Quote:
Originally Posted by Hope
All this political talk just makes my spirit sink. Trying to use this logic to address the issue of the ground of the church, the ground of locality, the ground of oneness or whatever phrase you would use does not apply.
|
Hope,
By "political talk" and "logic" are you talking about the argument I'm making in this thread? I don't think I'm saying anything political. As for logic, I think God is very logical. He created logic. You can't form a meaningful sentence without logic. So, I ask, please try to bear with me and follow what I'm saying.
It's no secret that the LC sees the local church in the city as one
submitting to one set of elders. This is very much implicit in their model. It's their "ace in the hole" over their members. In other words, basically the elders are the church. I recall the preface to one of Lee's books called
Elder's Management of the Church which was written by a Chinese elder saying "the center of the church is the elders." This is the LSM/LC thought. By the very idea of thinking one group of elders (theirs) by necessity represents the whole city-church they are saying that the elders are
over the whole city-church. This is their thought, not mine, and there is no pretending it is not part and parcel with their package.
My purpose is to show that thought to be internally self-defeating to the idea of oneness.
I agree with you and others, Hope. Elders should be servants. To address
Shawn's thought as well, if an entire city of Christians happens to agree to follow one group of elders then more power to them! That's fine. But no one can say that therefore every other Christian that comes along must submit to those elders too. The day could come, and has historically, like night follows day, when elders go bad and lead believers in sectarian ways. At that point, if a small group of believers, still endeavoring to keep the oneness, decide to meet separately and follow other leaders, I think they are perfectly in their right to do so, and the bigger group has no right to condemn them or call them renegades or any of the other nasty names that LSMers have thrown about like teenagers insulting each other in a chat room.
If you think about it, they must have that right to go the way the feel led. Otherwise the Church has no way to reform itself. I think we all believe that the more Christians are one, the better. But the Lord has to be able to break up entrenched, ossified, oppressive religiosity. Some things cannot be reformed from within.
Why didn't the Lord just plainly specify one church per city? I think it's because if he had it would have been much harder to reform once religion got entrenched. History would have unfolded differently. The Catholic church would have always set up one "church" per city and any rivals would have easily been condemned as rebellious and un-Biblical. The Reformation might have been defeated. Who knows? Anyway, I think the Lord always provides a way for His real seekers to break away from the religion of the day, even when that religion is embodied in the "local church."
Who knows how many believers miserably remain in the LSM churches simply because their consciences are compelled by the false application of the city-church teaching--that to cross the elders is to cross the church.
This is what I am taking on in this thread. I hope people will try to understand that.