[Cal]

Again, I think it's an error to seek to define specifically for everyone what theoretically is a genuine practical church and what isn't. And it's even worse to try to do it in practice.

The Bible never says we are supposed to discern what are real churches. It's not our job to do that. But Nee felt like that's what he needed to do.* So he set out to create the definition. Again, he reminds me of Ayn Rand. She set out to define the nature of reality in a way that led to a life practice. She was a very smart woman and created something that seemed reasonable and pretty airtight. The problem is she made the same mistake Nee did. She pretended her assumptions were facts. She jumped to conclusions and pretended she wasn't jumping to conclusions. Nee did the same thing with the local ground, and with many of his other teachings, too.

Human beings want things defined. Wouldn't it be great if we knew exactly what church is? Then we could know whether we are right, and just as importantly to fallen humans, when somebody else is wrong.

But God is wise. He doesn't give us that kind of knowledge because he knows, as we all should know by now, that the church is not something based on outward practices. It's based on a mysterious reality God has created that we can't quite define. When we try to define it completely and pretend we have, we come up with something that is actually false. But being deceived that we have it defined, as Nee did, we proceed to beat others over the head with it, as the LCM, and unfortunately our friend Evangelical, does.

God wished to protect us from that, which is why he didn't completely define how to do church, and so left us with the freedom to follow him and to honor those who do it differently.

* Nee actually had an ulterior motive for doing this. He wanted to invalidate the foreign denominations that were dominating the Christian landscape in his native China. He wanted to break their bonds and the way to do it was to create an ecclesiology which diminished them.