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

Now I’m going to address people who believe in oneness and unity, as the Brethren did, only we’re now in Asia. The gentleman, one of the four or five or six workers in Asia, who came to America, and I met him shortly after he began ministering. He’d been here several years before he started ministry. I expect I met him within a year and, shucks, it was glorious. It was absolutely glorious. I was too infatuated, too enthusiastic, and too blind to notice much, but I did notice a little.

Now, I went to the Far East to meet with the Little Flock. I had already been to Louisville, Kentucky, and I had heard many wonderful things. I also want you to keep in mind that preaching the highest gospel in the world does not transform you, except skin-deep, or maybe a little deeper than skin-deep. These are holy people. People pray a lot. Pray more than we do. And that was one of their problems. I’m going to throw in another gimmick. Get those people praying for you, and they’ll give money. Have you ever heard that statement? If you haven’t, at least you can get it figured out that way. I have a real problem with prayer, and I’m going to lay it down this weekend. I’ve carried this burden long enough. I’m going to get rid of it.

So, I got there, and we landed in Taiwan, and a coronation line of people met us. Oh, that’s so beautiful. 500 people on this side, 500 people on this side. They were just spread out enough. There were others on the trip with me, but the gentleman in charge, the one I will now refer to as the leader, got hold of me, and we went down that line at the airport, and we were doing like this. He was doing this. I was doing this. I was shaking hands and stopping to hug people every once in a while. Very impressed.

We had a conference, then met with them on Sunday morning. On Sunday morning, I went to their meeting. This is a huge meeting place that would hold many people?  You never went there? Well then, I make it as big as I want to, can’t I? Now, it could easily hold 1,500 to 2,000 people. All the men sat on this side, all the women sat on this side, and every woman in that building had a black doily on their head. I’m going ask you, how much work does it take to get a group of people where men sit on one side, women sit on the other, and every woman has exactly the same doily on their head? You want to make a guess? I don’t know. You don’t do that with one message; that takes some high-tall preaching.

Now, while the conference was going on, and their hospitality was unbelievable, and on Saturday afternoon, every woman in that church was there with a little spray bottle and a rag. I don’t know, there must have been 2,000 glass panes on that house, in that building. It wasn’t walls, it was glass panes. They were on ladders, and down on the floor, and up bigger ladders, and every one of those panes got cleaned on both sides. These were called services. Well, they had these people who cooked our meals. They had single women who wore those doilies and long robes; they were single, and those women took care of us night and day. We had meals three times a day.

I did not really know what brought him to America, but there was a long string of buildings and rooms, and they put one brother in this room and me in the next under a mosquito net. Then there was the living room, and there was somebody else, and then there was Don Marcy and his wife, whose name I believe was Jule. Well, there was some sort of a fight going on, and they used the living room, which was next to me. Now, I was just then recovering from…Debbie, please do me a favor here. Please read up on disseminated histoplasmosis and find out everything you can about it. I’m going to stop calling it disseminated histoplasmosis because people just look at me and roll their eyes. You’re going to discover that it says it is identical to cancer, and it moves through the body the same way. I had just gotten out of bed from disseminated histoplasmosis, but you could just as well call it cancer in the system. It crawled all over my body and ate up just about everything in me.

I was a very, very sick man, but I did not care. You have no idea how much burned inside of me. No, you have no idea how much burns inside of me. They sat there in that living room and fought till 2 and 3:00 in the morning, and then we had breakfast at six. I talked to Don Marcy, and he said… forgive me again, but this is Don. I didn’t say this. He said, “Gene, they get there in that living room, and they chicken talk to one another all night long.” I did not know what was going on. I know there was anger, and that it went on for hours and hours and hours. It was the beginning of problems.

