Quote:
Originally Posted by Evangelical
In any given city, how can there be multiple legitimate expressions of the church today when Christ and the disciples only established one? Paul only established one church per city, that is a historical fact. That's why the bible never mentions more than 1 church per city. That does not mean there was only one meeting place per city, it means they all identified themselves as part of the one church.
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See, here you're conflating "the church" with "expressions of the church". There can be people who meet separately, and still be all members of the same universal church, even if they don't necessarily realize it, and everywhere they meet, they are partaking in a true and legitimate expression of the one church.
The followers of Nee and Lee are no more or less legitimate of an expression of that same universal church when they meet together than any other congregation of Christians. Under ideal conditions Christians wouldn't see any barriers between themselves, and would feel totally free to worship together always, but the LCM isn't really helping that to occur by elevating the writings of two men to be nearly as important as the Bible itself.
As the saying goes, "actions speak louder than words", and you can call yourself the "church in Anaheim" all you like, but so long as they're following specific non-Biblical religious teachings, set liturgies, an obscure Bible translation, and other exclusionary elements, they're not substantially different from any other denomination or sect.
For all the talk I hear from saints in the LC saying that
Nee and Lee were just ordinary men, they weren't prophets, they just happened to be burdened by God to recover the early Church, and they came in a long line of theologians working towards that recovery, why when I go to the conferences don't I ever see a single book on the shelf or even a citation in the outlines, from a single non-Nee/Lee source? Why nothing from Martin Luther or the early church fathers? Why nothing from C.S. Lewis? Why no contemporary writings from living theologians? Even if we could definitively say that Nee and Lee wrote the greatest biblical commentaries of all time, it's still true that man by his very nature can never be perfect. By not reading and studying a wider body of literature (as Nee himself did) they're limiting themselves to a single narrow perspective on the Bible, which is ultimately a harmful exercise. It's just as bad as considering the Roman Catholic Pope to be infallible. It's either you stick with nothing but the Bible itself, or if you do go to outside commentaries, you need a variety to contrast different perspectives and draw nearer to the truth.