Quote:
Originally Posted by Terry
Not meaning to go off-topic, but just to touch on what Ohio had spoken. Before on this forum we had touched the ground of locality teaching of one church/one city. In any given city there are thousands, tens of thousands, and maybe hundreds of thousands of Christians in a larger city. Most of whom had never heard of the local churches or of Witness Lee's ministry. It would be logisitically impractical for all to meet in one location. As it is, that practice is contrary how the early Christians used to meet; house to house.
My experience has been unless Jesus Christ is our sole basis for fellowship, there cannot be oneness no matter how much one speaks about it. Just look in 1 Corinthians. There are distinctions of ministries, but one Spirit. As soon as a minister or ministry becomes the basis for fellowship, division is present. We have church history as proof. Paul was clear about that. Paraphrasing, Paul was saying don't look to Cephas, don't look to Apollos, don't look to me, look to Jesus Christ.
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Funny that you bring this up since I had a similar conversation with her regarding the whole one city/one church teaching. I said that it would be very impractical for, say, the whole city of Chicago to meet in one place. I tried to tell her that the Church in Corinth, for example, was probably several assemblies of believers rather than everyone meeting in a central location (though I have no proof to back that up other than logical reasoning) when she said that the one church in a city "doctrine" (my word not hers) was based on what early believers did in the Bible. We had a very circular argument ending with her just saying "well if God wanted to, there could be one city/one church." Well if God wanted to, why hasn't it been done yet? She definitely has a conflict of looking to Christ as the head of the church and LRC teachings regarding the church.