Quote:
Originally Posted by Terry
Ohio, at what point in time do you believe did early Lee become later Lee?
Terry
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I think this may be a question many people would like to ask.
Not that Ohio's answer would be conclusive, nor any of our, but it owuld be interesting to see as a as a kind of consensus.
Personally, I have studied closely the first message from the Feb. 1986 elders' training and there was clearly a turn in his mentality at that time to work very diligently towards seeing what he understood as the practical side of brother Nee's ministry being put into practice.
This is the first message found in volume 7 of the Elders' Training series.
Lee expressly says in Message One that the change in his mentality began in Taiwan in October 1984. I do not know occasioned the change in his thinking, but I bet we could figure it out.
In this message, Lee implicitly calls for a purge, saying that "the blood" had never been "purified" from the "ambition" from the troubles in 1973. Again, I'm not certain what these 1973 troubles were but others here can surely help me with this.
In October 1984, according to Message One, Lee apparently came to point the finger squarely at T. Austin Sparks for the loss of the one accord and consequent blessing in Taiwan in 1955, apparently unable to realize his own role in the problem with brother Austin-Sparks. (This was well discussed somewhere at the other site and I'd love a link back to it if someone knew right where it was.)
In other words, everything was fine with the "spiritual side" of brother Nee's ministry but the "practical side" - which Lee apparently understood to be the Local Aspect of the Universal Church - had been neglected all these years since the problems in Taiwan and Lee purposed within himself to put an end to that. He basically says here that the Lord's Recovery is just "one car" and he is the uniquely qualified "one driver." This later became the teachings regarding "wise master-builder" and "apostle of the age" and such.
I really believe this one message, better than anything else I've seen, reveals the point of demarcation between "old Lee" and "new Lee" and I feel it also reveals his turn from just caring for the churches to caring for The Church in a "new way." The result of those days in that training was that elders all signed up to help him build the Universal Church and they soon began aggregating statistics from all of the localities in Anaheim. This was an attempt to guage the status and condition of The Church and it did have the effect of unifying by a system of human organization all the local assemblies that until then had merely been closely associated with Lee's ministry.
So, two questions:
what was the problem with "ambition" in 1973?
and
what occurred in October 1984 that Lee went back to Taiwan?
I'm sure these are discussed somewhere but so is a lot of stuff and it's hard for me to organize things sometimes.
My notes indicate that Summer 1973 was the last training held in Los Angeles, but I don't know why that happened, exactly. And I would like to know what was the book that resulted from that training. My notes say that Ingalls and Barber handled the training in Winter 1972.
Also, I see that the Life Study of Acts took place in December 1984 so he would have been preparing for that, presumably, and the final book of the Recovery Version of the New Testament about October 1984. Maybe something he saw in the book of Acts? Maybe something (probably "ambition") that happened while finalizing the RcV? I know Ingalls has written some about this but I haven't made a thorough study of that topic as yet.
At the end of the day, it probably doesn't even matter but it could certainly stand as a lesson to all of us if we knew where they started skidding so far off the rails. (Not that there weren't HUGE problems before this, of course, but just recognizing that there is a rather clear difference between the 1968 Lee in
Practical Expression and 1986 Lee in
Elders' Training Book 7...)