Witness Lee and the "Local Churches": A Personal Testimony

by Daniel Azuma

Part 3: The Search For Truth

It seems that most of the present Christian counter-cult ministry focuses on theological deviations of the cult from what is considered mainstream Christian thought. While this may be effective in preventing those who are already Christian from being caught up in a cult situation in the first place, it tends to do little for those who are already cult members, those people who are taught-- and taught very well-- not to listen to outsiders who will try to pull them away from the "truth." My observation has been that most people who leave cults do so not because of issues of doctrine or theology but because of issues of group behavior, and this was the case also for me.

My problems started a month or two after my involvement with the "Local Churches" began. I started to grow uncomfortable with a trumpeting self-glorification and verbal attacks on the outside Christian world, characteristics that sometimes showed up in meetings. Members, it seemed to me, were of the opinion that most of Christianity had serious problems, and that their group, and only their group, had the solutions. It was even claimed that their organization constituted "God's sole move on the earth today," effectively that God was doing all His important work solely through their movement. And so the prevailing attitude seemed to be one of haughty contempt, a "we are in harmony with God's plan but you aren't, so ha ha ha" sort of attitude. Blatant expressions of this attitude were not extremely common, but they did happen regularly, and gradually, this began to bother me in spirit.

The first few months of my involvement focused around the UCLA campus club run by the "Local Church." On a number of separate occasions, I approached one of the leaders of the that club and asked about those attitudes. They invariably gave me the same no-answer answer: something along the lines of: "Sometimes someone will say things that you don't like, but you should try to ignore it and focus on your enjoyment of Christ." Occasionally, I would also be chastised and told something to the effect of: "You have no business criticizing the church." Being very young in the faith at the time, and feeling like I didn't have a clue, I tried to listen to them. When such behavior appeared in meetings, I tried to shut out the quiet voice of the Lord warning me that something wasn't right. I tried, but I failed.

As a result, my activity in the Local Churches, and even as a Christian in general, began to drop off not too long after it had started. My get-togethers with the other member at Caltech faltered, and would soon stop altogether. I prayed less often and stopped going to Sunday worship meetings.

Meetings at UCLA bothered me more and more during the course of my freshman year at Caltech, and I responded by reaching for science, turning my problem into a kind of experiment. I coined the term "cringe" for any manifestation of the haughty, self-righteous attitude I had noticed, and counted the number of "cringes" in a meeting, mentally making note of the results. Good meetings sometimes had a "cringe" factor of zero. Especially bad ones could be in the twenties or higher, with the average being around four or five.

Despite the problems, however, I couldn't leave. I was fully convinced that, questionable attitude or not, the movement was right when they claimed that most of the Christian world had lost their devotion to Christ and had forgotten essential aspects of doctrine, and I believed the members when they said they had "recovered" what had been lost by everyone else. I was comparing them to the liberal environment I had grown up in, and in my mind, the Local Church came out easily the superior in terms of zeal and God-centered living. So no one forced me to stay. I simply weighed the factors according to my understanding of Christianity at the time, and was convinced that I should.

That polarization, that us-versus-them mentality, is probably the overarching element in "Local Church" thought, one that rubs off very easily on new members. When I first entered the movement, I was convinced that it had something that my parents' church was missing. Because I had until then had very little education in fundamental Christian doctrine, the claim that theirs was a "higher revelation" was met with a receptive mind. As a result, when I had to deal with my parents later, I was very wary of their doctrinal positions. I tested what they told me against what Witness Lee claimed to be the truth. In short, I became mildly paranoid. The same attitude initially kept me from very much fellowship with other non-"Local-Church" Christians at Caltech and elsewhere-- I was wary of them, and preferred to meet with other followers of Witness Lee instead.

The very subtle psychological manipulation has a significant effect on members' peer groups and associations. Especially for those deep into the movement, peer groups seem to be often composed nearly exclusively of other members, and this centers the life of a member very tightly around the group. Even contact between members and the rest of the Christian community is kept at a minimum; it is almost unheard of for "Local Church" members to frequent outside ministries.

In later months, particularly that summer when I returned home, I expanded my involvement, joining the nearby "Church in Los Altos", and regularly attending youth group meetings a little further away in Santa Clara. The "self-righteous attitude" problem stayed in the background for much of the summer-- perhaps I was beginning to accept and ignore it, or become hardened to it-- but it didn't disappear altogether.

