[Cal]

Originally Posted by Oregon

Hi Igzy,

Firstly:
The word “church” in the NT many times is translated assembly and Paul may just be referring to the fact of saints assembling in someone’s house. Also it seems that there were some localities in the NT where there may not have been many believers and the whole church probably gathered in a single house in that city. I pointed out the fact in the Word of saints meeting in many houses and yet the scripture refers to them as “ the church” and not churches. Why is this? Are you neglecting this point?
I am well aware of the references in the Word of "the church in the house", although these are few and couldn’t even come close to the number of verses referring to the church in the city.

Hi Oregon,

I'm not neglecting the point. My issue is not that there is not in some sense "one church" in a city in much the same way as there is one church universally. My issue is that once you claim that one church must be organized practically with one set of leaders there is no way to determine who the actual leaders of that church are. The best you can get is people claiming to be the leaders. So if you have two sets of leaders claiming to be the elders over the church in Toronto (which is in fact the case now, as in many other cities) there is no way to resolve the situation. This is being demonstrated in real time as we write.

In Witness Lee's movement (aka The Recovery) he and his co-workers were always the final arbitrators on this point. So if they said a set of elders or an assembly was not the real church in the city, then that was pretty much it. In other words, the validity of a particular church was decided by a movement. This is decidedly unscriptural. I seen nothing in the Bible that gives workers the authority to declare churches valid or invalid. This is in fact the way of Rome.

Secondly:
Please don’t think of me as an LSM person dealing with this matter in the way it has been dealt with by them. I am not. I am totally aware of the wrong application of this by certain ones and I believe I pointed this out in a previous post.

So, what exactly is the right application? Please be sure to explain how disagreements on who are the true elders are resolved. When there can only be one church in a city, there are going to eventually be disagreements on this issue, as we indeed see today.

Thirdly:
Your statement that the local ground practice leads to sin and is inconsistent and unworkable may be logical in your mind but to me it is somewhat ludicrous.

If it's ludicrous you ought to be able to tell me how the Christians in a city decide who the proper elders over than one church are. For example, who are the real elders over the church in Toronto? The ones over the LSM church or the ones over the CB church? Or none? How does one know? If you cannot answer this then my point is not ludicrous.

The gathering of believers outside of denominationalism simply on the grounds that they are the Lord’s body and not Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans or what have you is something which would be very much in agreement with the Word. How this is practiced by the LSM churches may be in error but it doesn’t change the fact that when you look at the church in the NT what you see is believers assembling together in cities where the gospel had gone to and they are referred to as the church in that city. There is abundant proof of this in the Word……far more proof then the few references to “the church in the house”. If the few verses concerning the church in the house are any persons ground for believing that there can by multiple churches in any city then that ground is very weak indeed.

There is nothing wrong with meeting just as a church in the oneness of the Spirit. In fact, this is how most community churches meet these days, including the one I meet with. There is no thought that we are better than anyone or have an exclusive thing going.

The problem comes in with insisting that a group must meet on the ground of the city to be a legitimate church. The Bible does not command us to do this. Also, there are too many verses which may give ground to churches on different grounds other than the city (e.g. the house) to insist on the grounds of the city.

Besides, once you insist on the ground of the city, who is to say the proper group meeting on the ground is the one you happen to meet with? Maybe it's someone else.

Now that there are many cities with more than one group claiming to be the church, it is simply a he-said-she-said situation, with no way to resolve it. This is why recovery churches end up in court. It's an indication of a severe flaw in the practical city church model.