Quote:
Originally Posted by ZNPaaneah
I think we can all agree that "all the believers in a locality" are the church in that locality.
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The question is if the church in a city is a abstraction, like the universal church, or is it something that is strictly organized.
The lack of the bible prescribing city churches plus its multiple citings of house churches lends enough reasonable doubt to the city church model to make insisting on it unreasonable. Therefore even if you believe in the city church model you should be tolerant of other interpretations of how church can be practically realized. Calling other manifestations of the church "false" is a reckless position.
Add to this the uncertainty of how the organization of the city church should be maintained. Who picks the elders? What if the entire leadership becomes corrupt? How are members to follow their consciences and split off from bad leadership? Ultimately the LCM model leads to a kind of dictatorship, where Christians have no choice to submit to whomever seems to be in charge. And it gives the leaders total power to condemn whomever they want to.
Even so there is, in a sense, one church in the city. Just like there is one church on earth. But like the universal church this city church can be realized as smaller churches, as the citing of house churches in the Bible implies. The error of the LCM vision of church is equating church with eldership (always theirs). That is, you must follow their eldership to be in the church. But we are all in the church regardless. You cannot leave the church. Being in the church is a reality. Thus the LCM's real beef is with people who don't submit to their eldership. It's a power thing. The "local ground" is just a tool they employ to try to force this. This is proven by the many times they have encountered groups which met as the church without a name, urged them to merge, and when a group said something reasonable like, no thanks, we don't think following leaders who follow Witness Lee is a good idea, the LCM church proceeded to discredit them and presume to be the "true church" in the city.
To the LCM there can only be one king of the hill and that's gotta be them. Thus their take no prisoners attitude.