[aron]

Originally Posted by UntoHim

I've always just assumed that the church and it's leadership was "modeled" after the Jewish synagogue. I have always assumed that many of the details of church leadership were among these things that never actually made it to the accepted text. Would it be a stretch to think that when Paul was apart from the other apostle (for many years right after he was saved) that God was giving him instructions regarding church leadership, along with so many of the other high and glorious revelations regarding Christ and the Holy Spirit?

Good point. As I stated in my response to YP, it seems natural that a) if the Lord didn't explicitly forbid it and b) it was the prevailing practice among the observant ones, pre-Christ, then why shouldn't church leadership models which seemed proper be enacted? I am radically rethinking my longstanding issue with "organization" per se. I may have been completely missing the boat on this one. Thanks for your input.

Originally Posted by UntoHim

I am very, very leery of questioning anything that seems to have been established by the scripture writing apostles. I am not saying that is what is happing here (I'm sure its not) but it can be a slippery slope if we're not careful.

I understand completely. I raise this questioning thread based on the "epistles to the seven churches" in the second and third chapters of Revelation. It seems to me that something had happened to the fellowships between the day of pentecost and the day that John was instructed by the Lord to take a scroll and write down what he saw and send it to the seven churches. Something negative, corrupting; some degrading element had "leavened" the fellowships.

I take the opposite tack as Witness Lee; he says that they were identical positively (golden lampstands) but differed in negative aspects (lukewarmness, pride, deadness, sin, etc). I say the opposite: as a positive collective expression of Christ, these fellowships, like individuals, will have unique characteristics. God will give some to be strong on the truth, some to be strong in the gospel, some in shepherding, etc. I believe this pleases the Father, and the strengths of one can support the weaknesses of another in a free flow of fellowship among the differing assemblies.

But the varied issues with the seven churches have a common root (I am surmising), and I want to find out what it is. What caused the degradation? As I said before, I think this is a wider issue than the seven churches; in some way they are meant to be representative of the larger body, the "body of Christ", not only at that time, but going forward. There is a strong universalist streak in the book of Revelation, and it would be completely out of character (it seems to me) to insert seven private letters into this book like John did. Nee & Lee say that the seven churches represent the various "ages of the church"; I don't disagree but it goes much deeper than that. If that was merely a prediction about the various stages the body of christ would go through, it wouldn't have much sense for the immediate recipients would it? No, John is MUCH more practical than this. He has fish to fry, and he wants to fry them today, not when Nee or the Brethren show up to correctly interpret the signs.

If you have 4 patients in a hospital ward, and one of them has Karposi's Sarcoma, one of them has Hairy Leukoplatia, another has uncontrolled infections, another has Pneumonia, you may say they are all diversely afflicted. But if I tell you they all have AIDS, and it is manifesting itself differently, that makes sense, right? So I think that maybe some "virus" got into the fellowship of the believers, before the end of the writing of the Bible, and I want to know what it is.

Originally Posted by UntoHim

One thing that just popped into my pea brain was that the Lord Jesus was referred to as our "great High Priest" and the church is called "a kingdom of priests". Again, I'm just popping off here and not sure if this fits into the argument at all, but it does suggest that there is a connection there.

Well, the notion of "serving priests" would have different connotations to a Jewish believer AD 50, and a gentile believer today, wouldn't it? Point well raised.