Quote:
Originally Posted by Gubei
To my best knowledge, it was the early (or late) 1980s that WL actually changed the teaching of WN on the ground of locality, claiming that apostles (referring to himself and his co-workers) should not sever their connection to local churches. I think this "later Lee's" teaching is very far way from that of WN. Furthermore, WL said that actually we do not need to have many ministries in this modern age in which by the power of transportation and telecommunication, one ministry can efficiently cover all over the world.
I believe that was the start of our tragedy. Thus my evaluation of WL is mixed.
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Gubei, you are right. At the same time WL attacked Lang's book
Churches of God which addressed the matter of church eldership and church autonomy. Lang had written the book out of the same Brethren environment which the Recovery faced at the time. Lang ably expounded from scriptures in order to address many deficiencies which developed among the Darby exclusives. These truths were extremely dangerous to the system developing under LSM, hence the need for WL to enact a coordinated assault via quarantines upon all the proponents of the book and the truths within which were slowly spreading.
Like you, for the same reasons, "
my evaluation of WL is mixed" also. For these reasons, the "
ground of locality" is also paradoxical to me. I see the ideal beauty of it in the N.T., and at the same time, I see its ugly fruit in church history. Hence, the Spirit of God never made it prescriptive in the N.T. It happened, it was wonderful, it was recorded, it ended.