The Present State of the Lord’s Testimony (Part 2) – Watchman Nee, the Little Flock, and the Crisis of Church Authority (Part 2)

(Continued from Part 1)

I left you at Hardoon Road in Shanghai during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, right up until the Mao Zedong army arrived during the Long March. They came pouring down, and the United States, by the way, refused to give Chiang Kai-shek any weapons to defend himself against the armies of Mao Zedong, because they believed, and I quote, that this was nothing but an agrarian reform. Chiang Kai-shek could have stopped Mao Zedong if he had any bullets to shoot with, just a little.

Okay. I said to you, and this is rather hard to grasp. Mike, I’m not sure you’ve ever given this any thought. Great preaching with a mute audience, far richer and higher than anything the institutional church has ever been able to give, actually works a transformation on people’s lives. Am I saying that preaching the word of God can transform people? Under those conditions, the answer is absolutely yes. They are the holiest people you will ever meet. The kindest, most gentle, serene. It’ll make your teeth ache to want to be like…everything you ever dreamed of a Christian being is what they are. Right up till you scratch them, and then they’re just as in the flesh as anybody else called a Christian in this world.

The only time they function is at the Lord’s table. They move in from different places. They hear this great preaching. They become increasingly soft and increasingly gentle. One of my professors put it this way. “A mild-mannered man preaching to mild-mannered people, exhorting them to be more mild-mannered.” Well, that’s a typical church service. This is more. This is some of the greatest truth and revelation the world has ever heard. These are the writings and works of Nee and T. Austin Sparks. T. Austin Sparks held forth longer than Watchman Nee did, and he raised up an incredibly holy, pious people. Again, it will make your teeth ache.

Brother Nee preached this way, and they were such incredible people. You’ve got to understand that many of these people died under communist rule. Some went to prison; some went back to prison; some went back to prison again. And Nee was eventually in prison. Now, if I’m not mistaken, he was not in prison based on anything that had to do with communism.  It was a charge of immorality, and we’ll spend the rest of our lives not knowing the answer to that one. But they were after him, and would have found something anyway.

I met these people. The first group I ever met was in Louisville, Kentucky, when I met Beta Sheirik. Now, this is what I didn’t understand, and I can only understand it looking back in retrospect. When I walked through that door, who walked through that door was like nothing they had ever seen or heard. Beta felt her prayers had been answered, prayers of a lifetime, that God had finally sent a worker. Well, she was right, but I didn’t know that. I was excited about the last work of God on this earth, and I went into that place like a buzzsaw, asking questions. Right, left, and middle, questions that had never been asked before, and nobody else had ever cared. I kept a barrage of questions up for three or four days.

Two things I observed, and a third one I did not observe, but I only came to understand it in retrospect. I want you to know that little group, which Watchman Nee so influenced, and that Beta was a worker in the Little Flock movement, and I suppose there were some others there, too. In that room, in the home of brother Authouse, in their living room on Sunday, was one of these (podiums), and they had chairs in the living room. They moved the furniture out of the way, put this up here in its place, and they had a meeting, and it was dead rather than dead. It was hell, but it was the longest-standing church in America that had anything to do with the Lord’s work in China and England. T. Austin Sparks had spoken there. Another outstanding leader had spoken there. Help me with the names of the two men who married T. Austin Spark’s daughters. Richard Ackeroyd, and who was the other one? Okay, let’s go with Ackeroyd. Did he take over the work of Austin Sparks when he died? He did not. No, it was a son-in-law or something like that who took over. Okay, say his name again. Richard Ackeroyd.

Now, the first thing I noticed was that they were deader than a doorknob, and now I’m stopping right here, and I’m saying to you, when I ask you to stick with this, I’m saying if it gets that dead, stick with it, because somebody may walk through that door. I did, and I shot those people full of questions, every kind imaginable. I had no idea why they were so startled at me, and sitting there, meeting Beta would have converted anybody to anything. She was one precious city sister. And by the way, that woman knew the cross. Her life was the cross. Richard Ackeroyd split that group, and the Authouses’ split it right back. Who split it? I don’t know, but there were now two groups, both of which believed in locality. This was 1963.

Well, now I have come to a difficult spot here. You heard me slip a name. Just me, and I don’t even know who this guy is. I don’t know who either one was. I think I shook hands with him once. Richard Ackeroyd. I’m going to try to tell a story from here on, and I’m going to refer to a gentleman who was the leader. I’m not trying to keep a secret. You don’t have to say, “What is he talking about?” Everybody in here knows, but out of respect for him, I don’t have any other way to tell the story by his name, or without his name, and I’m not going to use his name, right up until I slip. I’m probably going to do that. I’ve been trying my best to tell myself, ‘ Don’t do this. ‘ Now then, you’ve never heard this story. You don’t know anything about it. You don’t know anything about it. My wife will not know 90% of it. Alicia, you don’t have any idea about this.

Alicia, there’s a young lady named Kim, the daughter of Shirley, who is writing the story of Isla Vista, and Bob wrote her an absolutely incredible, beautiful story of how it got started. I mean, it’s great. Thank you, Bob, so very much. But when he introduces me at UCLA, he says, “Gene Edwards, who was a teacher in a school in Tyler, Texas.” And I went with that. So, you are going to be given the story of my life before I left the institutional church. If I’m going to be called a school picture in Tyler, Texas…I never taught a day in Tyler, Texas, or anything else. I want you to know the story of my life until I left the institutional church. I’m not interested in it. It is… as Paul said… it is done. I have never been interested in it, but if he doesn’t know any more than that, I did a really good job of keeping the story of my life from you up until the day I arrived in Isla Vista.

So, I’m going to take up from right there and go back from the time I left the institutional church. When I left the institutional church, I wanted to – get clear on this – I wanted to be part of that witness, that testimony. I was looking for it. I wanted it. I had convictions. I had feelings. I had dreams. I had hopes. And I had not met any of these people. I did not even know that Watchman Nee had been someone in China, and I had read a book, The Normal Christian Life, and then Sit, Walk, Stand, and I tried to read The Spiritual Man. In fact, I’m probably the first person in the world to have ever read The Spiritual Man in English, because I had a Chinese friend who used to be part of the Little Flock, and he had sat there for hours reading it to me. I had enough sense then to know that nobody ought ever to translate that book into English, and brother Nee asked that it never be translated. So as soon as they heard that, everybody wanted a copy, and it is now his second-largest-selling book, even though he was totally opposed to what he wrote, since he wrote it when he was 21. Now you all go out and read The Spiritual Man.