Originally Posted by Igzy
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 are in control, which always results 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 either use to one extent or another, or not use. 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 in 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. 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 admit we don't have the perfect theory of anything.
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