Talk:Local Church controversies

message: Wouldn't it hold true that this article in nature would be biased?  Its a page of allegations against the Local Church.  Who marked it as biased and what would you suggest? --Csodennc 02:55, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Neutrality

message: No response from anyone in regards to POV and factuality tags, of which I found no reason for.  If anyone would like to retag the article, please explain your concerns in this talk page --Csodennc 00:33, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Tags removed

message: This article could use some major clean up and streamlining. I don't think that Wikipedia is the right forum for hosting a full-fledged debate on these issues. The style of this article is written in a "Allegation / Response" format that could easily turn into an "Allegation / Response / Counter-response" format that would only increase this article's already biased entries. Take a look at the main article on Ted Haggard. Here, you have a presentation of the allegations in one section, followed up by a section responding to these allegations. This is simply more readable.This article's title indicates that it should be presenting the Allegations against the Local Church when in fact it is a defense of the Local Church. Perhaps retitling this article as "Local Church Controversies" would be better suited to the actual content presented here. Jaiotu 14:14, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article Cleanup 

message: This section does not seem to be dealing with anything that looks like an actual controversy. In fact, it reads like a treatise on why there is no controversy surrounding Local Church naming issues. If controversy actually exists in these regards, it should be better articulated. Otherwise, this section should be completely removed. Jaiotu 18:54, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Naming issues 

message: From reading through this article trying to find out about the "local churches" which sprang from Watchman Nee and Witness Lee I feel the writer is in strongly opposed to the teachings of this church and this has created a bias in the way he or she has presented the Domain Name issue.  As most people realize domain addresses are not only for naming an organization but also for protecting it from what others may truthfully/untuthfully publish against it.  If another organization controls the name most people are using for that organization even if they may not call themselves by such a name they receive .  Although the local churches may not have originally have labeled themselves in such a way it is understandable that they did not want others to refer to them in bad way by the name that stuck.  I feel that the argument misses the point of what 'Nee' and 'Lee' were trying to get across.
59.16.122.59 13:03, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bias Domain Name 

message: I've removed some criticisms because they are not sourced. Particlularly when we are making allegation of sexual and financial improprieties we need to have verifiable sources that we can attribute the allegations to. I can't find them in the listed sources.
Michaelquantum 04:36, 3 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removal of sexual and financial allegations 

message: There are two allegations that I am concerned about in the Daystar article. The first, is a statement that churches were "required" to purchase chairs from Daystar for their meeting halls. Now, people who have been a part of the Local Churches for a while have known that almost all of the larger churches had the same yellow chairs in common. Many churches have since upgraded to newer chairs, but you can find those chairs around most meeting halls and in many older members homes. While that is evidence that many churches bought the chairs, it does not support the accusation that they were "required" to buy them. I am not sure if the pamphlet "Reconsideration of the Vision" covers such an allegation, so a citation of some sort should be added.
The article also claims that some guy paid off the remaining debts to prevent Lee from getting in trouble during any subsequent investigation. Where is the citation for this? It may have happened, but there needs to be some public support for such an allegation. Please provide some sort of support, or confirm that these allegations are also part of "Reconsideration of the Vision."
--Gijones 14:43, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some Daystar Questions... 

message: Isn't this article supposed to be merged & deleted? See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Local Church controversy. 70.116.8.234 (talk) 09:35, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge/deletion

message: Please see the discussion on the main article's talk page for the discussion relating to some of the new edits. Thanks, HopeChrist (talk) 22:53, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  recent edits (09/24/08) 

message: I have edited the portion to be more general, and it is only a fact if you look up from ministrybook.org their own publication website.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.97.226.152 (talk) 12:17, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: more recent edit

