[aron]

Originally Posted by OBW

But while there are some who consider those who step out and start their own thing to be "divisions," there are now many who will even support them as taking the gospel to a different constituent...

When Jesus said to go forth into all the world and preach the Good News He wasn't sanctioning divisions. When He sent out seventy before Himself, they weren't creating seventy divisions. They were simultaneously going forth, or as you put it "stepping out", and they were also abiding in Him, in His word, and in His commands. So the increase in assemblies, even within one geographic area (city or whatever) can be arguably "multiplication" rather than "division". The Lord's Recovery local churches concede this practical point with their various assemblies, designated as "Meeting Halls", sharing urban space.

Perhaps the rub is this: when you go out are you preaching the Good News or are you telling everybody the Bad News of how everyone else is degraded and poor and Babylonian, and only you have recovered the "pure strain"? In other words, are you part of the great going forth of Christianity or are you separating yourself from it?

If anyone was qualified to burn it all down and start something new it was the aged apostle John. Looking back at the Asian assemblies from his vantage point on Patmos, he was forced to keep writing, "repent". One assembly he did threaten with the removal of their lampstand. But he wrote to them all, as the older brother who loved them all, just as Christ had loved him. John did not start something new. He stuck with them. We also should "stick together". Degradation, failure, repentance, and all.

Originally Posted by OBW

..One sort of odd effect of the notion that where you are "born" you cannot leave is that if you are born (again) in a place that is a splinter from another, does that mean that you have to stay, but those that left another to start it are in error and should return from whence they came?..

My supposedly logical extension of Igzy's "try to work things out in the church in which you find yourself" may only have showed the ultimate weakness in thinking logically. Which is fine, because exposing weakness in and of logic is part of the thinking & discussion process. That was what I was attempting to do with my copious sections of copied text. I felt that their gripes with "Christianity" as they find it are arguably legitimate, just as Marx' had been with capitalism. But they become so enamored of their thinking, ensnared by their critiques, that they end up in La-la land. "And the last state of the man becomes worse than the first."

...We are so prone to create hard-and-fast rules where non exist while ignoring the "main thing." It just seems to be another way in which we make the main thing into an afterthought while elevating the trivial into the main thing..

The only hard-and-fast rule is to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Every other rule should follow that, and be subservient to it. If the rule "love the church", for example, which I now see being bandied about, causes you to lose (avoid, ignore, weaken, abandon) your 'first love' for your neighbor, forget it. The same goes for any special pet doctrine, group, leader, or work.

...And despite all of the writings by Paul and some others to the church, and even considering some of the things written about the church, I'm not sure that the church is really the main thing. I think it is the result of the main thing, not the main thing. Jesus really said very little about it. The things he said about it may have been profound, but it was far from his primary teaching...

Agreed. If we Keep It Simple Stupid and focus on the primary teaching, the other stuff will organically (ha-ha.. couldn't resist) emerge. Otherwise we really do end up arguing the equivalent of 'how many angels can simultaneously touch an angstrom'.