A Christian journalist by the name of H. V. Morton visited the Holy Land between the wars and subsequently wrote a book entitled “In the Steps of The Master”. Here is his reflection after visiting the Mt Calvary of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher:
....Calvary, the holiest place on Earth. I looked round hoping to be able to detect some sign of its former aspect, but that has been obliterated for ever beneath the suffocating trappings of piety... I went away wishing that we might have known this place only in our hearts.
In summer of 1997 I was on business in Israel. During that visit I managed to squeeze in a “Jerusalem pilgrimage” and for a day I became a “pilgrim” doing the usual Holy sites. I too was left with my own reflection on “the suffocating trappings of piety”. Here is a short passage from the story of my visit
The religious mentality has something about it that renders it unselfconscious. Perhaps this is a consequence of devotion so intense that it becomes lost in itself. But whatever the cause, this context blindness means that this extreme devotion leads to an inability to stand back and examine itself. Thus in its obsession with devotional minutia it is unable to see the aggregate effect of its activity, and is thus unaware of the incoherent and implausible jumble its religion has become. One man's iconic elaborations are another man's blasphemy. And so there is a tendency for these elaborations to be repeatedly destroyed and remade as people wipe away the elaborations of their forerunners or contemporaries and start all over again with the construction of fantastic new cultural forms, forms often thought to represent a return to genuine and original simplicity. Thus, the ground is successively cleared and replanted and the net effect is that there springs up a thick undergrowth of diverse groups.
The generic concept here is summed up by the word “Restorationism”. Freedom permitting, Christians (and in fact religious people in general) are forever rebuilding their faith in reaction against the other believers around them, thus restoring or returning to what they believe to be the right way. This tendency is particularly marked in Protestantism where a power vacuum attracts self proclaimed authorities.
With this background behind me it was with a somewhat perturbed fascination that I recently noticed yet another form of Christian restorationism popping up on a Network Norwich & Norfolk thread (See here - this link no longer exists 20/2/10). This form of restorationism actually goes back a few decades and has its origins in the ministry of a Chinese Christian called “Witness Lee” whose views, in turn, are partly founded on the teachings of another Chinese Christian called “Watchman Nee”. Unlike the Christian house church restorationists of the late seventies the Lee sect doesn’t use the word “Restoration”, but a word like it: “Recovery”; it considers itself to be the Lord’s “recovered” church.
I have had a quick look at the teachings of Lee and Nee using links furnished by the NN&N thread (Especially the links provided by a correspondent called “The Terminator”). In order to assess a movement as quickly as I can, as a general rule I go straight to a sects publications dealing with leadership, authority and church. This is because the subject of church management will reveal any cult ethos, if it is to be found. In this case I focused on two publications called “Authority and Submission” and “Leadership in the New Testament”. To cut a long story short these publications suggested to me that we have here a group ethos with a very strong view of its spiritual authority. This was no surprise. Moreover, in the NN&N thread one of the sect members is caught in the act of trying to administer that authority online. Clearly annoyed by the obstinacy of The Terminator a sect member called “a believer in Norwich” does the equivalent of excommunicating The Terminator:
We are left with no other recourse but to follow our Lord’s directive to treat him/her, according to his /her own attitude, as those who are outside the realm of the people of God .
And this is carried out on the basis that The Terminator’s behavior:
reveals little care for the headship of Christ or the body of Christ
This online disfellowshipping is a rather a futile gesture as clearly “The Terminator” is not part of the Lee sect fellowship in the first place. What little gravitas this “excommunication” has comes about as a result of the sect’s view of spiritual demographics: The sect divides the world into three populations: the favoured “blended brothers” (sect members, it seems), the apostate church of “divided brothers” (all other sects and denominations of Christianity) and finally the pagans and atheists on the way to hell. It is to the latter group that the excommunicated Terminator has been consigned. The “headship of Christ or the body of Christ” referred to above is none other than the authority of the “recovered” church of Witness Lee: This much becomes clear when one reads the publications cited. It is this authority that has been exercised in excommunicating The Terminator. (I doubt the Terminator gives a damn). It was the basis of this authority that I expected to find and found when I started reading the sects literature; any sect/cult that maintains a strong sense of communal identity and belongingness requires an exalted notion of the group’s religious authority in order keep discipline. This notion of authority can be found in other sects/cults.
The Lee sect members who meet in a city call themselves the “Local Church”. This may seem a rather bland name, a name that is just about as uninformative as calling oneself a “church”; such terms are over allocated. Moreover the qualification “local” adds little distinction, since all churches, accept perhaps for web churches, are local. However, as is always the case with restorationist startups there is a hidden qualifier tacked on to the front of its prosaic and affectedly primitive self designation. In its view they are not merely “a local church” but “THE local church”.
