Thank you for visiting my Wikipedia User page! My purpose is to present information on Witness Lee and his churches. Please be warned that I am posting this particular page from my interpretation of a strongly Evangelical Christian perspective. For a more NPOV, please visit another website.
The term 'local church' is typically used in Evangelical circles to refer to bodies of Christian believers organized near each other, or at the "local" level. Typically the term is used loosely within the church growth movement or in opposition to large ecclesiastical structures.
However, the term " Local Church" is often used to refer to the movement begun by Witness Lee, which migrated in the United States. Within the movement, it is known generally as "The Lord's Recovery," despite Witness Lee's insistence that the movement never name itself.
As Witness Lee never claimed the name "Local Church" for his own movement, and since the name was applied by those outside the movement, the term "local church" cannot be considered a trademark or trade name of any organization and remains in the public domain. This was decided in The Church in Houston v. Jim Moran, Light of Truth Ministries, in which "the Panel concludes that Complainant has not met its burden of establishing that it has rights in the mark "The Local Church." The mark is not registered, and therefore enjoys no presumption of validity under United States law."
Given the controversy surrounding the movement, and the nature of Wikipedia, it is highly recommended that readers research for themselves, and critically understand the issues involved, before finally coming to conclusions. A careful consideration of all sides of the dispute is necessary for a solid conclusion to be reached.
NPOV is difficult to achieve in this case, because much common ground between various positions has been lost. It is my hope that in the pages of Wikipedia, this middle ground can be regained by the site's philosophy of NPOV. As I see it, there are two major POV's involved, without much in the middle or on the fringes:
The goal is to forge a NPOV that considers both sides of the controversy, that, as DJ Clayworth puts it in Talk:Local churches, does not canonize or demonize the movement. This is difficult to achieve, and I believe much of the problem stems from a victim mentality on the part of Local church members.
The following are articles I initially contributed to:
Other related pages of interest:
Wikipedia was designed from the beginning with Open Source values in mind. Early on, the decision was made to allow anonymous authors to edit and update Wikipedia as they saw fit. This can be done even without registering a User ID, or one can register a User ID and remain anonymous. Because this is a fundamental design in the way Wikipedia is supported, it is not a valid criteria for critiquing articles.
Unfortunately, the Local Church Movement has a very controversial history, including many schisms, public criticism, and litigation with Christians. This has made it very difficult to critique the movement without fear of reprisal from Living Stream Ministries by way of legal action. This use of civil courts is specifically taught against by Paul in I Corinthians 6; however, the Local Church Movement disregards these teachings in matters of public criticism, justifying the legal actions with a questionable and weak scriptural argument. As such, for my own protection, it is necessary to use the anonymity of Wikipedia - for better or worse.
The use of the moniker "TheLocalChurch" was a decision based upon Jim Moran's use of "thelocalchurch.org". The user name was available for anyone to register, and the term is not trademarked. Those who were familiar with Jim's use of domain and the difficulties he ran into will appreciate this. The details of the WIPO decision can be found online here:
It should be clear that if I retain anonymity, credentials are useless as they cannot be verified. It is strange that members of the Local Church Movement request research credentials, when it is clear that neither Watchman Nee or Witness Lee have either college or seminary training themselves. That said, it is sufficient that I am an Evangelical Christian researcher, with some seminary-level training.
At a research level, I have access to a number of source materials published by Living Stream Ministries as authored by Watchman Nee, Witness Lee, or others. I have had a few years of contact with current and former members of the Local Church Movement, and cherish the friendships I have been granted to make in this time.
Understandably, disagreements about the materials presented in various Wikipedia entries on the Local Church Movement have come to the surface from time to time. I encourage individuals to discuss these issues with me directly at my own talk page:
There is a belief among members of the Local Church Movement that criticism of the movement is the result of jealousy, ulterior motives, hatred and persecution of the true Christians, or that criticism stems only from the materials of a handful of individuals written in the 1970s who allegedly had a "chip on their shoulder". Personally, I see this as victim mentality on the part of members of the movement, who in turn have developed a persecution complex and feel that any writings critical of them must necessarily stem from something other than legitimate criticism. The tendency is to draw extreme conclusions, along the lines of what one would find on the extremely POV website Contending for the Faith.
Some of the resources available online are listed here. By no means is this meant to be an exhaustive listing of resources for any particular POV.
