25 Facts About Witness Lee

Witness Lee was a Chinese Christian preacher and hymnist belonging to the Christian group known as the local churches in Taiwan and the United States.

Witness Lee became a Christian in 1925 after hearing the preaching of an evangelist named Peace Wang and later joined the Christian work started by Watchman Nee.

Witness Lee was born in 1905 in Shandong Province in China.

Witness Lee's great-grandfather was a Southern Baptist who brought Witness Lee's mother into Christianity.

Witness Lee's mother studied in an American Southern Baptist mission school and was baptized as a teenager at a Southern Baptist church.

Witness Lee sold her inheritance to provide her children with an education in Chinese and English.

Witness Lee was brought into contact with his mother's Baptist Church in Yantai where he studied at a Southern Baptist elementary school and later at a mission college operated by American Presbyterians.

Witness Lee then began to meet with the Benjamin Newton branch of the Plymouth Brethren where he remained for seven and a half years and was baptized in the sea by a local Brethren leader, Mr Burnett, in 1930.

Witness Lee began to correspond with Nee to seek his guidance for a better understanding of the Bible.

From that point onward, Witness Lee began to work closely with Nee.

In 1934, Witness Lee moved his family to Shanghai as editor of Nee's magazine The Christian.

Witness Lee traveled to the northwestern provinces of Suiyuan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi to preach the gospel and edify Christians there prior to the Japanese invasion in 1937.

Under suspicion of espionage due to his experimentation with evangelism by migration, Witness Lee was arrested by the Imperial Japanese Army in May 1943 and underwent a month's interrogation through flogging and water torture.

Witness Lee's health was greatly weakened by this imprisonment and he developed tuberculosis.

Watchman Nee and Witness Lee met for the last time in Hong Kong in 1950.

Nee charged Witness Lee to instruct, teach, and lead the elders and to make arrangements concerning the church services, as well as the purchase of land for the building of a new meeting place.

When Witness Lee moved to Taiwan in May 1949 he began his work with a few believers and churches already present there.

Witness Lee began to conduct conferences and trainings for the churches on a yearly basis and beginning in 1951 a formal training for his ministry co-workers.

Witness Lee began to publish books through his publishing company, The Taiwan Gospel Book Room, as well as The Ministry of the Word magazine published from 1950 until 1986 in 415 issues.

Witness Lee's messages delivered during shorter conferences and longer trainings were printed in The Stream magazine, published by The Stream Publishers.

Witness Lee wrote extensive outlines, footnotes, and cross references for the entire New Testament; these were eventually incorporated into a new translation of the New Testament, the Recovery Version, published in English in 1985.

Witness Lee taught that certain practices in Christendom were unscriptural, such as the use of denominating names and the clergy-laity system.

Many of Witness Lee's spoken messages have been published in over 400 books translated into more than fourteen different languages.

Witness Lee's largest written work is The Life-study of the Bible, comprising over 25,000 pages of commentary on every book of the Bible from the perspective of the believers' enjoyment and experience of God's divine life in Christ through the Holy Spirit.

Witness Lee was the chief editor of a new translation of the New Testament into English and Chinese called the Recovery Version.