Quote:
Originally Posted by Evangelical
That's where you are mistaken.
Acts 14:23 says elders were appointed in every church:
"And when they had ordained them elders in every church, and had prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord, on whom they believed."
Titus 1:5 says elders were appointed in every city:
For this cause left I thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city, as I had appointed thee:
Compare these two verses and we don't need to be a rocket scientist to see that the apostle arranged the churches as one church per city.
Couple this with the fact that the Bible no where uses the plural churches in reference to the city, proves there was one church per city. It was Paul's letter to the "church in Corinth" not the "churches in Corinth".
For practical reasons there would have been multiple house assemblies in each city, but these individual assemblies are never referred to as different churches.
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Descriptive, not prescriptive. There is no teaching here from the Apostles.
The LC practice of appointing elders proves that they never applied these verses. In actuality, the LCM practiced Ignatius' pattern of
Bishops.
LC leaders like Lee, Philips, Chu, etc. never were apostles to those churches where they appointed elders. Many LC's they never even visited, so how could they be "apostles" to those LCs?
They weren't. They were Bishops. They trained elders and sent them to take charge of LC's. Happened all the time. That's what Bishops did.
That's not what Acts 14:23 and Titus 1:5 say.