Some Evangelical Christian websites which are critical of the movement can be found online here:
By design, Wikipedia invites anonymous users to edit, maintain, and modify pages. To this end, I have worked to contribute a few small articles to Wikipedia - however those articles have been seen as controversial, despite a lack of evidence that my articles were not actually NPOV. Most of the changes and updates have only been limited to minor updates and corrections (see the history of the Local Church Movement article for an example).
This said, there have been concerns about the factual content of my submissions, which I would like to address here.
In late June of 2003, I submitted my initial posts and edits of the Local Church Movement. Shortly after this, a number of interesting events transpired, prompting me to hold off on personally editing or updating the article in any way until the issues were resolved. Since my original posting, I have thus made no updates to the Local Church Movement article. The first events included multiple blankings of the material presented, which were faithfully reverted by Wikipedia users. On September 11, 2003, one of Wikipedia's users posted this notice at the head of the article (spelling and grammar errors left as written):
It is interesting that the same individual who blanked the article also posted this accusation of bias. Can someone both blank an article and be considered to be writing a NPOV? It is interesting to observe that the "Pro" website URLs are listed, while the "Against" are not. Similarly, the phrase "is not experienced personally by one of the Wiki's contributors" was pure speculation at the time this was written. How would he know if I had personally been involved with the movement? What difference would it make to the veracity of the article?
At this point in time, the article was titled Local Church, but has been renamed several times by various Wikipedia users to Local Church Movement and the current Local churches. A number of edits occur, many of which in my opinion are simply bizarre :) Some useful information was contributed, however, when an update was made with respect to issues surrounding the cases of Lee v. Duddy and the publication of The Mindbenders.
DJ Clayworth made this observation in Talk:Local churches: "It should be possible to write a sensible article about this movement without either canonising or demonising it." (sic) Indeed, I don't believe that the article as originally posted was demonizing, but apparently a simple article can be interpreted in some very different ways. Clearly, achieving NPOV is difficult due to the tendency, in DJ Clayworth's words, to canonize the movement. Thus, the reason for the observation made on this page about the difficulty of achieving NPOV.
Finally, on March 7, 2004, Wikipedia Sysop Bryan Derksen removed the notices regarding POV dispute. I felt now that I could comfortably post to Talk:Local churches my concerns, and thus I did.
This, however, did not end the controversy around the article. Nathan Cheng began a number of updates and rewrites on March 28, 2004 which implied that the article was "spun". I'm not sure how it could be considered spun at this point seeing as how it had been picked over so much, but perhaps the comments in the article history will shed some light on what was happening:
At this point, I think the fear that NPOV would be lost in the article has been realized. Perhaps this can change in the future. Wikipedia is certainly nothing if not dynamic!
Nathan Cheng misinterpreted the statement on my user page "whenever possible, corrections can be made in a manner that best reflects the views of all parties" to be an invitation to edit this page. In light of this, I have rephrased the Introduction to be more clear. The edits Nathan made were reverted by RickK as per Wikipedia guidelines. Nathan followed up by acknowledging the Wikipedia policy and by making some suggestions in My User Talk page as well as updates to Talk:Local_churches. Based upon his editing pattern, he had some valid concerns that I'd like to address here.
To detail some of Nathan's objections regarding this page:
Following this, Nathan Cheng discussed his concerns further on Talk:Local_churches. Several points to be discussed:
Finally, Nathan felt that the article Living Stream Ministries was incorrectly titled, and thus needed to be redirected to Living Stream Ministry. Additionally, he felt the statement "Living Stream Ministries is the publishing arm and ministry station headquarters of the Local Church" needed to be removed, as well as references to the publication of the Recovery Version of the Bible. The edit comment he left was "factual information only, please", but in what way was any of the information in the article not factual? Additionally, Nathan added reference to Living Stream Ministry's membership in the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, which indeed it is, albeit not without concern. Mere membership in ECPA is not the same as a blanket Evangelical endorsement.
All of this said, I hold no personal animosity toward Nathan Cheng and applaud his willingness to work within the guidelines of Wikipedia and interact with the materials presented here. The simple fact is that the wounds that exist between the Local Church and the Evangelical community need to be healed, and this can only happen when there is honest and open dialogue on issues that exist between us. A mere brushing aside of these issues, or a white-washing of the problems, will never replace the need for mutual understanding. I wish him well in his endeavors :)
Thank you for visiting my Wikipedia User page! My purpose is to present information on Witness Lee and his churches. Please be warned that I am posting this particular page from my interpretation of a strongly Evangelical Christian perspective. For a more NPOV, please visit another website.
