Quote:
Originally Posted by zeek
It's doubtful that every ex-local church member is going to agree on everything.
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To me your idea of order sounds a lot like the Southern Baptist Church.
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First, it is entirely OK that every ex-local church member doesn't agree on everything. But one of the most limiting things about integrating with all those Christians we used to despise is retaining so much of Lee's teachings. Even when we join them we keep running into disagreements that we have without so much as thinking about it. "They have a choir. How Babylonian!" If I think there is something wrong with that kind of thinking, then it is definitely to my benefit in interaction with those Christians that I deal with it. If not, then maybe a Reformed LRC is the answer.
As to sounding like the Southern Baptist Church, on what basis do you think that is wrong? Because you've been in a place that did it differently? Without regard to whether it was really correct? Without considering that Paul might have been pointing much more in that direction than in the direction that Lee took it and we learned it from him?
I do not condemn meetings in which all participate. I question the insistence upon that without evidence that there is any such directive in scripture while I seem to be reading something that suggests quite (or at least somewhat) the opposite. And just saying it again with more emphasis doesn't make it read differently. Discovering that the translations are missing the nuance of a word such that what we have in front of us in English is not really telling the story right might change my mind. It wouldn't be the first time. But no one is suggesting that. They are just saying "all" must be a universal "all" when there is a context in which "all" would seem to have only a local scope. (And I don't mean local in terms of Corinth, but in terms of the paragraph.)
Show me why the third sentence in a discussion of how 2 or 3 should carry out their prophesying suddenly is talking about the whole congregation. In my assembly, that would be 4,000 or so (although present over three services and not all at one time). They carry it out in a manner in which there is order (not chaos) as they speak and they all (all of the 2 or 3) get to speak. That would seem to be the obvious way to read it. To read it another way would seem to need some kind of indicator that the context had changed. It is not there (that I can see).