Chinese Saint
🇨🇳Witness Lee
1905–1997 · Chinese · Bible Teacher, Author & Church Builder
“The Christian life is not about doing things for God, but about experiencing God Himself.”
Biography
Witness Lee (Li Changshou) was born in 1905 in Chefoo, Shandong Province, and came to faith in Christ in 1925. He soon came under the influence of Watchman Nee and became one of Nee's closest co-workers, helping to spread the Local Church movement throughout China. During the 1930s and 1940s he served as an itinerant minister under Nee's direction, planting churches and training workers. After the Communist takeover of mainland China in 1949, Lee moved to Taiwan where he established a significant and rapidly growing church in Taipei. In 1962 he immigrated to the United States, settling in Los Angeles, and began extending the Local Church work to the West. He founded Living Stream Ministry as a publishing arm, through which he produced an extraordinary volume of Bible teaching materials. His most ambitious project was the Recovery Version of the Bible with extensive footnotes and a Life-study series—verse-by-verse exposition of the entire New Testament running to thousands of pages. Lee was a prolific author and speaker whose works fill hundreds of volumes. He emphasized the enjoyment of Christ, the building up of the church as the Body of Christ, and the centrality of the human spirit. He continued ministering actively until his death in 1997 at age ninety-one, leaving behind a global network of local churches in over sixty countries.
Key Works
Witness Lee's Recovery Version of the Bible with comprehensive footnotes is his most monumental work, providing detailed theological commentary on every chapter of the New Testament. The Life-study of the New Testament, based on his spoken messages, fills over 2,000 volumes when printed as individual studies. The Normal Christian Church Life and The Economy of God are foundational expositions of his ecclesiology and theology of the divine economy. His Crystallization-study series on Old Testament books represents some of his most mature biblical exposition. Living Stream Ministry has published over two hundred of his titles.
Legacy
Witness Lee's legacy is the worldwide network of local churches he built, now present in over sixty countries, and the vast library of Bible study materials he produced through Living Stream Ministry. His Life-study series represents one of the most extensive verse-by-verse expositions of the New Testament ever produced by a single author. His emphasis on the experiential enjoyment of Christ and the organic building of the church has shaped hundreds of thousands of believers globally. He extended Watchman Nee's vision of the local church to the entire world.