The Present State of the Lord’s Testimony (Part 4)

It’s 7:45 in the evening, and the subject for the third time is the Present State of the Lord’s Testimony. I’m going to finish this as quickly as I can. But now we’re into not only the present state of Christians outside the institutional church, but also the status of Christians inside the institutional church. Now, some of you are going to say, Gene, this is not what the institutional church is really like. You got into an exceptional situation. No, that’s not true. The institutional church will kill you if you threaten them. If they don’t actually kill you, they can at least make life a little interesting.

When the church in Isla Vista got big enough that it could be seen, known, and heard, and these folks were getting ready to go out on a migration, this gentleman called a meeting of every church (of theirs) in the United States. He traveled to every one of them, and his sole purpose was to attack me. Now, honestly, you’ve got to believe that. You really have to believe that. So, word came back to me that this was happening, and it didn’t particularly bother me. But one of the things that I have tried to do is to be submissive, and when you find somebody, it’s really going to hurt them if you don’t do what they ask you to. I did something very foolish, and I should not have. So many people said to me, Gene, why on earth did you submit yourself to this? You knew what was going to happen. But Bob said, “Gene, the Bible says if you have something against someone, or somebody has something against you, you’ve got to go see them.”

So, I wrote this gentleman a letter, and you could not send telegrams. The telegraph company was on strike for the only time in my memory. I found someone who would type it up. It was about four pages long, a masterpiece of diplomacy, and it started with “Dear Brother.” But the envelope, which was the envelope that I had scratched out to take with me to the Western Union…the person who typed it up took that envelope and put the letter in it and left out one word: “Brother.” So, I wrote to him and asked to meet. I went to the embassy hotel to make sure I was at the right place. I stopped, opened the door, walked in, saw their book table, turned around, and walked out. There was a rumor that, within 10 minutes of my walking in and out, Gene Edwards had come to spy on this group. I’m trying to give you some idea of the paranoia with which these people lived in an unreal world. So, the next hour or two, or maybe it was the next morning, I’m not really sure, I came in with Lance and John, and the meeting was held. The brother saw me in the audience. He knew I was coming. He had been alerted. I was there to see if I could sit down and talk with him.

Now, y’all, this is the present status of the testimony of God. Are you clear? He stood there and called people out of the audience to speak against me. There’s no way for me to communicate this, but they believed in calling on the name of the Lord, but it had become a scalping cry, a war cry, if you please, a war dance. Mike, shake your head. Yes. When they got through with this orgy of attacks on me, then they went into one of these, “Oh Lord Jesus,” and it just reverberates, and it’s a screaming match. It was over, and I went to the front to see if I could reconcile…Oh, I didn’t either…I knew good and well I was going to get lynched, and there was all there was to it. That’s why I was there. You have to understand that there is no human being on earth who can argue with this man. It cannot be done. No human has ever tried it and come out with anything but being steamrolled and squashed. Now I was very aware of that.

So, we sat down, and there was the stage, and he faced me. We were at the foot of the stage. I sat there facing him, my knees together with his knees. They were not any more than that far apart. On the stage was virtually every man in that building. They had packed that thing out, and you know I was an enemy, and he was their hero. So, we sat down, and he said, ” We’re going to ask you this question.” I said, “Brother, I’m here just to see for some time that you and I can get together and see if we can come to peace, a reconciliation, or if not, at least leave on friendly terms.” He was very upset because there was a church in Santa Barbara, and even more upset when he heard it was better than his churches. And he was just upset.

We had two men’s wills locked in, just locked, and this must have gone 30 or 40 minutes. No, brother, I would like to sit down and meet with you. All these people standing there…it was interesting. This is the only thing I’d say to him. “I just came here to…” Well, brother, we want to talk to you. Nope. “I just want to see if you and I can get together and talk.” When we finished, I felt thankful to God that it was finally behind me. He said he would meet with me on Monday. I think that was Saturday morning. When we stood up, I had the only vision I ever had in my life. He stood up and turned, and John, at the very moment, stood up and turned toward me. “I have just traded one slaughter for another one.”

I turned to go, and he came to me, and he said, “Gene.” No, he always called me brother. “Brother Gene, I have a request to make of you.” This was in August of 1971. He said, “I ask you never again to preach anything you ever learned from me.” I said, “Brother, I’ll take you up on that.” He had no idea what he did that day, because from that moment on, it was higher ground. I turned to go, and there was a long, long aisle up to the front, and I knew that every eye in there was going to be watching how I left there. And you know, Mike, it turned out just exactly the way I felt. I made sure how I walked out of that room. Later, before the day was over, they were saying he walked out of there like a snake slithering down the aisle. This is true. I’m not exaggerating anything. In fact, I’m being kind. Well, you’ve never seen me do a Blackie Edwards/John Wayne walk. I mean, it would make strong men pass out. (laughter) If you ever see me get angry and I’m walking, you’ll see it, but I’m not going to try to illustrate it to you. I walked out of there. Well, I don’t have enough room. It takes about 20 feet to get started.

That was Saturday morning. I got back to Isla Vista and heard there were a whole bunch of people there on Sunday morning to hear him. The first thing he did was stand up and say, “I am not going to meet with Gene Edwards.” Okay, and I understand he did a pretty good job there that morning. Somebody wrote in to ask for the tape they always distributed and wanted a copy of the Sunday morning meeting, and somebody was really thrilled. They were going to send it out, and they thought, “Oh, this is a wonderful tape. You’re really going to enjoy it.” Somebody stopped it, and no one ever distributed that tape. I sat there with this incredible man, and if you please, this giant of a man, I was as calm and as unperturbed as I could be. But that morning, I did not drive back to Santa Barbara. I drove out about halfway, and I checked into a motel, and I cried the rest of the afternoon, the evening, and the next morning. All those emotions from all those days, weeks, months, and years turned loose.

There had hardly been a month that had passed, maybe two or three, and word would reach me that these folks were going to send an entire church to establish a church in Santa Barbara. Why they did not, I will never know, but it was a mercy of God. That’s one thing we did not have to deal with. I don’t know what on earth we would have done. I seriously considered asking the brothers and sisters from Santa Barbara to shut down and join the Elden Hall group for the sake of oneness, to stop this bloodletting. I called Steven Kaung, crying, and said, “Stephen, I have never wished any harm for him nor his work, and I don’t know what to do.” Now, have you ever had an experience where somebody gives you a sentence that’s something like apples are red, or the wind is blowing, and it hits you like a truck hitting you? I was crying almost incoherently. I said, “Brother Stephen, I don’t know what to do.” Now those two men had long since divided.

Now Stephen Kaung is the, I believe, the first cousin of Watchman Nee; kin in some way. Then there was the other brother, and they had served together for years in China. Brother Stephen, always the gentleman, said, “Gene, there comes a moment in your life when you have to follow God and not man.” I had been so committed to peace and unity that I felt like that never crossed my mind. I started balling, and I said, “Thank you.” I hung up, and that was pretty much it.

I will tell you this legendary story. I was working with a group of Christians in Dallas. A brother who more or less started the group was a gentleman named Caleb. He’s still a very dear friend. This story has been told from so many viewpoints. I want to tell you what happened. They had met, and this group had a group in Dallas, and they came into the group I was working with and said, “We want to be one with you, and we want to just all go in together just on the grounds of Jesus Christ and nothing else.” And Caleb said, “No.”