Quote:
Originally Posted by Freedom
In the LC, they like to talk about what the church isn't, and say things such as "the church isn't a building", "we don't go to church", etc. It seems that Nee/Lee developed a lot of ideas about what the church is by approaching the subject from the view of what the church is not. That is the wrong approach and it leads to the wrong conclusions.
Take the very premise of the ground of locality - that there can only be one church per city. . . . If we are to view the church as it is found in the bible, any talk of boundaries, territory or 'ground' of the assembly starts to sound strikingly divisive.
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This is my argument. "The church isn't this and that", all these straw men to take our eyes off of Jesus. Then to save you from the boogeyman they give you the "new and pure" church, which is NOT THE STRAWMAN!! Hurray!! Now we can just love Jesus! Right!?
Wrong. We merely created a new non-strawmen entity, based upon our imagination, and selective response to our modest sensory input. "And the last state of the man was worse than the first." Ineed, not trusting in the all-seeing and all-knowing God, we trust our feeble perceptions. We look around and perceive multiple assemblies, and declare, "division". How do we know God doesn't look around and see multiplication? Why, because we don't want to, is why - we only see what we want to see.
Lee took it so far that he declared that in order to be one, all the local churches had to be "exactly identical", with "no differences whatsoever". Whatever happened to living stones? Now we're identical bricks! Whatever happened to "every tribe and people and tongue"? Now we're a smoothie. Every distinction homogeneously blended away into a ministry smoothie. But it's not the boogeyman!!
It started out with the church, then local ground, and boundaries. Then Deputy God, Handing Over, the Jerusalem Principle, the Work, the Ministry, God's New Move, Vital Groups, the Building Up, God's One Trumpet, God's Oracle, the Feeling in the Body. . . can I stop now? Or will the strawmen get us?