Chapter 7
THE BEGINNING OF THE LORD'S RECOVERY IN TEXAS PART 1: TYLER AND PLAINVIEW
Tyler
THE TESTIMONY OF THE LORD’S RECOVERY IN TEXAS began between 1962 and 1964 almost simultaneously in three localities—Tyler, in East Texas; Plainview, in the Panhandle; and Odessa, in West Texas. Shortly thereafter, localities sprang up in Waco and Denton in the central part of the state. These early churches were the fruit of the spread of Watchman Nee’s ministry, Witness Lee’s travel, and the stirring of the Spirit among a generation of young Christians.
Tyler was an affluent community in East Texas, home to many who had become wealthy in the oil industry. It was also deeply religious, with a large Christian population and no shortage of denominations. During the early 1960s, a young pastor at a Baptist denomination discovered the ministry of Watchman Nee and began to draw from it in his sermons and Bible studies.
In the fall of 1962, the pastor conducted classes along with a wealthy socialite named Helen Bracken, known as “Sug,” short for “Sugar.” Sug Bracken’s social status and influence in the community saw the classes grow to more than six hundred attendees. The classes were largely social in nature, but the pastor used The Normal Christian Life to lead the study of Romans.
A friend of Bracken’s—a Baptist preacher named Gene Edwards—met brothers from the church in L.A. while on a business trip to California in August, 1963. After hearing Brother Lee speak at the summer training in Alta Dena, Edwards telephoned Bracken and asked her to invite Lee to Tyler to speak to her Bible class. Bracken and the pastor were thrilled to hear that a co-worker of Watchman Nee was in the U.S. and gladly agreed.
Brother Lee visited Tyler the following month. Sug Bracken secured the venue—a Presbyterian denomination that could seat the six hundred attendees of her Bible classes. Lee mainly spoke on the experience of Christ. After the meetings, Bracken hosted Lee and others for refreshments at her home, and Brother Lee took questions from some who had attended the meetings.
As it turned out, most of the attendees had little appetite for Lee’s speaking. Nevertheless, at Gene Edwards’ urging, Lee returned to Tyler in November and held a series of meetings. Whereas six hundred had attended the initial gathering in September, only one hundred attended in November, and most had come not from the Bible class in Tyler but from other parts of Texas. During this second visit, Brother Lee spoke not only on the experience of Christ but also on the church.
In the wake of Lee’s visits, a small group that had been touched by his ministry came together to consider how to go on. Eventually, they realized the need to meet outside the denominations and began to gather weekly for fellowship on Lord’s Day afternoon. By April of 1964, these meetings had developed into a local church in Tyler, comprising just a dozen of the original brothers and sisters from among the six hundred. Of those twelve, only three remained in the Lord’s recovery long term. Occasionally Sug Bracken and her husband, Sam, joined the meetings. However, fear of offending the denominational leaders and losing their social status in the community prevented them from fully entering in.
Plainview
Around the same time, some four hundred miles northwest of Tyler, the Spirit was moving among a group of young people at Wayland Baptist College in Plainview, a small town in the Texas panhandle.
In June of 1961, Wayland hired a young graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to be the new director of the college’s Baptist Student Union. His name was James Barber. Barber had read The Normal Christian Life by Watchman Nee, but struggled to understand it and was left unimpressed.
Every fall semester, Wayland held a campus revival, and the college president would invite a featured speaker. In December of 1962, the president made a controversial choice that left many, including Barber, unhappy. He invited a non-Baptist to speak—a British evangelist named Major W. Ian Thomas.
Throughout his teenage years, Major Thomas had sought to serve the Lord and tried desperately to “win souls” until he reached the point of exhaustion. On his knees, at the age of 19, he wept before the Lord, feeling a hopeless failure. The Lord touched him with words that would alter the course of his service: “For seven years, with utmost sincerity, you have been trying to live for Me, on My behalf, the life that I have been waiting for seven years to live through you.” Thomas began to see that Christ living in the believers was the key to the Christian life. He was brought into a deeper, more subjective relationship with the Lord, which became the defining characteristic of his ministry.
During the revival meetings at Wayland, Major Thomas shared that the genuine Christian life is one of allowing Christ to live in the believers. For Barber, the light began to shine: “For the first time I realized I did not have to try to live the Christian life,” he testified. “I went through the New Testament and underlined every verse that said anything about the indwelling Christ or the indwelling Spirit, and right away I thought, ‘This is right. This man is right.’”
In private circles, some at Wayland spoke out against Thomas and his teaching, and according to Barber’s assessment, most of the students were untouched by his message. But a small group of students was deeply stirred and began to meet to fellowship, pray, and seek the Lord concerning what they had heard. In his own words, Barber was “turned upside down.” Thomas’s speaking reminded him of The Normal Christian Life, which he had previously been unable to understand:
“I went back to The Normal Christian Life and devoured it. While reading The Normal Christian Life, by the Lord’s mercy it didn’t take me long to realize that this man, Watchman Nee, had more than the person [Major Thomas] who the Lord used to open my eyes. I read the book five times in a year, from the end of 1962 to within a week of one year in 1963. Every time I read it, I underlined something more. Eventually the whole book was underlined. Every time I underlined something I had to underline something else, and by the time I read it five times—forget it. Everything this man says is something.”
—James Barber, Higher Ground
James Barber estimated that around twenty to thirty students had been revived through Major Thomas’s sharing and wanted to go on with the Lord in a deeper way. He ordered all of Nee’s books that were available in English at the time: The Normal Christian Life; Sit, Walk, Stand; and What Shall This Man Do? Barber began recommending and distributing these books to students who came to his office.
