling person, if anyone asked Nee to leave their ministry, he
would.  And that was one of the reasons Watchman arranged Witness Lee to go
to Taiwan, but on one condition.  (Most of the other co-workers went back to
China; all of them were eventually arrested by the commuists.)

This condition was that Lee must work together with a miss Shou-Ying Hou,
not to be serving alone.  But after they got to Taiwan, Lee did not really
work with miss Hou.  (No one doubted that Witness Lee was very talented in
church activities, and organizational matters.)

There was a custom among them that sisters only give teachings to sisters.
>From the beginning miss Hou had some ministry among the sisters.  But some
time later, all the sister meetings were stopped.  And the meeting -- where
miss Hou would address to -- had only a few attendants.  Miss Hou's
influence had been weakened; and Lee had gradually became the dominant
leader in Taiwan.

----------------

When Witness Lee was still running the Living Stream Ministry, one thing was
obvious to all who are involved.  There was a strong grib on things like
money and realty properties, Living Stream Ministry would take a lot of
strong actions in order to gain the property ownership of meeting halls
around the world.  Please correct me if I am wrong.  It seems that Witness
Lee believed in natural power; I don't know if he believed in super-natural
power.

Tim Wai
back to Hong Kong now.