[aron]

DistantStar,

It might help to see that the word translated 'church' is from the Greek 'ekklesia', which didn't mean 'church', but rather 'meeting', or gathering, or assembly, and there could be any number of them occurring simultaneously, or sequentially, in any given geographical area.

If you see the Psalm 22 - "I will sing praises to you in the midst of the solemn assembly" -- the word in the LXX (Greek OT) is 'ekklesia', and this translation predates Christ by centuries. Yet there was no 'church' as we think of it. But rather an 'assembly', or gathering. A bunch of people together in one place for some purpose.

And in Acts 19:41, "And with these words he dismissed the assembly", the word translated into English 'assembly' is actually 'ekklesia'.. but it doesn't make sense to call it 'church' because it wasn't a religious assembly, but simply a gathering of people. Only later did 'ekklesia' take the connotations of 'religious assembly', specifically 'Christian assembly', and one that was a standing organization apart from any actual physical gathering in one place and time (or meeting, in LC parlance).

I touched on this earlier: what we do today, often, is read back onto the text a meaning that we have today, but that may actually have had little to do with what the authors meant, and wanted their contemporary readers to understand. Because today's needs, and situations, are often different from the original, and we don't even know what the original really was (very well), so we simply appropriate the words for today's needs. Lee was a master at this, and all the while selling the whole "cut straight the word" shtick as if only he was capable of doing it. Patent nonsense.