Quote:
Originally Posted by testallthings
Evangelical, W. Nee didn't contradict himself. It is you who are mixing two different topics ... If there are other Christians in the same city we cannot claim to be the church in that city, we are only a part of the church in that city. But we can certainly answer that we belong to the church in that city (that's what Nee said in your quotation)
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Evangelical and testallthings, unfortunatelly you both have not fully understood WN on the church issue.
Indeed there is no contradiction between the statements in Assembly Life (1934) and Rethinking the Work (The normal Chuch Life, 1937). And it is also true that Nee always says that God's church is only divided by location and that we must be very careful when setting up one, because a church cannot exclude brothers and sisters. We must not establish a church where already (other) denominations exist, because in doing so we make the confusion even worse and will be an other splinter group. But if we enter untouched territory (of which there was a lot in China at that time), then we are the church of that very location. This is what Nee in the 1930s meant and what Kaung also understood.
But Nee did not teach: As Christians, we belong to an invisible body in a city where only denominations (plus possibly a Catholic "church") exist. Rather, his view was that then there is no church. That is what Lee obviously understood, because that is what he said to Kaung. And if I see it correctly, that is why Lee was cautious about setting up “churches” at the beginning of his time in the US.
Nee's view was that in a situation of denominations, the spiritually approptiate way would be for local believers to unite, no matter what tradition they were carrying with them, to start anew together. And he was prepared to give up his own "tradition" for this.
P.S. That’s my opinion too.