One incident sticks in my memory, a time when several members from the UCLA student organization arrived in the area to visit. We locals took them on a tour of the surrounding area, including the Stanford campus. At Stanford, we spent time in the bookstore, around the campus, and eventually made our way to the cathedral, which had just recently been fully repaired from the damage it had sustained in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. I busied myself admiring the artwork and talking to our guide, a "Local Church" member who worked at Stanford, about the physics behind the pipe organ. But presently I turned around, to discover the UCLA students sitting in a row on the back pews, shaking their heads in unison and muttering, "Jezebel..." The backplot behind this, I was later to find out, was that the Local Church considers the Roman Catholic church to be typified by the church in Thyatira (Revelation 2:18-29), and "the woman Jezebel" (v.20) was supposed to represent some sort of fleshy pompousness in the Catholic church. It was a somewhat more somber group that walked back from the cathedral to the car, myself in particular because I had been violently reminded of something I had pushed far to the back of my mind-- that the Local Church looks down on everyone else, including and especially other Christians.

As a rather startling appendix to that story, I spoke with one of those UCLA students a couple of years later and learned some things that I think speak volumes about what goes on internally, out of the view of outsiders or new members. He had been a second-generation member, the son of one of the movement's prominent elders, but had in the meantime left the movement for much the same reasons I did. From him I learned that he and his companions had reacted that way not out of an actual disgust of their surroundings, but in mockery of what their parents and other older members might have done in similar circumstances. Now that the movement has been established in the United States for about 30 years and the children of the original members have come of age, we may be seeing a generation gap, the changing responses of those who have grown up within the "Local Church" environment and are finding cause to reject it, in much the same way as I ended up rejecting my liberal Christian upbringing.

When I returned to school that fall, in 1994, my difficulties with the movement, which had mostly taken a back seat during the summer, returned worse than before. Not only did their attitude bother me, but other things, particularly their views about the church, started to strike me as hypocritical.

As an example, members of the "Local Church" tend to decry "denominations" as against God's intentions. They see denominations as unnecessarily dividing the church on doctrinal or practical grounds. To an extent, they are correct; the plethora of denominations, sects, and independent groups currently tiling the Christian scene is at best confusing, and at worst a serious hinderance to the testimony of Christian unity. The Local Church outdoes itself in pointing out the problem, but its response in practice has been effectively to set up yet another denomination, scoffing at outside Christians from behind their newly-erected walls. Interestingly, members of the "Local Church" will almost always deny that their group constitutes a denomination or a sect, typically citing the fact that they refuse to give themselves an official name, or sometimes claiming that the "higher revelation" of their doctrine makes them immune to the label.

The group's systematic theology came into play only tangentially for the most part. Although I knew the stories backwards and forwards, I had had little education in fundamental doctrine while I was growing up, so my understanding of the subject came largely from the teachings of the "Local Church" itself. As a result, I had nothing to contend with until I learned to read the Bible on my own, without the "assistance" of the movement's interpretations, very late in the game. Nonetheless, there are significant points of difference from mainstream thought, and although the group will publicly emphasize their similarities when in view of outsiders, their behavior is quite different behind closed doors. Their differences seem to be a point of pride to them, the element which marks their way as special and their group as chosen.

Members in general appeared to be particularly sensitive and defensive concerning their theology. One of the key points in the thought of the movement is that unity of doctrine is essential to unity of the church, and so members found to be in disagreement with even what turn out to be minor points of concern are dealt with swiftly. Because of my lack of experience at that point, I had few arguments to make on theological grounds, and therefore this sensitivity didn't affect me directly until very late.

The movement as a whole is also sensitive to outside criticism, sometimes exerting legal pressure to block publications that paint it in a negative light. One particular case often cited by members was Lee vs. Duddy, a libel case involving the book The God-Men (not to be confused with a Living Stream Ministry publication of the same name) by Neil Duddy and the Spiritual Counterfeits Project (SCP), a major counter-cult organization. In the end, a judgment of sorts was handed down in favor of the "Local Churches," a fact that members will often emphasize when confronted with accusations of cultism. However, doing just a little research beyond what facts members are willing to volunteer uncovers a more disturbing chain of events. The judgment cited by "Local Church" members is in fact not the result of an actual trial, but instead the result of a default hearing in which SCP, having been driven into bankruptcy by the discovery process, was not allowed to participate. Living Stream Ministry's recent book, The Experts Speak is based on testimony from that default hearing, given by individuals hand-picked by the "Local Church," speaking the organization's party line without the benefit of cross-examination.