This is 1965. I spoke at the gathering of some 5,000 people there. I spoke to the church there. Then I went to the Philippines, and when they took me off the airplane, they drove me past a place and said, “This is where the other group meets.” They took us to court. What kind of Christians are those? I tried my best not to let this register. Then I got back to Hong Kong, met brother James Chen, and attended their meetings there. Now, this was a big church; it was a building where you couldn’t tell any difference. I had a balcony. I walked in, and I took my place in the balcony on the right side, and I sat down with all the men, and on the other side of the aisle are all the women, all the little doilies, downstairs men, and here’s a man whom God had given a vision of what the church was supposed to be. I’m sitting there, and I remember a Chinese guest came up to the balcony, and he wasn’t paying any attention. He sat down here on this side (with the women), and one of the ushers came over, grabbed him, then started pulling him over to this side. He was confused. He didn’t know what to think, and then he noticed the whole crowd. He looked at these people, and then he got over and sat down, and I thought, if that doesn’t fit with Chinese, it sure doesn’t fit with me. Still, I love those people.

Now, by the time I spoke to that huge gathering and got involved in the church in Hong Kong, I’m sorry, but I don’t remember if I preached there or not. Everything in me says I did because of what happened. I had been in Taiwan. I had been and preached in the Philippines. Then the people who were in Taiwan went back to Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and to the Philippines, and to two or three other places, and to Tokyo and some other places I long since forgotten. Suddenly, there came these telegrams. They did everything by telegrams. We want Gene Edwards; do not send him home to America. Is my wife present? Boy, can somebody get her? Just tell her I need her for one minute. I don’t want to finish that story without her.

So, I’m sitting up here in a room. I am 31 years old. I am sicker than I can get, and then watch them bring in this leader. Then he said letters, telegrams, phone calls, everywhere. Everybody wants you to stay. I was just about to tell him I was too sick to go, and I had to go home, and he said, “Someone must take over the work in Asia. Somebody must go to the Philippines now. Who shall it be? I’m in a great big room, and there are two people in it. Who shall it be? Who shall it be?  So, I thought I had recovered from this because I got out of bed, and like a fool, you know, when you finally get out of bed, you think you’re going to be over it. Well, listen, this one never gave up on me, not until this hour. I said, “Okay, I’ll go.”

“Now, I want you to go to such and such with so and so, and of course, and we call so and so and so. He didn’t wait one tenth of a second, and he had me mapped out for the next five years: every year, I want you to fly home to the United States and be with us at our summer conferences. You might as well take Elijah’s robe, Elisha’s robe, Paul’s robe, and Peter’s robe and put that thing around me the way I felt right then. I just was not ready for this, saints. When I got to the Philippines, I stayed there for six weeks or two months. I started a church there. That church is still there. They had a Chinese church, which is ridiculous; a Chinese church in the Philippines. They’re not made of Chinese; they’re made out of Filipinos. So, I started a church for Filipinos, and the language wasn’t English; it was Tagalog. And I collapsed. I sent a wire to this brother and said, “I’ve got to go home. I’m too sick. You’re not going to have anything but a hospital bed here.”

Now I’m going to play dirty. Real dirty. I’m going to tell the truth. There were three other brothers with me, all whose names you know, Mike, very well, and they were mortified at what they were seeing. But when this gentleman walked in, it was the most wonderful thing in the world. Just great, just fantastic. Then they were all so shocked at anything I did because they were religious people, and I’m not a religious person. They had just chewed me out about something I did, and this gentleman sat down with us for lunch, and I said, “Brother, he and he and he have said that I have been wrong in doing this, that, and the other. What do you say?” Nobody in this world’s ever done that to him, and they were mortified. So, he gave his answer: Yes, what you did, Gene, was perfectly acceptable. And I said, “Did you get that? Did you get that? Did you hear that?” Alright, I just stopped being dirty. That’s the end of my being dirty. No, it’s not either because those men were so critical of everything he did, and I had kept my mouth shut the whole time. Then he came over to the Philippines with his other brothers, and they had just coated him with butter the whole time. I had a few minutes to get to the airport, and James B…see how much I’ve learned from these people? You use the first name and the last initial. Alright, he was standing up against a limousine. Was he going to take me to the airport? He turned to me, and he asked me what I thought. And I might as well have had a skywriter to write that in the sky, and then keep going all the way across this Pacific, across California, all the way over to Europe. I said…Well, I bet everything in me knew I was going to get hung for this…I said, “You know, other than their love for one another, I don’t see anything here I want to see in America.” And man, when I said it, I could tell, James B. is going, “Hot dog. I got him now.” Forgive me, but those men were absolutely flushing hypocrites with the way they worked with that gentleman.