message: Arrgg. Forget about it in whole. Please look up your history book first before assuming anything! I have only give out a fact and it is not at all a 'research'! But anyway I am sick of you guys.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.97.226.152 (talk) 14:02, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The problem with the additions you keep making is that you're suggesting that two sources conflict, when in reality they don't. Aside from merging your sources together to produce a new statement, you're also under the influence of a logical fallacy: that God couldn't have acted through people in history to prepare Britain for WWII so that Germany would not attack them. Please try and maintain a neutral point of view when editing Wikipedia. This means approaching editing not from whether you believe God exists or does not (because both sides require a leap of faith), but from a point of view that is not affected by the possibility that He exists or does not exist (or in this case, has an influence on world events or does not have any such influence). KhalfaniKhaldun 15:27, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  done with it 

message: I think it may be relevant to cite the statement released by Fuller Seminary regarding the Local Churches, stating "that the teachings and practices of the local churches and its members represent the genuine, historical, biblical Christian faith in every essential aspect.” I believe this is available online  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.126.1.8 (talk) 23:55, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  theological controversy 

message: I'm about to go through and delete all of the unsupported statements throughout this entire article. Many of these are full paragraphs of information. It's unfortunate that this must be done, but it is not acceptable to have anything on a "controversies" page be unsupported by reliable sources. For the sake of anyone who wants to save this information, though, I will copy it here so that at any point in time when supporting sources are found they can be moved back into the article. KhalfaniKhaldun 19:36, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleanup 

message: As per consensus in this AFD from so long ago, this article should be deleted and merged. It contains almost the exact same material (although somewhat less of it) originally contained in the article that was nominated in that AFD, and thus should not exist. (i.e., it's still just a POV fork.) As of now, I am beginning to work on cutting down this article to what it should contain and making it into an appropriate section for the Local churches (affiliation) article. You can find it here. Feel free to make comments on my edits and participate in the editing there, as that will probably be the final product. KhalfaniKhaldun 18:08, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I quit editing Wikipedia shortly after starting this project. Sad, I know. But I really wish someone would see this and run with it. The fact that this article still exists two years later bothers me. Per Wikipedia policies it should not exist and never should have been re-created in the first place. A large portion of it can probably be deleted, anyway, since Wikipedia isn't an exhaustive resource for every minor detail involving a topic and this article seems to be pretty nit-picky. Anyway, someone please pick up where I left off. Merge this article back to its parent. Thank you! 69.40.135.212 (talk) 06:28, 7 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Delete & Merge 

message: This article has been long overdue for a thorough overhaul. The main issue was a lack of balance in terms of the weight of the issues discussed. Furthermore, it has long exhibited a tension of competing perspectives and in some cases personal opinions without the kind of objective use of credible primary sources that should be found in an encyclopedia article. In addition, there have been numerous developments over the past few years that the article did not reflect. The result has been an incomplete, unbalanced, poorly documented, and stylistically inconsistent article.
Since the 1970s, the two major areas of controversy related to the local churches have centered on the libel litigations they have filed and three main areas of their theology. This rewrite reflects those two main and substantive areas of controversy with references to the main documents that reflect both sides of the controversies. I have done my best to adhere to this site’s policies regarding research and objectivity as befits researchers and writers for Wikipedia.
"And He marveled because of their unbelief..." ~ Mark 6:6 15:20, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't advocate a total revert as the previous version of this article was a paucity of sundry facts compared to the body of information now presented and it is difficult to address the second part of your critique without specific examples. However, regarding the matter of the "degree mill", PSU's own  article strongly supports the judgments being made in this article so I am inclined to accept them for now.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Abishai 300 (talk • contribs) 18:44, 15 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: This seems a reasonable conclusion. The scare quotes may be stylistically slightly heavy handed but describing the institution as a defunct diploma mill is accurate. That said, my gut says there's probably something that's probably a mess with this article. I'm having a poke around on Google Books and I'm not finding much about the Local Church movement that's not written either by Witness Lee, by Living Stream Ministry, or by critics of the Local Church movement like Geisler and Rhodes. What I'm not seeing is much in the way of academic discussion from theologically uninvolved authors. It's a mess, but I'm not sure if there is an easy way to fix it if we can't find some non-involved sources. —Tom Morris (talk) 23:01, 9 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rewrite of Article. Heavily Researched and Documented