The whole problem here is that you are making a huge presumption that to judge the nature of what we can see is somehow to be "speaking evil."
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The point is this, I don’t know the hearts, only Jesus does, and this can have a big influence on how someone is judged. Judging that the girl took the computer is not the same thing as judging that she is a thief. Also, deciding if someone merits amnesty or not is not for me to decide it is for the Principle (or in the case of WL it is for the Lord) to decide.
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And no one has suggested that we must know the heart. The evidence is in the actions. If there are certain signs, Paul suggested that rejection was acceptable, and even insisted upon.
You are claiming that pointing to strong evidence is equivalent to speaking evil and therefore cannot be. This is the kind of speaking that allowed Benson, Ray, Lee, Kangas, and so many others to declare that anyone who exposes the wrongs of their spiritual superiors (most notably Lee or any of the upper echelons) is guilty no matter how right they are.
It simply falls back under that heinous rule of "right and wrong do not matter, only the spirit." Well, the "spirit" they are speaking of is not the one that Paul ever spoke of. It is something else. It is some code for "spiritual authorities are exempt from righteousness." And to suggest otherwise is to join them.
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Off Topic? The topic is defined in the first post, it is the comment in red. You are not the topic. What you are doing and what you desire to do is completely irrelevant to this thread.
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Funny way to argue with me. I was responding to a post of yours other than the first one. You didn't respond to me, but to something else. It makes your response "off topic" relative to what I was speaking of. It was more truly a strawman — not necessarily for advantage of defeating it and appearing to defeat may actual argument. But it
was a change of the subject. Willful or not. Underhanded or not. You dodged the subject.
And every bit of this is relevant to whether you can dismiss Lee's ministry. According to Paul, it is quite essential that those kinds of things be considered. You, along with others, were so strong for the adherence to the qualifications for elders, yet you do not even require those for the source of your teachings. You do not require that your teacher(s) at least admit their faults and repent when they are found in sin. And take at least some time out if not step aside altogether. Instead, they are clothed in an impenetrable shield that makes all faults, great or small, irrelevant. Why? Because they brought a bunch of teachings to us that made us feel superior? If we dismiss the source of our superiority, we will fall in our own eyes.
It would be a great fall. But again, only in our own eyes. We are the only ones who ever thought we were so much because of those teachings. And even if we have rejected the superiority, if we cling to the erroneous teachings, we know that they will not be found anywhere else, so we continue to cling to the source.
It does seem a dichotomy to declare that we are all fallen and then note that we accept the teachings of many fallen teachers. But those teachers are not declaring their folly to be righteous, their business to be no one's but their own. Yet their business controls the very life of the churches it touches. How can that only be Lee's own business? The very position reeks of hypocrisy. If it affects the churches by requirement, then it is the business of every member of those churches.
So a man who puts an openly immoral man in charge of the affairs of those churches through a "ministry office" is to be allowed to do so and any comment about it declared to be "evil"? And how is this so important? That office has directed that its churches must cease certain meetings of the church, and instead have meetings for the purpose of effectively reading through materials that must be bought from the ministry. It is making God's house a house of merchandise. A personal piggy bank. I don't fault the churches for having book sales, even of LSM books. I fault the LSM for forcing itself upon the churches and requiring their payments. It is a variant on the sale of indulgences.
Complain about this being "off topic" if you will. It is sound reason for rejecting the ministry of Lee.
And you can reject the ministry of Lee, and his "service" to the churches, without denying him a place among the redeemed. And without speaking evil of him.
But speaking evil of him is really about speaking of him in a manner that would be blaspheme if said of God. Blaspheme is to say something knowingly untrue about God as a slight against his character. Speaking the truth is not blaspheme. (And there are people these days that are sure that God cannot be the God that wiped out all but 8 people in a flood. So they either have to say that is a misunderstanding of God written into "scripture" by men, or that God is unjust. Either way is to misrepresent God.) We are not misrepresenting Lee. We are telling it like it is. That is not evil.