[Indiana]

I am interested in truth. This includes the pulling down of any high place, and the breaking of any idol.

Let us consider: Was Witness Lee contra sectarianism in more than his spoken word? What path did he really end up taking?

Asking this important question is for our learning dear brothers and sisters. It is also for determining our Path.



Plymouth Brethren and the Local Churches

We have the record of the Plymouth Brethren to compare ourselves to and saw how division came in through the system of Darbyism, as people were excluded for not holding the right concepts. They didn’t fit in with the assemblies that were united in a special unity around the world through Darby’s teachings. John Darby, accordingly, received the blame for this cutting off of fellow members from the fellowship of the Body.

It is evident that the Brethren lacked love for maintaining their “brilliant unity” and in accommodating others for the building up of the Body of Christ. Their “Golden Age” was over in twenty years. Unity, their top-most objective was broken. As one of the Brethren leaders, lamented:

"Our shame is public. It requires no spirituality to see that exactly that which we have professedly sought, we have failed most signally. The 'unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace' is most surely what we have not kept." - FW Grant

Another brother observed,

"The Brethren are remarkable people for rightly dividing the Word of Truth and wrongly dividing themselves!" - Griffith Thomas

At the end of his sharing in "The Fermentation of the Present Rebellion", Witness Lee exhorted the leading ones, who had just spent at least two days castigating their former fellow co-workers, to “endeavor to keep the oneness of His Body AT ANY COST”.

I have to say, it is not clear to me what Brother Lee meant by this word. He did the opposite of this exhortation in order to carry out the “big plans” that LSM had to move into localities around the globe. He didn’t keep the “oneness of the Body” at any cost then, or else he would have responded in a proper spirit and attitude to reports in the Southeast of violations of the oneness of the Body and of the oneness in the work between elders and workers. He would have done the same in England, Germany, and Rosemead when he heard of LSM usurpations, interferences, and control. His silence and lack of response was taken as the voice of complicity to the divisive work of Living Stream.

He let the violations of the oneness of the Body occur, and he did so “at any cost”, losing co-workers, churches, and saints. He was after a new way, new elders, and a new mentality in the “churches”, while he labeled those who raised challenging questions as slanderers, perverted ones, rebellious ones, and so forth. He showed little regard for keeping the oneness of the Body. He was “cleaning house” and starting something new.

Witness Lee, and his co-workers, set a system in place that others are maintaining well in the churches thus far, nearly ten years after his passing. But the sectarian mindset that is unavoidable in such a system is here.

The churches of the Lord’s recovery have experienced much organization over the last twenty years by its leadership. In 2005, a proclamation concerning having only one publication in the recovery went out to the churches that will further organize the recovery under the domination of LSM. A type of control mechanism is being instituted by that “little office” of “limited function” to further systematize the already heavily systematized recovery. The divisive elements long embodied in the narrow heart of LSM representatives are surely being manifest today in the One Publication Proclamation.

Division is resulting from the push and the emphasis, in the same way that division resulted from the strong push and emphasis in the LSM drive that began in the early eighties and plowed through the late eighties, creating havoc, and into the nineties with great momentum, until arriving at today with Proclamation in hand and a line drawn.

There needs to be a return to the proper ground of oneness with no over-emphasis on a person, a ministry, or a way in order to afford the Lord an inclusive way to move in His Body in local churches, rather than to confine Him to the exclusive way of a man, a ministry, and a movement within a system.