Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
As I said to UntoHim, I probably overstressed the "two or three", and seemed as if I was dismissing anything else as irrelevant, or even wrong. I didn't mean to convey that.
|
I did not think that you were. But there did seem to be the inference that the fact that two or three were gathered together made it church. I just don't have any clear basis to assert that so definitely. And when it is applied to the ones who were sent out two by two just because they are together, then I have some problem. I do not deny them the ability to "have church" with just the two. But if we presume that they were together virtually all the time, I would suggest that there was much time of their togetherness that would not be "church." In other words, church is not simply meeting. It is more than that. It is not simply doing a task together — even a religious one — although that task could be the thing that brings them into "meeting" (or into "church") in the sense spoken of in scripture.
And, of course, many of the references to "church" do not even require meeting. They simply exist because there are Christians. This is the universal sense, and the sense of the collection of members in any area.
But in all these ways of analyzing "church," it is what it is. It needs teaching. It needs the word (and the Word). It needs the Spirit. As it grows, it needs leadership. It needs to be open to revelation and keen to understand what is "from the beginning." In terms of leadership and organization, there are some that are nearly leaderless. Some have elders. Some operate strictly with the preacher as spiritual authority but the community as a whole as responsible for all other issues. The variety is nearly endless. And it is church. Of all the things that may be on the heart of God, I doubt that the structure of an assembly is far above the bottom of the list. Much higher are the lives of those who have chosen to follow to the best of their abilities. (And that sentence would be torn apart by the LRC because they do not acknowledge that they have abilities.)