Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
I wonder how much of it was a reaction by young Chinese idealism against perceived British colonialism manifested through denominational mission boards. Didn't Margaret Barber, Nee's earliest mentor, have a falling out with her own missionary board in London? In his ecclesiastical books, Nee addressed denominations and their failures head on. Lee, however, went way past this, and literally condemned all things Christian, except, of course, his own member churches.
Nee took the so-called "pattern" found in Revelations 2-3, John's 7 epistles, and then shoe-horned the rest of the New Testament into it. There's nothing wrong, for example, to say that your group is a "church in New York City," using the model of the church in Ephesus, but to use Acts 14.23 and Titus 1.5 to definitively declare that the entire "true" church in that city must be under one set of elders appointed by the self-appointed apostle is akin to those Appalachian snake handling churches trying to "recover" their long-lost "true" church based on Luke 10.19 and Acts 28.5.
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Yes, I think those verses may indicate that at the time of Paul and John the apostles worked in this way. They each had their own territory to work in (Paul talked about not wanting to work in a territory someone else was working in) and within that territory they raised up churches in every city.
However, as it has been noted there is no word at all in the NT about how large a gathering should get before it is too unwieldy, how many elders you need, how many meeting halls, etc. I think everyone agrees that division is wrong and that there should be a degree of oneness among all believers, but that degree is very clearly spoken of in the NT. If WN and WL had stuck to what the NT clearly does say about this oneness there would have been no issue, but to infer that oneness necessitates one eldership is a very big leap. To then say that the way to determine this oneness is with a magic formula "The church in ...." is to clearly veer off course. To then judge all other Christians as being in "Babylon" because they participate in the Lord's Table in a meeting that is not named "The church in ..." is evil, it is sin.