Quote:
Originally Posted by Evangelical
Your post is more persuasive than your others, and you don't have to remind me that we are a tiny minority of opinion, as if that really mattered anyway. You seem worried that God really is telling us to do these things, and you might be wrong. But don't worry, remember Lee's messages about the peaks of Jerusalem and the higher peaks? We try to be the higher peak, but it doesn't mean people in other churches aren't peaks.
I think that God works purposefully with one group at a time, as He so often has according to the Bible (whether Old Testament or New). I don't think God raised up thousands of denominations in a scatter gun approach.
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God does't raise up denominations. He raises up people and those people eventually coalesce into something he can more or less use, or not use, as the case may be. It's simply human nature to arrange ourselves along the lines of what makes the most sense to us, which gives us all the different flavors of groups.
Where we go wrong is when we start deciding to the extreme that what makes sense for us has to make sense for everyone else. That's why the whole idea behind the generality of the "unity of the faith" exists. Our unity is not in the details. It's in the general faith. And the faith does not include things like the local ground, or someone's proprietary idea of unity.
The LCM would be a good idea if it weren't such a bad idea. By that I mean in abstract theory it sounds good. But in application the flaws in the theory become apparent, as when you resort to invalid reasoning techniques to try to "prove" you are right. If you were right you wouldn't have to do that. But you do it over and over and I think you know it. Everyone else here does.
You are like Lee in that you think there is a practical mental construct, a theory of how to do church life, that can be applied to everyone. The problem is it's too specific and you eventually succumb to forcing unreasonable ideas on people in the name of "oneness," like expecting everyone to join the Recovery. In short, your theory doesn't work. And I definitely do not think God intended it to work because the end result really is something like Catholicism, where one organization presumes to speak for God to everyone. That always results when an elite few feel they have all the answers, which always issues in corruption and abuse, which is exactly what happened in Catholicism and in the LCM.
So what does God do? He continues to raise up people, who continue to coalesce into groups which he can use to one extent or another, or not use, as the case may be. Some of these fade away, some thrive and serve him well, others turn into religious institutions, or worse. But of none of them does he say, this is my unique place, better than all the rest. And even if he did think that, he'd never let us know, because it would go to our heads and make us presumptuous about what we could dictate to others, as it did with Catholicism and the LCM.
And the cycle repeats, over and over. History shows that. So in a sense God does scatter shoot. Absolutely he does. That's what the picture of the seed sower shows us. We never know where he is going to appear next, or who he is going to anoint next, or even exactly how we fit in. We just follow him and try to be faithful while we are here. And we let out a long and relieved sigh of humility and admit we don't have the perfect theory of anything.