Quote:
Originally Posted by Indiana
The second main aspect of the church life is that of the standing or the ground of the church. This term, the church ground, was first used by Brother Watchman Nee in 1937. Before 1937, we never heard or saw this term, and the matter of the ground of the church, as far as we have been able to determine, was not known."
|
This is where people should have been wary in regards to quickly accepting the ground of locality as a legitimate teaching. Instead of Nee and Lee being excited that they had discovered a seemingly new doctrine, they would have been wise to ask the question, “If this is legitimate, then why hasn’t anyone else noticed it?” (Lee really should have asked himself that before every new teaching he decided to introduce)
Despite Lee feeling that “the ground” had Biblical basis, I think it served a more important purpose for him. It allowed him to organize all the while claiming that the LC’s didn’t have any “human organization”. Everyone was told organization was solely based on the practicality of geographic location. I’m sure it sounded like a good proposition to those who were fed up with structure and organization of traditional denominations, so it wasn’t all that hard to get people to buy into it.
As I said earlier in this thread, Lee’s ministry was always the basis of the local churches to some extent or another. Local churches were always “ministry churches”. Maybe the degree how ministry-centric churches were varied over the years, but right from the get-go, affiliation with his ministry was necessary to be considered a genuine local church. Most LC’s today don’t actually even strictly follow “the ground” doctrine. Many LC's meet sub-locally (in districts). Some will cross over into a neighboring city to meet with the LC there instead of the one in their city. There’s an enormous amount of hypocrisy considering that “the ground” is their prized doctrine.