Re: The Living Word Fellowship, The Walk, John Robert Stevens
Date: September 12, 2015 04:31AM
The congregations were raised on a diet of being told what to think. Paul claimed to have the mind of Christ on many issues. Likewise, it was important for people in the Walk to strive to have John's thinking -- sometimes it may have been benign, as in looking at people with the same faith that he was perceived to have. Other times it was "Let me tell you how to think about ..." people who left, people who were under discipline, the elections, husband-wife relationships, raising your children, your finances, shutting down churches, Kingdom businesses, going to seminary, not going to seminary, unequal yokes, pretty much any aspect of a person's life came under the purview of "Let us tell you how to think about this." If you assumed that there was no difference between the leader and the mind of Christ, then you could feel that you were doing exactly what God would have you to do.
There were periods under John when there were weekly marriage checkouts, since an influx of young people had flooded the churches. Then there were other periods where very few marriages took place. Recently there seems to have been an unspoken directive to let as many of the young kids get married as possible lest they go outside the church to try finding a mate. Most of the young people would not think to leave anyway because 90% of their friends are the kids they've grown up with -- better to stay on good terms and be surrounded by your friends than step away to an uncertain world.
Either way, the shepherds still exercise a lot of control over the most personal decisions people can make -- where to live, who to spend your life with, minor things like that. The fact that many of the leaders have personal lives devoid of a healthy personal example does not matter as much as the submission of the sheep to their designated authorities.
They may argue that to be a Christian you must submit every area of your life to Christ and that as Christ's representatives you are yielding to Jesus Christ when you obey their directives -- but that requires a lot of hubris, perhaps tainted with ambition, or other mixed motivations. By cutting people off from their personal relationship with the Lord and mocking their seeking of God as looking to "God in the sky" or "God in your brain" -- they installed themselves as the representatives of Christ-in-the-flesh to whom people had to submit.
To then displease that Christ, or to have her get pissed off at you, or lash out at you, where were you supposed to turn? To God? That's only your brain, trying to dodge the cross. To other members of the congregation? They were trained to shut down and pretend you were invisible if you were under discipline. It's no wonder that people felt like they were being slowly strangled or denied spiritual air in which to breathe.
These types of control are unhealthy, especially when exercised by people whose own personal lives may be in disarray.