Quote:
And you did not reply my questions about your assertion that the ground of locality necessarily leads to conflicts.
|
Let me address by analogy the issue of
one eldership (not ground of locality) necessarily leading to conflicts. (Ground of locality without one eldership is pretty meaningless.)
Suppose you have a person with no immune system. As long as no disease germs come along, he's going to be just fine, it will seem his system works perfectly. But if germs do come along, and they are sure to, he is not going to survive.
Now a city with one church and one eldership is precisely like that man with no immune system. As long as no problems come along, well, the system seems to work. But if any kind of problem comes along where the leadership's over-all-the-city authority is challenged, the system does one of two things:
It either turns mean and becomes oppressive, which is a kind of conflict. Or, if the leaders are actually godly, like those in Columbus, they don't assert themselves and allow the disgruntled to leave and meet where they want, in which case they are assenting that they actually aren't over all the city in the first place.
Since disagreements with leadership, legitimate or otherwise, are bound to happen eventually, the model is bound to break down in one of two ways, one which shows the dark side of the arrangement, the other which assents to an alternative model.