Quote:
Originally Posted by Oregon
The teaching of one church in every city is not artificial UntoHim. How can you make such a statement. Look in the Word of God. Look at the record of the New Testiment. You may not like it but that doesn't change what is recorded in scripture. The New Testiment writings are full of evidense that in the minds of the early saints all the believers in a city were the church in that city......the church in Corinth, the church in Antioch, the church in Jerusalem etc. The local churches may have deviated from the true practice of oneness but that doesn't change the reality of the Word. The hundreds of years of church history that you refer to is a history of fallen man's exercising his own thoughts and views rather than submitting himself to the truth of the Word.
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Oregon,
I also embraced the "one city, one church" doctrine and practice for decades ... that is, until I began to seriously examine the fruit of such practice in the wake of recent quarantines and lawsuits. The "one city, one church" doctrine and practice has accurately been explained as being
descriptive, but not
prescriptive in the New Testament. This is very important to me. As one LC author has noted, "there is more scriptural basis for
head-covering in the N.T., than the practice of one city, one church."
I currently view this church model similarly to the practice of "having all things common" at the end of Acts ch. 4. This practice was
described in the N.T. but never
prescribed by the Apostles for us to practice. This was tried once -- it's called communism. For us to do so now, prescribing what the scripture only describes, is to "
add to the word of God." Peter also cast his net "
on the right side of the boat" (John 21.6), which was quite productive at the time, but has never worked for me as it did for him.
The Bible is filled with events such as these. They are marvelous testimonies of God's dynamic salvation, but we should not infer that this alone is the "God-ordained way." Church history is replete with brothers who unsuccessfully attempted to convert God's one-time blessing into a mandate for future practice -- it's called religious tradition, and is the basis for every denomination and sect.