Quote:
Originally Posted by alwayslearning
I think the question of this thread suggests there is a universal answer. It assumes there is an ideal model that can be discovered and applied anywhere at anytime and actually work. IMHO this is wishful thinking.
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Perhaps the question to start the thread should have been "Is there a structure of the assembly?" But my initial hypothesis was that there IS some required structure in the assembly, because that is the sense I get from most believers, and it seems to fit the church history that we read.
Since we've abandoned the LRC one-city-one-church structure (or model, or paradigm), what, if any, should follow? My own experience has led me towards "two or three" in Jesus' name, meeting at work, on the street, in a home, on the bus, wherever. It is fluid and free, although it occasionally does seem rather lonely. But I feel the presence of Christ sometimes.
Two of my paradigmatic meetings(ekklesia), as such, are found in Luke 24, with Jesus and the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, and Acts 8 with Philip, an angel, the Holy Spirit, and an Ethiopian eunuch. For example, I don't see Philip instructing the Ethiopian to return to Jerusalem for further training, and somehow to me that just feels right.
Anyway, I sort of started the thread with a premise, that there is some minimal structure to the assembly. The idea of no structure whatever seemed like, "...and the church was without form, and void", a la Genesis 1:2. But I also felt that any structure shouldn't go beyond what the Master has taught us. So as I saw structure emerge, in Acts and beyond, I compared it to the Master's teachings in the Gospels. The Acts chapter 6 bifurcation into "table servers" and "Bible scholars" is an example that got my interest.
So I more or less am in the same position as
alwayslearning. Neither Nee's TNCCL nor any other that I am aware of presents us with a practical, idealized structure. Any attempts to shoehorn all the assemblies into being "absolutely identical", per Lee's footnote in Revelations, to some idealized construct of our fallen minds is about the furthest thing from new wineskins that I can possibly imagine. The comparison to Marx' communism healing the wounds of capitalism is quite apt. The cure is clearly worse than the sickness.