[aron]

Originally Posted by David

a moderator declined to allow my post regarding the ground of the church to appear yesterday. . . Just goes to show that this place is nothing more than an echo chamber.

Not quite as extreme as the echo chamber of the LC, tho. There, we were told to be "Witness Lee tape recorders". If you want to get an ''ayyemenn" when you "function", just stand up and say, "What I enjoyed this week was..." and then read, verbatim, a quote from the ministry. Then you'll be a member in good standing in the LC.

Originally Posted by David

I am standing on the ground of the Church in Greenback in the Meeting Place State

Here's a quote from someone's experience trying to find "the ground" in Singapore.

Originally Posted by Bradley

One thing I was very passionate about when I was in the LC was the ground of the church. We were taught that it was the source of all blessing and had to be perfect. We were taught that the ground of locality was everything, the name was everything. Brother Lee was not the ground of the church but the ground was.

We were taught that there could be all sorts of problems in the church but as long as the ground was right, it would be okay. There could be all sorts of things going well but as long as the ground was wrong, God has forgotten you and your work is in vain.

You can imagine my surprise then when I went blending in Singapore and found myself not in 'the church in Singapore' but 'the church of God in Singapore'. Subtle difference, but I had spent two years in the training being taught how bad this is. You just can't do that, you might as well call yourselves the southern Baptists.

There was another group that was 'the church in Singapore' and they had broken off. They got to keep the name, so this group I was blending with was forced to take another name. The other group was apparently not on the 'true ground', but the 'church of God in Singapore' was. Why was that? I couldn't understand. They had the right name, so they should have the ground.

Nobody could answer my question: what is it about 'the church of God in Singapore' that gives it the proper ground despite having the wrong name, and what is it about 'the church in Singapore' that puts it off the correct ground, despite the fact that they have the right name?

Apparently, the true requirements for the ground of the church is not what the ministry teaches, i.e. having the right name, it is what the ministry specifically said was not important, i.e. loyalty to the Living Stream Ministry and the blending brothers. They teach one thing but do the other.

On that note, a full-timer brother I knew was secretly going out and fellowshipping with them, maintaining a friendship with them even though they broke off twenty or so years ago. He had to keep it a secret because they were demonised as bad guys from pretty much everyone, even though they all used to be friends in the past. Pretty sad really.

But my point is this: the people (in Anaheim) who decide which church groups are on the right ground and which are not, do not read their own books to tell them how to decide. They go with whoever invites them to come speak at conferences, and reject those who do not.

My conclusion now of course is that there is no ground, or any one true church, and that its all BS. But the hypocricy still bothers me.

And in Shanghai

Originally Posted by Bradley

There are three separate local churches in Shanghai too, where I lived for three years - all of them 'faithful to the ministry', all of them inviting coworkers from overseas to hold conferences, all of them up to date with the morning revival and 7 feasts. All three of them are accepted by the global LSM as legit. But they won't meet with each other, they hardly even know each other. One group is the locals, one group is for foreigners, one group was of 'turtles' i.e. locals who had lived overseas for years (of course, through the gospel, there were locals, foreigners and turtles in every group). I went to meetings at all three: the local group was the most burning and the foreign group was the most dead but thats where the English-speaking districts were so I went out of necessity.

One brother (from the local group) told me he discovered that his next door neighbour was in the LC (a Taiwanese district in the foreign group) and they both hosted table meetings in their homes every sunday morning. He had invited him to join table meetings together for blending and the other brother had refused, as if that would be a terrible sin and he didn't have the authority to do that (though he wouldn't ask anyone who did). They basically had a 'wave at each other and say good morning' -type relationship after that and thats all.

When the local brothers expressed their concern about it to me, I contacted a well-known coworker called Paul Hon. He had already known about it for decades and basically said: "its no big deal, there's nothing you can do, if we can't fix it you can't either so forget about it and ignore it." I had the attitude that a little person can make a small difference, at least to those around him, but his attitude was pretty much "meh who cares, don't even try".

This bothered me no end because I had been taught that the proper ground is the master key to all blessing, and without it, you shouldn't even partake of the bread and wine. Here was a big time coworker telling me to forget about it and carry on like it means nothing, partake anyway. But according to the teachings, in this situation there's no blessing and the work is in vain. He didn't refute that, he just said there's nothing I can do. It was a depressing cloud hanging above my church life while I lived there.

The LC "practical oneness" seems to be slavish submission to HQ - you don't even have to be "one" with the LSM-affiliated believers in your city, as long as you are "one" with Anaheim. Just keep buying those books and tapes!