[ACuriousFellow]

First, we have the insistence that the Old Testament pattern, in and of itself, automatically justifies the notion that we should name our churches a particular way. I’ve already pointed out the major flaw in this line of thinking, that being the fact that there are several parallels made to the temple, God’s one place of worship and sacrifice in much of the Old Testament, and yet none of those New Testament parallels make reference to city boundaries. God gave very particular commands to the people of Israel regarding where to worship, and there were always major consequences for those who violated these commands. Again and again, the Lord and his people emphasize the importance of the temple in Jerusalem. Again and again the people are reminded of the need of this temple for the sake of all Israel. The need of the high priests and priests and articles and sacrifices. Judgement and wrath came upon the people of Israel when they neglected these things. Destruction and chaos descended upon all of Jacob’s descendants when God’s commands regarding the temple were not properly kept. Conversely, it was always at this temple that the ultimate, most effective, and most meaningful rituals were performed after its construction, and so emphatic was the Lord of the temple’s importance that even when it was destroyed, he insisted on it being rebuilt exactly where it once was. So crucial is this temple mount that many are convinced that the prophetic events to come will still involve it somehow even despite the establishment of the New Covenant. So much of the Old Testament is dedicated to very explicitly showing us the importance of this very specific place of worship and sacrifice, yet we have no such emphasis on the names of the assemblies in the New Testament. Lee claims that this principle of naming is just as crucial as the command the Lord gave in Deuteronomy, yet if it was so important, why does it not receive even 10% of the explicit attention given to the city of Jerusalem and the temple found therein? I would dare to say that it does not even receive 1% of the attention. In fact, nowhere, absolutely nowhere, do you see any explicit commands for naming the assemblies according to the cities they are found in. You see patterns, but not commands. If it was so crucial, if it was even half as crucial as Lee claimed it was, we would not just see patterns, but we would also see commands. We would see explicit commands. We would see desperate commands. We would see nauseatingly repetitive commands, and a command to not be divisive, a command to not divide yourself based on who baptized you, is absolutely not an explicit command to name yourself according to the city you are found in. To top this off, and to transition into my second point, this supposed command, really only a pattern, is broken by the apostle Paul himself on more than one occasion.