Quote:
Originally Posted by Igzy
The mindset that "we must arrive at the optimal way to have church" is a mis-aiming.
The LRC equated having the perfect "church life" with satisfying God. But the Bible never puts a perfect church life forth as a goal.
The goals the Bible puts forth are loving one another, holiness, growth, service, testimony. ("The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith." 1 Tim 1:5.)
The church is simply an environment for these things to be worked out. How that looks has some flexibility. Paul emphasizes two things related to this, (1) everyone has gifts which should be utilized by them and respected by others, and (2) everyone can "prophesy" for the Lord in some way (which is related to 1).
The LRC placed an unhealthy emphasis on "all can prophesy." To the point they believed the Lord could not build his church without the kind of open meetings they employed. As if 15-second, rapid-fire testimonies were the key to everything God wanted. Not to be rude, but that kind of mindset is just Duh.
The bottom line, however, is that the perfect church life is not the goal. Endlessly seeking it, or seeking to define it, as a goal in itself, is a waste of time.
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I really agree with this. One day someone mentioned casually how EVERY new church / denomination feels they are closer to the Biblical pattern, yet look at how very different they all are. That comment jarred my thinking. No church is perfect, no practice is perfect, no service is perfect, neither can we expect them to be.
The Bible seems to only place boundaries on the church and her meetings. No way is THE way, because THE way is the living Christ, and He simply refuses to be defined by any liturgical service. Neither will He be bound by only one translation of the Bible, let alone one man's theological interpretations.
The verse which you quoted, "
The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith," (1 Tim 1:5.) took on new meaning in the GLA during the days of quarantines, to show just how far off LSM's Blendeds had gone related to "God's New Testament Economy." They missed the goal of the Bible, so it's no wonder where they ended up.
Once we go down this avenue in pursuit of the "perfect" church, we become vulnerable to a whole host of modern day "prophets" who have discovered (
or recovered!) the great, long lost missing link, such as "
you all can prophesy, one by one, but only for 90 seconds." We actually had a brother years ago,
a little askew at times, who even went so far as to calculate, during the training in Anaheim, the statistical mean and standard deviation for the time each trainee took to prophesy.
What's wrong with this picture folks?