Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
The ekklesia is an assembly which assembles in His name. Once we lose sight of the verb form to assemble, and forget the real location of the assembly, which is in spirit, in His name, then we are left with a noun form called church, which at best is a structured organization, and at worst is a gothic museum of sorts, where I spent the early part of my life.
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Yes; "to assemble" is a verb. The resultant form, structure, or pattern, is in the name of Jesus, and guided by His Holy Spirit and teachings. Beyond that, we should be wary of prescribing what it should, or should not, look like.
I noticed that ekklesia was a word found often in the OT, in the Septuagint version which was commonly used as a basis of the NT composition. See e.g. the Psalm 22:22 citation in Hebrews 2:12. Originally ekklesia didn't mean what we today think of when we use the word "church". Rather, it meant more like "meeting". Gradually over time ekklesia came to mean a standing body which assembles itself together, among other activities. But an assembly, or meeting, came to be seen as distinct from a church, i.e. the christian polity, though the Greek text used the same word.
I felt that Mr. Nee's one-city-one-church paradigm needed to expunge the first, original meaning, in order to get the NT text to line up with its doctrine. Obviously you can have more than one assembly, or meeting, in the name of Jesus in any geographical area. And this multiplicity of assemblies could be seen as a multiplication, rather than the dreaded "division", and it was also referenced positively by our Lord ("bearing much fruit", etc). So if we deal with the word ekklesia a little more nuanced than merely as "church", we might treat the text more carefully and not see the requirement of the kind of structure that Mr Nee et al thought was "normal".
Secondly, I stressed the "two or three" in Matthew 18 because it was dismissed out of hand by Mr. Lee with the words "They are not the church". I agree with
Ohio that I would rather have two or three in the Lord's name, with His presence, than be in some "church" which is an empty shell; a museum to someone's preferred structure. But in making my point I may have overstated it, as if two or three gathered together were all that mattered.