Quote:
Originally Posted by Trapped
1. The idea of oneness - while it sounds good, the local church's idea of oneness is an internal, inward-facing oneness. It is not a oneness with the rest of the Body of Christ. (And yes, there is a "rest" of the Body of Christ....growing up in "the church", "the Body" is made equal to "the local church" while disregarding the millions of other Christians who are also the church). The local church is not, has no desire to be, and takes no steps to be one with those other Christians.
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Let me amend this one point by saying this, since I don't want to be guilty of making the same type of sweeping statements about one Christian group that the local churches make about other Christian groups: In the spiritual realm, I believe the local church is one with other Christians on the basis of the shared life in Christ, and some individual saints can and do live this out in certain ways in their daily life (since I've seen it). The shared life in Christ, the one Lord, is the basis of the oneness that should be among all Christians and I can't discount the existence of that in the individual believers in the local church.
However, in practice, the local churches as an organization (uh-oh....another church-life buzzword) are not and simply cannot be one with the rest of the Body of Christ given the permeating spoken and printed disdain for non local church believers (those who are not "saints"). Even new college students learn very early on that others "don't see what we see", and in years past I've heard things like that come out of their mouths. Whether the local churches do experience or enter into certain things that other congregations don't is irrelevant at that point because the "us vs. them" chasm has ruined the oneness.