Re: The Living Word Fellowship, The Walk, John Robert Stevens
Posted by:
Apostle Dog
()
Date: November 11, 2015 01:39AM
I don't want to minimize the harm done by people that were put in the ministry that were not qualified nor called by God to be in the ministry. I do not want to place any blame on the innocent followers that were injured. But my experience in the LWF tells me that it would be difficult for any minister, even if he had the purest of motivation, to minister to them without being placed in a precarious position of becoming an idol. There would only be a few choices with a big part of the population of the "first generation" people. That is the only bunch that I am familiar with. First of all, the leader could just walk away and quit. Or, the leader could just send them away, and they could go find somebody else that wanted to be a lord over them, because that is what they were after to begin with. I know personally of occasions where people have tried to put me and others that I knew well in a place like that, even on the remote low level of the church that I was in. Women would ask for personal ministry, but they didn't like my wife, because she "didn't have a revelation of ME",, in other words, here comes the offer of the spiritual wife. Also people would call at all hours of the night to some of us and ask for the "mind of the Lord" about what kind of car to buy, or what color to paint their living room. You could tell them that is not something to ask, and all they would do is go somewhere else that wanted to be the lord over their lives, to be their "spiritual father" or "spiritual husband." Again, if you look back at my posts you will see that I have had no illusions that there was not abuse from the ministers. There seemed to be something about the MY generation, a need for fathering, most of us were rebellious to our natural fathers, whether their fault or ours, but when it came to some bagwan or guru, we seemed to lose our minds pretty quickly. Remember that was the age of the Jesus movement, when kids thought that they had a much better revelation of God, understanding of politics, everything. We thought we were greatly open minded and individualistic, but all we did was create a counterculture of people that were exactly like one another, their fasion, their politics, their religous beliefs, their choice of drugs, and if there was any deviation from the accepted norm, we rejected that person, shunned them, we were more of conformists than the society we rebelled against.
I don't think my generation, the so called first generation really caught on to what JRS was really teaching. That was I believe part of the problem. Now JRS tended to have some distorted ideas about people's ability to grasp, automatically by impartation, which is one of the Latter Rain doctrines rejected by the Assemblies of God. JRS would "get a revelation" of somebody, I think partly because that person boosted his ego, and he would set them aside and eventually set them in office.
Even in the little church that I was in, there was lots of strife, one guy wanted to take over so bad that is all he talked about. We were a group of ten adults usually, and years later my wife ran into one of the members, who was somewhat mentally challenged, and he thought that the dude that wanted to take over was the pastor. He never was. I guess this guy told him he was, and of course I was not much of a force in that church anyway. Maybe that was one thing I did right, I was not even noticed except when it came time to tell people what color to paint their walls or who to marry, or not to marry, which I didn't do, or when it came time to put the John tapes in the tape player.