Quote:
Originally Posted by allinclusivechrist
There is two lampstands in Lebanon..
|
My previous post (#19) probably didn't do the subject well as I used the term "take the lampstand". I think the term is rather "take the ground", i.e. for the Lord and his Church.
But what I was trying to address was the idea of a "lampstand" or local expression of the Church. When one delineates a lampstand, one perforce delineates what is not, and in this case that's all but one's own group... my question was to ask, how one does that? What criteria are used? It seems to me that one's inclusionary criteria will include others, and one's exclusionary criteria will exclude oneself.
For example, how do we know there was no lampstand in Ethiopia before the LSM arrived? There were believers there since the book of Acts was written. At what time therefore did the lampstand get removed, until the LSM re-established it?
Or Geneva and Bern, which had one church per city, strictly enforced I might add, under Calvin's auspices - if that's not a "proper lampstand" then what is? Especially since Calvin is listed as a "minister of the age" in LSM lore. At what point then did Geneva and Bern lose the lampstand? Or the Puritans in New England for that matter - they never tolerated any but one church per city. If this wasn't a lampstand then why not?
Ultimately it seems to be, when we do it, it's a lampstand but with anyone else it's not. There are then two sets of criteria, one used for our group and one for everyone else.
If "degradation" is the exclusionary criteria, then what of Daystar, Phosphorus, and Overseas Christian Stewards? What of "Phillip Lee is the Office"? If operational purity is one's defining characteristic, then how can one stand? Witness Lee wanted others to overlook his "messy kitchen", so why couldn't he overlook the rest? One must be consistent with applied criteria, else one's subjective experiences become untethered from objective reality and become absurdist fantasies.