[Norm]

Maybe Watchman Nee was not the first to touch this matter of oneness in locality. Watchman Nee had read Otto Stockmayer. This may have been the seeds of what he developed. See the following. The entire book is being published on my web site.

SICKNESS AND THE GOSPEL
By OTTO STOCKMAYER

Chapter 7

According to the Scriptures, the Church of Jesus Christ, as a whole and in its entirety, consists of the united company of His redeemed, those whom He has washed and whom He is perfecting (Eph. 5:23-32), The Church in a place, or, as it is in large cities, the Church of a certain district, consists of the children of God living in that place (Rom. 1:7; 1Cor. 1: 2; etc.). The Scriptures everywhere pre­suppose that the children of God, who are members together of one body, most closely knit together for weal or woe, for honor or shame, and continually needing one another (1 Cor. 12:21-27), should, as far as time and circumstances permit, gather together in the same place. In Corinth some sided with Paul, some with Apollos, some with Cephas; others again claimed to be Christ’s in a special manner. Paul grieves for these divisions, and calls the Corinthians “carnal” (1 Cor. 1:10-12; 3:3-7). But bad and deplorable as was the condition of this church (1 Cor. 11:17-20), yet the Epistle to the Corinthians bears no trace of these Christians having thought of separating themselves, according to their several sympathies, into special circles, which would then have been called religious bodies, or congregations. Divisions in the Church cannot be justified by Holy Scripture, whatever the questions may be about which Christians differ, whether of Church government, or of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Wherever there exists a difference of views or convictions, there Phil. 3:15 applies, “If in anything you are otherwise minded (have another view or conviction), God shall reveal even this unto you.”

In our day we are accustomed to see Christ divided (1 Cor. 1:13), and how many children of God in the National Church, in the Free Churches, in Baptist, Methodist, and other communities, pride themselves on the truth or the views they represent, instead of being ashamed of participating in the guilt of dividing Christ’s body, instead of bewailing the reproach and weakness which are thus brought upon the Gospel. Christians meet with satisfaction on the ground taken by the Evangelical Alliance, and congratulate themselves on the respect paid to man-made barriers, and the consideration shown to the creeds for whose sake they separated, instead of rather availing themselves of such precious opportunities: of meeting with each other, in order to bow in repentance and humiliation on account of a state of things which the Lord alone can alter and heal; human attempts to put them right would only aggravate the evil.

The immediate deeply important bearing of such a state of things on the subject of the healing of the sick members of the Church is obvious. Indeed just in the Corinthian Church there were many sick, and many were prematurely carried off by death, because, in the Lord’s Supper, they failed to discern the Lord’s body (1 Cor. 11:29-30); because they did not discern their own condition in connection with it, and did not “judge” themselves (verse 31). But in the Lord’s Supper the body of Christ is to be viewed, not only as broken for us on the Cross, but also as His mystical body, which is the unity of all the redeemed in Christ—they are indissolubly bound together in Him. “We who are many are one loaf (margin, one body)” (1 Cor. 10:17 R.V.). The Lord’s table is the place where this unity of God’s children finds its per­fect expression. Wherever the Church is divided, wherever the believers of a place have separated them­selves into divers communities, founded by man, according to human ideas, and have their Lord’s table closed to each other, there they no longer “dis­cern the Lord’s body,” in a sense different indeed from the Corinthians, but in a manner equally cul­pable. If the Corinthians were sick because of their sin, we in these days have no right to expect that our sick shall be healed at once so long as we are guilty of the same sin. It is also hardly possible to call the elders of the Church as long as we have only elders of communities.