All restorationist startups face one impossible logical conundrum. As an almost invariable rule they rail against the denominational divisions, but in a monumental and yet completely unself-conscious act of collective egotism they never see themselves as just another denominational start-up: They get round this by taking it for granted that unlike all those other corrupt and apostate churches they are THE church; church in its best and purist manifestation. They are, in their opinion, the church restored (or recovered) to what it should be; primitive and simple. This is ever the story one finds amongst JW’s, Mormons, house church restorationists and the like. They usually have novel elements found in no other contemporary or historic churches and thus they have little option but to explain themselves as a modern recovery of what should have been.
However, to talk of some of these restorationists as just another denominational start-up is to do great disservice to the average mainstream denominational church, because the restorationist churches usually have a much stronger sense of their identity and belonging than the average denomination. Moreover, that identity is maintained by the administration of authority, an authority wielded by a strong leadership. So in a sense restorationist sects are a form of deniminationalism++. But this takes us back to my introduction: Sect and cult members are utterly and genuinely unaware of themselves as just another division of Christianity and they too, in their elaboration of belief and practice, are tempted to bury the true Calvary under the suffocating trappings of piety, particularly the trappings of, submission, authority and control.
There is a story of tadpole that mocked frogs for their ill favoured looks and yet the tadpole himself grew up to be an ugly toad. This story is a fitting metaphor for the cult startups who forever criticize and denounce the denominations of the mainstream EPC (Evangelical, Pentecostal, Charismatic) community. But it is out of the EPC community from which many sects are spawned. The authoritarian parody of faith that we see in the cult-startups is often prefigured, albeit a less pronounced form, in EPC itself: Spiritual pride and elitism, anti-intellectualism, intense and affected spiritual expressions, haughty condemnations of sin etc. In some ways the restorationist sects are a mirror of EPC, a mirror that exaggerates its less desirable aspects. That mirror needs to be looked by into by the EPC community and the lessons learned. We currently have an opportunity to look into that mirror on the NN&N website.
.
....Calvary, the holiest place on Earth. I looked round hoping to be able to detect some sign of its former aspect, but that has been obliterated for ever beneath the suffocating trappings of piety... I went away wishing that we might have known this place only in our hearts.
In summer of 1997 I was on business in Israel. During that visit I managed to squeeze in a “Jerusalem pilgrimage” and for a day I became a “pilgrim” doing the usual Holy sites. I too was left with my own reflection on “the suffocating trappings of piety”. Here is a short passage from the story of my visit
The religious mentality has something about it that renders it unselfconscious. Perhaps this is a consequence of devotion so intense that it becomes lost in itself. But whatever the cause, this context blindness means that this extreme devotion leads to an inability to stand back and examine itself. Thus in its obsession with devotional minutia it is unable to see the aggregate effect of its activity, and is thus unaware of the incoherent and implausible jumble its religion has become. One man's iconic elaborations are another man's blasphemy. And so there is a tendency for these elaborations to be repeatedly destroyed and remade as people wipe away the elaborations of their forerunners or contemporaries and start all over again with the construction of fantastic new cultural forms, forms often thought to represent a return to genuine and original simplicity. Thus, the ground is successively cleared and replanted and the net effect is that there springs up a thick undergrowth of diverse groups.
The generic concept here is summed up by the word “Restorationism”. Freedom permitting, Christians (and in fact religious people in general) are forever rebuilding their faith in reaction against the other believers around them, thus restoring or returning to what they believe to be the right way. This tendency is particularly marked in Protestantism where a power vacuum attracts self proclaimed authorities.
With this background behind me it was with a somewhat perturbed fascination that I recently noticed yet another form of Christian restorationism popping up on a Network Norwich & Norfolk thread (See here - this link no longer exists 20/2/10). This form of restorationism actually goes back a few decades and has its origins in the ministry of a Chinese Christian called “Witness Lee” whose views, in turn, are partly founded on the teachings of another Chinese Christian called “Watchman Nee”. Unlike the Christian house church restorationists of the late seventies the Lee sect doesn’t use the word “Restoration”, but a word like it: “Recovery”; it considers itself to be the Lord’s “recovered” church.
I have had a quick look at the teachings of Lee and Nee using links furnished by the NN&N thread (Especially the links provided by a correspondent called “The Terminator”). In order to assess a movement as quickly as I can, as a general rule I go straight to a sects publications dealing with leadership, authority and church. This is because the subject of church management will reveal any cult ethos, if it is to be found. In this case I focused on two publications called “Authority and Submission” and “Leadership in the New Testament”. To cut a long story short these publications suggested to me that we have here a group ethos with a very strong view of its spiritual authority. This was no surprise. Moreover, in the NN&N thread one of the sect members is caught in the act of trying to administer that authority online. Clearly annoyed by the obstinacy of The Terminator a sect member called “a believer in Norwich” does the equivalent of excommunicating The Terminator:
We are left with no other recourse but to follow our Lord’s directive to treat him/her, according to his /her own attitude, as those who are outside the realm of the people of God .