Even hymns in their hymnal began to bother me. The "Local Church" uses a particular hymnal unique to the group, a compilation that contains many hymns common in "mainstream" Christian churches, but also includes a number of hymns written by Witness Lee and other prominent members. I was appalled to discover that many of those latter hymns appear to focus on glorification of the group, claiming that God has chosen their group and that other Christians would be under His judgment. That November, I attended the next southern California college student retreat, a year after the one during which I had first found Christ. While I was there, one of those "cringe" hymns, a hymn that exhorted Local Church members to "overcome degraded Christianity," came forward to haunt me. I remember the scene pretty well-- the entire congregation of around 500 students was standing and had just finished the previous hymn, and when this hymn was called, I looked at it with sudden horror, sat right down, and remained stony-faced silent as the students around me sang about degredation and tried to get me to stand back up.

It was a rough year. I spoke with many, many people within the movement-- friends, elders, church leaders-- during that time, still hoping that someone would be able to give me a reasonable explanation for the increasingly cultlike behavior I observed the deeper I got involved. No such explanation came forth, other than variations on, "This is the Lord's recovered church, so you shouldn't spend so much time trying to find fault with it." Occasionally, I was even ridiculed in front of other members. The sad part, and probably the key element in the success of any cult movement, is that despite the problems, I still believed it. I wanted to believe it. I wanted to be part of a subset of the church that God had chosen as His "recovery." It was something to be proud of, something to take comfort in, a belief that I was special among all the religious confusion of the world. And to leave that perception of specialness, to separate myself from the elite, that was unthinkable; it would have been the end of the world for me.

Nevertheless, the mounting problems I was having with the movement, in combination with an increasingly stressful school work load, eventually caused my participation to wane, and in February of 1995, I decided I'd had enough and consciously and intentionally cut off almost all of my contact with the movement. That was not the end. Even to me, at that time, it was a temporary condition, to last only until I had calmed down, or until someone came forth with that long sought-after reasonable explanation for the behavior that was bothering me, or until I had matured enough to find some better way of dealing with it. For the first time, I felt I was cut off. But it was then, when I thought the situation had made its turn for the worst, that I caught sight of God again. And looking back on it in hindsight, it is clear how this was indeed a moment of culmination of God's intervening on my behalf throughout the entire ordeal.

As early as a few months after joining the "Local Churches," the Lord put me in contact with a few other people at Caltech who would now become immensely important in my life. In particular, during my second and third years at Caltech, God set me up with a roommate who was one of the student leaders at a different group of Christians, Caltech Christian Fellowship, an interdenominational fellowship on my own college campus. Through my roommate, I had an inside scoop on activities and meetings and an encouragement to get involved, and so, with "Local Church" relations slipping fast, I began my first ventures into that outside Christian community for which the "Local Churches" seemed to have so much contempt.

I would learn much over the last few months of my second year at Caltech, between February and June of 1995. Although I had decided to cut off relations with the "Local Churches," I was in reality still unsure how to respond to everything I had been experiencing. I was in exit transition, neither fully in nor fully removed from the movement, still unsure whether, despite their attitude, they were right about every other Christian group being in apostasy. Every so often, members would try to pull me back in, and I would tell them: "Maybe later."

But it was during those months, gradually and increasingly involved with Caltech Christian Fellowship, that I began to realize the error in my thinking. CCF was one of only two Christian student organizations on campus at Caltech-- the other being a smaller Catholic-specific ministry-- and because of that, it was necessarily very diverse. It was in this environment, among Christians of all denominations, shapes and colors, that I finally started to gain some understanding of my situation. My vision had before been limited to the clash between an unusually liberal church and an unusually cultlike church, but now at last I had access to the entire spectrum. And for the first time I saw the vision of the church. Not a social gathering of people interested primarily in cultural or moral issues, nor a controlling group employing any means necessary to proclaim its vision as the sole revelation of God, but a group of disciples of Christ, committed to work together to explore what it means to live according to God's desire for us, to teach and learn from one another, and to share God's grace with a world in need of it.

And so it was around the start of the summer of 1995 that I finally made the decision to leave the "Local Churches" permanently. A long and painful journey was ending, and the Lord had pulled me through. Like any significant experience, however, the story did not end there.