Major Ian Thomas had seen something of Christ living in the believers and thought that this truth would revive the denominations. Initially, James Barber held the same view—Christ living in the believers should be brought into the Southern Baptist denomination to bring about a spiritual revolution there.
In the spring of 1963, a Christian bookstore manager told Barber about a new title by Watchman Nee, The Normal Christian Church Life. Barber and the students read it but felt that the outworking of its teaching on the practical church life was something for China, not for the United States. Barber, like Thomas, continued to aim for spiritual change within the Baptist framework.
It soon became clear that no such revolution would occur. In the summer of 1963, during a gathering of Baptist department heads in New Mexico, the head of the Department of Student Work, who supervised all the Baptist Student Unions, told Barber that he did not agree with what he and his students were doing at Wayland. Barber had a choice—give up speaking what he had seen or resign.
That fall, in November of 1963, Barber received a phone call from an evangelist friend named Wayne Bristow. He had read Watchman Nee’s books and had come into contact with Witness Lee during his visit to Tyler earlier that month. Bristow was calling from Gene Edwards’ home, where Brother Lee was staying, to encourage Barber to come to Tyler. Edwards, who had a penchant for hyperbole, got on the phone and said, “You have to come. A co-worker of Watchman Nee is here and you have to come, whatever it costs. Sell your wife. Sell everything. You have to come.”
Barber later said, “After he said it was a co-worker of Watchman Nee, he didn’t have to say anything more.” He immediately traveled from Plainview to Tyler, partly by car and partly by plane, to make the meeting the following morning:
“He began to speak on Genesis 1-2 and Revelation 21-22, and how in Genesis 1-2 there is the tree of life and in Revelation 21-22 there is the tree of life. In the first two chapters of the Bible there is a river flowing and in the last two chapters of the Bible there is a river flowing. In the first two chapters there are precious materials: gold, bdellium, and onyx stone, and in the last two chapters is a city built up with these same precious materials, gold, pearl, and precious stone. I was writing so fast that my pencil was ‘smoking.’ I had never heard anything like this. My thought was that this is the same as hearing Watchman Nee—it is exactly the same person. I realized, ‘This is the same word, and I have never heard anything like it.’”
—James Barber, Higher Ground
Barber did not sell his wife, Virginia. He went back to Plainview to pick her up, took his remaining week of vacation time, and returned to Tyler with her, Elton and Judy Karr, who were among the students, and another sister to join the meetings. Through his time in Tyler, Barber was convinced that this ministry was something fully of the Lord and that he needed to take some kind of action. He asked Brother Lee what he should do, hoping for a clear word of direction, but Lee only encouraged him to pray. Unclear of what to do, he opened the Bible and began to read from the first passage that appeared, which happened to be Isaiah 52:11-12:
“Depart! Depart! Go out from there! Do not touch any unclean thing! Go out from the midst of her! Cleanse yourselves, you who bear the vessels of Jehovah! For you will not go out in haste, and you will not go in flight; for Jehovah will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rear guard.”
—Isaiah 52:11-12, The Recovery Version of the Bible
Barber later testified that although he would never advise anyone to act upon a portion of Scripture opened to at random, this passage regarding the children of Israel departing from Babylon seemed to him to be the Lord’s clear speaking and direction for him.
For the remainder of 1963, Barber and the students gathered nightly in his home to listen to recordings of Brother Lee’s speaking from Tyler. Among them were Jim Coleman, the Karrs, Rodney Phillips, and Ray and Marilyn Graver. At the end of the fall semester, Barber submitted his resignation and drove to Los Angeles to attend the winter conference along with several students. Over the course of the ten-day conference, the students became convinced concerning the way of the Lord’s recovery, and upon returning to Plainview, Barber and about twenty five students began to practice the church life in their locality, meeting morning and night to sing and pray.
Soon, rumors began to spread in Plainview. Some said Barber had stolen promising young people out of the Southern Baptist fold so that they would pay tithes to him. Fred Howard, a professor of Greek at Wayland College, attacked the church in Plainview in an article entitled “The New Heresy.” In it he noted that according to Watchman Nee, “the local church” was “coextensive with the community. Thus, the church in Plainview would consist of every Christian in the confines of Plainview, regardless of denominational affiliation.” Although he seemed to correctly apprehend the basic truth concerning the church, Howard went on to write, “Such an interpretation of the church is, of course, idealistic and highly impractical.” Students meeting with the church were fired from their on-campus jobs and were prohibited from obtaining such jobs in the future.
Some in Plainview put the blame for the formation of the new “sect” on Major Thomas. As a result, many of Thomas’s speaking engagements in Texas were canceled. This, in turn, caused Thomas to adopt an unfavorable attitude toward the church and Witness Lee. Thomas visited the brothers and sisters in Plainview in 1964 and expressed disapproval toward the practice of the church. Coming out from the denominations did not sit well with Thomas’s view of bringing spiritual vitality to the denominations.
Witness Lee visited Plainview in April of 1964 and spoke in several evening meetings. Dr. Fred Howard, who had written the article against the church in Plainview, attended at least one of these meetings and spoke with Lee directly. Howard later wrote that he felt Brother Lee was “extremely humble” and an “effective teacher.” Nevertheless, Howard wrote another article, “The New Enlightenment,” in which he further disparaged both the church in Plainview and the teaching in the Lord’s recovery.
Many who came to hear Witness Lee speak in April, 1964, expressed enthusiasm for what they heard, yet most, in the end, did not take the way of the Lord’s recovery. In the conservative and highly religious communities of rural Texas, to leave one’s denomination was tantamount to leaving the community. Such a move required the paying of a high price. Yet, to those who left to take the way of the Lord’s recovery “outside the camp,” the Lord supplied the encouragement and confirmation to go out by faith.
