[Freedom]

Originally Posted by awareness

Sadly, even in this little local church, dependency is being enabled. And both the dependents and the enablers are to be blamed. There's a comfort zone found in the two-sides-of-the-same-coin dynamic.

But I have no room to speak, and shouldn't judge. If honest I have to admit that, I once was a co-dependent on Witness Lee. Shame shame on me ... that I found a comfort in that. If I can depend on Lee then I'm off the hook.

Dependency is an interesting issue. People want leaders. Just look at how uncomfortable people get in situations where there is no one to take charge.

Actually there was an article I saw about a week ago containing something that none other than Stephen Kaung spoke to a group of people who had come out of a cult. What he says is interesting and it ties into the dependency issue. Also notice how quickly parallels can be drawn from what is said to the legacy of Lee that Kaung would have been well aware of. I will just post part of it, the rest is at the link:

So, when one person became the authority; and I think it begins, it began about 20 years ago, is that it? Roughly, that was the time that a lot of these began, it is a kind of reaction. In the beginning it was a time when all these young people wanted to be free and then out of that comes the young people who wanted to go in the opposite direction and wanted to find authority. It is around that time. First of all you find this Jesus movement and things like that, and subculture began to develop and people just wanted to be free with no authority, no organization, nothing, throw away everything, but then a reaction came in and as a result, out of that you find the different groups, for instance, like The Children of God, is one of them.

And it began as a person who took authority and young people just reversed their feeling because they are looking for an authority and somebody came and became that authority. The result is the people who are in that group begin to loose their individuality.They cannot make any decisions because they are not supposed to and they don’t want to, because if someone can make the decision for you, it takes all the responsibility away from you and that is easy. And the result is, you find that it began to aggravate.
http://www.freefromthegrip.com/s%20kaung.html