And this is carried out on the basis that The Terminator’s behavior:
reveals little care for the headship of Christ or the body of Christ
This online disfellowshipping is a rather a futile gesture as clearly “The Terminator” is not part of the Lee sect fellowship in the first place. What little gravitas this “excommunication” has comes about as a result of the sect’s view of spiritual demographics: The sect divides the world into three populations: the favoured “blended brothers” (sect members, it seems), the apostate church of “divided brothers” (all other sects and denominations of Christianity) and finally the pagans and atheists on the way to hell. It is to the latter group that the excommunicated Terminator has been consigned. The “headship of Christ or the body of Christ” referred to above is none other than the authority of the “recovered” church of Witness Lee: This much becomes clear when one reads the publications cited. It is this authority that has been exercised in excommunicating The Terminator. (I doubt the Terminator gives a damn). It was the basis of this authority that I expected to find and found when I started reading the sects literature; any sect/cult that maintains a strong sense of communal identity and belongingness requires an exalted notion of the group’s religious authority in order keep discipline. This notion of authority can be found in other sects/cults.
The Lee sect members who meet in a city call themselves the “Local Church”. This may seem a rather bland name, a name that is just about as uninformative as calling oneself a “church”; such terms are over allocated. Moreover the qualification “local” adds little distinction, since all churches, accept perhaps for web churches, are local. However, as is always the case with restorationist startups there is a hidden qualifier tacked on to the front of its prosaic and affectedly primitive self designation. In its view they are not merely “a local church” but “THE local church”.
All restorationist startups face one impossible logical conundrum. As an almost invariable rule they rail against the denominational divisions, but in a monumental and yet completely unself-conscious act of collective egotism they never see themselves as just another denominational start-up: They get round this by taking it for granted that unlike all those other corrupt and apostate churches they are THE church; church in its best and purist manifestation. They are, in their opinion, the church restored (or recovered) to what it should be; primitive and simple. This is ever the story one finds amongst JW’s, Mormons, house church restorationists and the like. They usually have novel elements found in no other contemporary or historic churches and thus they have little option but to explain themselves as a modern recovery of what should have been.
However, to talk of some of these restorationists as just another denominational start-up is to do great disservice to the average mainstream denominational church, because the restorationist churches usually have a much stronger sense of their identity and belonging than the average denomination. Moreover, that identity is maintained by the administration of authority, an authority wielded by a strong leadership. So in a sense restorationist sects are a form of deniminationalism++. But this takes us back to my introduction: Sect and cult members are utterly and genuinely unaware of themselves as just another division of Christianity and they too, in their elaboration of belief and practice, are tempted to bury the true Calvary under the suffocating trappings of piety, particularly the trappings of, submission, authority and control.
There is a story of tadpole that mocked frogs for their ill favoured looks and yet the tadpole himself grew up to be an ugly toad. This story is a fitting metaphor for the cult startups who forever criticize and denounce the denominations of the mainstream EPC (Evangelical, Pentecostal, Charismatic) community. But it is out of the EPC community from which many sects are spawned. The authoritarian parody of faith that we see in the cult-startups is often prefigured, albeit a less pronounced form, in EPC itself: Spiritual pride and elitism, anti-intellectualism, intense and affected spiritual expressions, haughty condemnations of sin etc. In some ways the restorationist sects are a mirror of EPC, a mirror that exaggerates its less desirable aspects. That mirror needs to be looked by into by the EPC community and the lessons learned. We currently have an opportunity to look into that mirror on the NN&N website.
.
2 comments:
Hmm
Thank you. You might like to hear this. Hank Hannegraff
http://www.equip.org/broadcasts/the-christian-research-journal20100501
http://www.equip.org/broadcasts/the-christian-research-journal20100601
Would you respect Hanegraf’s views on say Lutheranism, Methodism, Baptists etc as much as his views on Lee’s followers?
Since Lee’s followers have been documented denying that there is such a thing as the “Local Church” or that they have joined any group or that there is a Witness Lee sect, then on that account the sect doesn’t exist. Moreover, how can Hangraaaf reference a phenomenon that “doesn’t exist”? (or at least allows itself “no name”). Therefore, since there is nothing to investigate I need take the matter no further.
In any case I unfortunately only have as much time for Hanegraff’s webcasts as he has for my blog.
(PS What are you going to do 10 years down the line when the Lee sect is still just yet another marginal group of followers that has failed to “recover” the mainstream according to their image?)
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