Quote:
Originally Posted by awareness
Well at least you point out something about the trainings. Unless I missed it, neither bro Z nor bro Inddy have stated whether they think the FTTs are propaganda or LSM brandless God promotion centers.
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I hesitate to answer this question because I know it is merely my opinion and no doubt the LSM head honchos would deny and contradict it. But as long as everyone understands that I am merely giving my personal opinion because I was asked, and that I state clearly up front I was not a "decider" or even involved in fellowship leading up to key decisions, in the LSM I will give my opinion.
During the 3rd semester for the FTTT "abiding fruit" was a critical concern. So much so that Andrew Yu made it clear that the future of the training depended on it. Over the previous year the churches had made a big investment in the FTTT and hadn't seen any fruit. The church in Taipei was complaining that with all these great statistics, all these people being saved and baptized, they hadn't noticed any increase. This was such a high priority that we were put into various teams (I already have described my team a little), given the charge to find a solution, and given complete free reign (this may not have applied to all of the chinese trainees, but it did apply to most of the foreigners still there).
In December I went to the campus we were assigned and started working about 2 weeks before my coworkers joined me. The leading brother in our group should have been the brother from Austin, he had been here the first year, he had been the most successful with door knocking among all of the trainees, and he was training the saints in the gospel. But he saw the work I had built in two weeks and wanted to contribute. I told him that he was clearly the most talented at door knocking, if he would just continue with that and send his gospel contacts to the Bible study that would be the best help of all. So he did that and my Bible study was always standing room only. He should get a lot of credit for that. But, we know that door knocking alone did not result in abiding fruit and that is what he was doing. That was not the solution.
The American sister was located in the meeting hall nearest to this campus. She asked how she could help. This was an all male campus, there wasn't any need to send out gospel teams with a sister, and since I worked at nights it would be very inconvenient for the Austin brother to have her along (he would then need a third saint) so I told her the biggest need was a home meeting in the church. Now to her credit she arranged home meetings for every single day, Monday through Friday. Every day she showed up at the Bible study and took whoever wanted to go with her. She was great at getting different saints to open their homes so that there was always a home to go to. She felt like she didn't know what to fellowship with them, but I told her I didn't think that was an issue. Between the gospel and Bible study they had heard a lot, now it was time for them to speak. Also, the saints whose homes they were in would also fellowship. This sister very quickly began to appear like a mother hen with five or six new gospel contacts following her at all times. I think she was gifted and also grew in function over the two or three months. But, again, what she did was to ferry people that wanted to go to a home meeting to the home.
My point is this, LSM and the training had a very big problem, our team solved it in 3 months. Of the three of us I felt I knew as much as anyone as to how to solve this problem of abiding fruit. When they came to me they asked if there was anything they could do to help. I said no. That was it, no more fellowship about how we were having great success. They asked the sister and she said she would like some help leading the home meetings. That is where a whole series of books on leading home meetings came from.
In my opinion they were not genuinely interested in how to get abiding fruit, what they were interested in was how could the LSM publish more books. To their credit they didn't force anything down our throat. If I had said that "the secret to our success was the RcV footnotes" you can be sure I would have been asked to give that testimony a hundred times in various meetings, etc. But since my testimony was "I didn't use any LSM books" the topic was dropped like a lead balloon. As a scientist and as a Christian I find that to reflect poorly on the LSM.
However, I think your characterization of a propaganda center and branding the saints is way too superficial. You are forgetting they were operating on a shoestring. They didn't have the funds to exercise much control at all. Instead we were put into groups of about 6, told to read a chapter and then fellowship among ourselves.