Quote:
Originally Posted by Evangelical
We must consider the consequence of the thing we are talking about. To kill an innocent life is a high consequence.
But I will accept a level of 100% if you wish, assuming that being wrong about this is a high consequence.
You make a valid point. I can modify my statement to say "86% + 14% = 100% use of the word church for city OR house, proves beyond a doubt that
a church is never greater than a city.
Would you agree with that?
In other words, that 86% are white swans and 14% are black proves that none of those swans are elephants.
I may accept that a church can be smaller than a city, as I cannot prove it beyond reasonable doubt. But since I can prove that a church is not greater than a city to a degree of 100%, surely this rules out any church that claims to be bigger than a city.
This excludes any group that extends its organization larger than the city. Most denominations, the clergy-laity ones are in this category (baptist for example, are not).
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While I appreciate your concession to good sense, I still cannot agree with you, because of Acts 9:31.
"So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria enjoyed peace, being built up; and going on in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it continued to increase."
Here is a singular church in a region bigger than a city. Your percentage calculation left out this reference. So 100% of references to "church" are not all city-sized or smaller. So what do you do with this reference? Lee tried to say this was actually the "universal" church, that the universal church at that time was no bigger than that area. But this is a very speculative reading which is unjustifiable.
So the Bible refers to churches of all sizes. All-time-and-space-sized, Earth-sized, region-sized, city-sized, house-sized. What should we make of this? Well, one thing we clearly shouldn't do is insist a church be city-sized.
As I said, the Bible seems to speak of churches sometimes in a more abstract sense and sometimes in a more practical sense. The church in Ephesians 1-3 was abstract. It had no single set of leaders. Perhaps a house church did have a single set of leaders. What we don't know is whether all or any of the city churches in the NT had a single set of leaders, or whether Paul was referencing the city church in a more abstract way, just speaking of all the Christians in a city. We just don't know and shouldn't pretend we do.
So the problem with the LCM view is when it reads "church in [some city]" it automatically assumes it is "practical" and must be organized under one set of leaders. But my point is we don't know this for sure. And the existence of house churches shows it may have not always be true. Probably the church mentioned in Acts 9:31 wasn't organized under elders. No single group of leaders could have managed it at that time, neither is there any reason to believe they had to. Yet the Bible called it a church.
All Christians know that God has one church in reality. This is reflected by the reality that in one sense there is "one church" in a city, in the same sense there is one church on Earth. The fact that the one church on Earth can be comprised of many smaller more practical churches means that one church in a city can also be comprised of many smaller more practical churches. The principle is the same. We don't know for sure whether this may not have been the case with some churches. That plus the fact that there is no directive in the NT that a church has to be city-sized should make us hesitate to insist on the city church only view.
Good sense tells us that a practical church should be organized in a way which it can practically operate. As long as the church realizes it is part of a larger reality that God sees as one I don't see a problem with the size, and the NT doesn't tell us it is a problem.