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Originally Posted by aron
... if your "recovery" criteria are #1 coming out of the Great Whore Babylon and #2 having one church per city, then the Puritans already provided a model of the "glorious church life". For nearly a hundred years there was only one church per city in the American colonies, until the Baptists started splitting off, and Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson and other dissenters showed up. So the ex-Rome "recovered" church was already there, and having "taken the ground". Not a division at all; in fact, you got seriously punished for being divisive, back then.
But unfortunately that one-church-per-city model on virgin American soil wasn't sufficient. It wasn't started in the virgin soil of China by Watchman Nee, the Seer of the Divine Revelation, so we should ignore it. I guess.
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Another good one-church-per-city model, which predated Watchman Nee's Chinese variant, was 16th Century Geneva Switzerland, which was overseen by the Council of the Two Hundred, a group of overseers. Here's a record of their care for the church in Geneva:
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... "A conspiracy of men and women has lately been discovered, who, for the space of three years, had spread the plague through the city by what mischievous device I know not. After fifteen women have been burnt, some men have even been punished more severely, some have committed suicide in prison, and while twenty-five are still kept prisoners, — the conspirators do not cease, notwithstanding, to smear the door-locks of the dwelling-houses with their poisonous ointment. You see in the midst of what perils we are tossed about. The Lord hath hitherto preserved our dwelling, though it has more than once been attempted. It is well that we know ourselves to be under His care.".
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The Council was always on the alert that the "one accord" must be preserved, which meant ferreting out deviants, conspiracies and purging the flock. They believed that this kind of purification is necessary to keep the rest in the group compliant with leadership. As RK later put it so well, "Sometimes you must cut off the churches to preserve the Body".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Two_Hundred