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Witness Lee Witness Lee (李常受 Pinyin: Lǐ Chngshu) was born in Chefoo, Shandong Province, China in 1905. He became a Christian in 1925, and later came under the influence of the late Chinese Christian worker Watchman Nee. Witness Lee moved to Shanghai several years later to work with Nee. He became a full-time co-worker of Watchman Nee in 1933. In the late 1940's as the Communists were advancing on the mainland China, Witness Lee was sent by Watchman Nee to Taiwan, in order to continue Nee's ministry there. During the 1950's, he worked closely with T. Austin-Sparks who held conferences with Lee in Taiwan in 1955 and 1957. In 1948, Lee extended his ministry from Taiwan to cities in Malaysia and Indonesia. In 1950 his ministry reached Manila, Japan in 1957, the United States in 1958, Brazil in 1959, Canada in 1963, South Korea in 1965, New Zealand and Australia in 1970, Germany and Nigeria in 1971, and Ghana in 1972. According to Witness Lee and Watchman Nee, the Lord's recovery can be traced back at least to God's raising up of Martin Luther and the reformers, and continued in recovering lost biblical truths through others such as Madame Guyon, Count Zinzendorf, the Moravian Brethren, John Nelson Darby, the Plymouth Brethren, Watchman Nee, and himself. He believed that one of the primary items that God used him and Watchman Nee to recover was the oneness of all believers in Christ, and the practical expression of this oneness in the practice of the local churches. Witness Lee visited the U.S. in 1958 and 1960. He began meeting with a number of Christian fellowships in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. In 1962, Lee returned to the U.S. and established his residence and helped raise up the local church in Los Angeles. He established the Stream Publishers in 1965, which later became Living Stream Ministry in Anaheim, California, primarily as a publishing vehicle for his and Watchman Nee's spoken and recorded messages. He gave numerous conferences, mostly in the United States and Asia. A Man Apart Although Lee taught that Christians should be unified, he distanced himself and his movement from other Christian church groups and organizations. Lee believed that any church not organized on the foundational principle of one church per city--what he called "the local ground of unity" (see local churches)--was apostate and that recognizing such churches by attending services in anything but a qualified stance was sinful. Lee cared little for the acceptance and validation of contemporaries outside his movement. Believing that Christianity had become hopelessly corrupt, he followed his own unique theology, based on Nee's, which emphasized a deep, personal, ongoing encounter with God, and a practical, daily commitment to one's local church. Lee believed, as Nee did, that all Christian work was ultimately for the sake of the edifying of the church and that all other benefits were secondary. Since, in his view, all of Christianity was organized in a way that invalidated its stand as the proper church, there was nothing for him to do there. The totality of his work was carried out in his movement and for his movement (see Lord's Recovery). Some of the most foundational aspects of Lee's theology were the most controversial. Lee's model of the Trinity was condemned by some as modalistic, although he strongly denied this, warning his accusers that they might actually be guilty of tritheism themselves. Late in his life Lee revealed what he called the "crystalization" of all his teaching, including the declaration that God became man in Jesus so that man could become God in Christ. Although Lee qualified this teaching by saying that man does not become part of the Godhead, but rather only becomes God in "life and nature," the teaching was nonetheless taken by some as heretical. Lee's teachings are recorded in tens of books, most of which are edited transcriptions of his spoken messages. His major work, The Life-Study of the Bible, comprising 32 volumes, is also an edited transcription. Witness Lee died in June 1997 in Southern California.
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