The term 'local church' is typically used in Evangelical circles to refer to bodies of Christian believers organized near each other, or at the "local" level. Typically the term is used loosely within the church growth movement or in opposition to large ecclesiastical structures.
However, the term " Local Church" is often used to refer to the movement begun by Witness Lee, which migrated in the United States. Within the movement, it is known generally as "The Lord's Recovery," despite Witness Lee's insistence that the movement never name itself.
As Witness Lee never claimed the name "Local Church" for his own movement, and since the name was applied by those outside the movement, the term "local church" cannot be considered a trademark or trade name of any organization and remains in the public domain. This was decided in The Church in Houston v. Jim Moran, Light of Truth Ministries, in which "the Panel concludes that Complainant has not met its burden of establishing that it has rights in the mark "The Local Church." The mark is not registered, and therefore enjoys no presumption of validity under United States law."
Given the controversy surrounding the movement, and the nature of Wikipedia, it is highly recommended that readers research for themselves, and critically understand the issues involved, before finally coming to conclusions. A careful consideration of all sides of the dispute is necessary for a solid conclusion to be reached.
NPOV is difficult to achieve in this case, because much common ground between various positions has been lost. It is my hope that in the pages of Wikipedia, this middle ground can be regained by the site's philosophy of NPOV. As I see it, there are two major POV's involved, without much in the middle or on the fringes:
The goal is to forge a NPOV that considers both sides of the controversy, that, as DJ Clayworth puts it in Talk:Local churches, does not canonize or demonize the movement. This is difficult to achieve, and I believe much of the problem stems from a victim mentality on the part of Local church members.
The following are articles I initially contributed to:
Other related pages of interest:
Wikipedia was designed from the beginning with Open Source values in mind. Early on, the decision was made to allow anonymous authors to edit and update Wikipedia as they saw fit. This can be done even without registering a User ID, or one can register a User ID and remain anonymous. Because this is a fundamental design in the way Wikipedia is supported, it is not a valid criteria for critiquing articles.
Unfortunately, the Local Church Movement has a very controversial history, including many schisms, public criticism, and litigation with Christians. This has made it very difficult to critique the movement without fear of reprisal from Living Stream Ministries by way of legal action. This use of civil courts is specifically taught against by Paul in I Corinthians 6; however, the Local Church Movement disregards these teachings in matters of public criticism, justifying the legal actions with a questionable and weak scriptural argument. As such, for my own protection, it is necessary to use the anonymity of Wikipedia - for better or worse.
The use of the moniker "TheLocalChurch" was a decision based upon Jim Moran's use of "thelocalchurch.org". The user name was available for anyone to register, and the term is not trademarked. Those who were familiar with Jim's use of domain and the difficulties he ran into will appreciate this. The details of the WIPO decision can be found online here:
It should be clear that if I retain anonymity, credentials are useless as they cannot be verified. It is strange that members of the Local Church Movement request research credentials, when it is clear that neither Watchman Nee or Witness Lee have either college or seminary training themselves. That said, it is sufficient that I am an Evangelical Christian researcher, with some seminary-level training.
At a research level, I have access to a number of source materials published by Living Stream Ministries as authored by Watchman Nee, Witness Lee, or others. I have had a few years of contact with current and former members of the Local Church Movement, and cherish the friendships I have been granted to make in this time.
Understandably, disagreements about the materials presented in various Wikipedia entries on the Local Church Movement have come to the surface from time to time. I encourage individuals to discuss these issues with me directly at my own talk page:
There is a belief among members of the Local Church Movement that criticism of the movement is the result of jealousy, ulterior motives, hatred and persecution of the true Christians, or that criticism stems only from the materials of a handful of individuals written in the 1970s who allegedly had a "chip on their shoulder". Personally, I see this as victim mentality on the part of members of the movement, who in turn have developed a persecution complex and feel that any writings critical of them must necessarily stem from something other than legitimate criticism. The tendency is to draw extreme conclusions, along the lines of what one would find on the extremely POV website Contending for the Faith.
Some of the resources available online are listed here. By no means is this meant to be an exhaustive listing of resources for any particular POV.
