[aron]

I don't buy the "great but flawed church leader" argument. A first-year seminary student would be taught not to take OT types, shadows and figures to glide past clear NT directives. Paul was direct in how Church leaders should behave, and what happens when they don't. He was quite frank.

If you can't understand the difference between a flawed but repentant church member and a flawed but unrepentant church leader, then you are being used to cover up their abuse. And to those who find my observation insulting, too bad. I'm willing to offend some, if some will wake up.

And I notice in online forums, that people who get offended by my characterizations never actually address the substance. I will, for example, quote the mutuality that's seen in 1 Cor 14, and Galatians 2, and missing in the Local Church, but it's never acknowledged... just that I'm an aggressive writer. That's kind of my point: I see assiduous determination to focus on only selected part of the Bible, avoiding the unhelpful parts, then retreating back to homespun analogies, or holding up OT types that don't wash. And on that the church is supposedly being built.

There is no Drunken Noah in the NT, no David the Adulterer and Murderer. Christ is our Noah, our David, our Moses. And he's not a drunk or an adulterer. Paul goes over this in great detail in his epistles to Titus and Timothy. And none of the other NT-era leaders violated this. What if Peter had taken the funds from property sales in Acts 4 and 5, built a fleet of boats for his immediate family, saying that it was for the gospel? What kind of NT would that be? I know that the Dong, Nee, and Lee families all did variations of this. Even if the Chu family didn't, did he call it out when it was going on? Or, did he write it off as a cost of maintaining the Network?