Quote:
Originally Posted by Koinonia
I did not make such a claim.
Again, you keep talking about "we." Who is "we"?
I never suggested such a thing.
Evangelical, I know these analogies very well. I spent most of my life there. I grew up there. This whole thing about the wife and her husband's name is just WL's idea. The church is the church because it is--period. Look--I don't agree with denominations. But I also don't agree that a group can just claim to be "the church."
It has become fashionable recently for LCs (look at LC in Irvine, for example) to say--"the church in X is not our name it's our description." This is wrong. "The church in X" is the description of all believers in that place; it is not a description of one particular group.
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Sorry I understand now, it seemed to me you said that in the local church you didn't fellowship with any other believers and now you do.
If that particular group is the church in X, then it would be a description of all believers in that place, and they would be correct to say that the church in X is not their name but their description. They are not being exclusive but being inclusive. But they cannot deny that they are not the church in that city, if that is what they are.
If they said that the church in X is their name, that would be describing themselves as a group, independent of all the believers in their city, and this would not be according to the truth.
It is quite biblical to have a visible presence in the world and be known as "the church". The church is not, as you seem to portray it, a mishmash of individual believers meeting here and meeting there without any real identity that can be pointed to for practical and administrative purposes.
We can find in Acts 21:18 for example, that there is an entity called "the Jerusalem church" which was overseen by elders:
Acts 21:18 The next day Paul went with us to meet with James, and all the elders of the Jerusalem church were present.
So Paul traveled and met with an entity called "the Jerusalem church", though that is not their name, but what they are.
Imagine if Jerusalem was a scattering of individual "two or three" household churches and people meeting sporadically in parks and other places, Paul would not know whom to speak with. If you and a sister were praying together in a park, would you expect Paul to come to you? He would want to know where are the overseers of this entity called "the church".
Seems that you and others are in denial that a group of people called "the church in ..." is truly what they are according to the pattern the bible gives us. Suppose that there was another church started in Jerusalem in the time of Acts 21:18 - does that make "the Jerusalem church" another denomination? Of course not.