Some Evangelical Christian websites which are critical of the movement can be found online here:
By design, Wikipedia invites anonymous users to edit, maintain, and modify pages. To this end, I have worked to contribute a few small articles to Wikipedia - however those articles have been seen as controversial, despite a lack of evidence that my articles were not actually NPOV. Most of the changes and updates have only been limited to minor updates and corrections (see the history of the Local Church Movement article for an example).
This said, there have been concerns about the factual content of my submissions, which I would like to address here.
In late June of 2003, I submitted my initial posts and edits of the Local Church Movement. Shortly after this, a number of interesting events transpired, prompting me to hold off on personally editing or updating the article in any way until the issues were resolved. Since my original posting, I have thus made no updates to the Local Church Movement article. The first events included multiple blankings of the material presented, which were faithfully reverted by Wikipedia users. On September 11, 2003, one of Wikipedia's users posted this notice at the head of the article (spelling and grammar errors left as written):
It is interesting that the same individual who blanked the article also posted this accusation of bias. Can someone both blank an article and be considered to be writing a NPOV? It is interesting to observe that the "Pro" website URLs are listed, while the "Against" are not. Similarly, the phrase "is not experienced personally by one of the Wiki's contributors" was pure speculation at the time this was written. How would he know if I had personally been involved with the movement? What difference would it make to the veracity of the article?
At this point in time, the article was titled Local Church, but has been renamed several times by various Wikipedia users to Local Church Movement and the current Local churches. A number of edits occur, many of which in my opinion are simply bizarre :) Some useful information was contributed, however, when an update was made with respect to issues surrounding the cases of Lee v. Duddy and the publication of The Mindbenders.
DJ Clayworth made this observation in Talk:Local churches: "It should be possible to write a sensible article about this movement without either canonising or demonising it." (sic) Indeed, I don't believe that the article as originally posted was demonizing, but apparently a simple article can be interpreted in some very different ways. Clearly, achieving NPOV is difficult due to the tendency, in DJ Clayworth's words, to canonize the movement. Thus, the reason for the observation made on this page about the difficulty of achieving NPOV.
Finally, on March 7, 2004, Wikipedia Sysop Bryan Derksen removed the notices regarding POV dispute. I felt now that I could comfortably post to Talk:Local churches my concerns, and thus I did.
This, however, did not end the controversy around the article. Nathan Cheng began a number of updates and rewrites on March 28, 2004 which implied that the article was "spun". I'm not sure how it could be considered spun at this point seeing as how it had been picked over so much, but perhaps the comments in the article history will shed some light on what was happening:
At this point, I think the fear that NPOV would be lost in the article has been realized. Perhaps this can change in the future. Wikipedia is certainly nothing if not dynamic!
Nathan Cheng misinterpreted the statement on my user page "whenever possible, corrections can be made in a manner that best reflects the views of all parties" to be an invitation to edit this page. In light of this, I have rephrased the Introduction to be more clear. The edits Nathan made were reverted by RickK as per Wikipedia guidelines. Nathan followed up by acknowledging the Wikipedia policy and by making some suggestions in My User Talk page as well as updates to Talk:Local_churches. Based upon his editing pattern, he had some valid concerns that I'd like to address here.
To detail some of Nathan's objections regarding this page:
Following this, Nathan Cheng discussed his concerns further on Talk:Local_churches. Several points to be discussed:
Finally, Nathan felt that the article Living Stream Ministries was incorrectly titled, and thus needed to be redirected to Living Stream Ministry. Additionally, he felt the statement "Living Stream Ministries is the publishing arm and ministry station headquarters of the Local Church" needed to be removed, as well as references to the publication of the Recovery Version of the Bible. The edit comment he left was "factual information only, please", but in what way was any of the information in the article not factual? Additionally, Nathan added reference to Living Stream Ministry's membership in the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, which indeed it is, albeit not without concern. Mere membership in ECPA is not the same as a blanket Evangelical endorsement.
All of this said, I hold no personal animosity toward Nathan Cheng and applaud his willingness to work within the guidelines of Wikipedia and interact with the materials presented here. The simple fact is that the wounds that exist between the Local Church and the Evangelical community need to be healed, and this can only happen when there is honest and open dialogue on issues that exist between us. A mere brushing aside of these issues, or a white-washing of the problems, will never replace the need for mutual understanding. I wish him well in his endeavors :)