Quote:
Originally Posted by OBW
And at that, you have included the LRC as merely a sect because they do not carry any special status that excludes them from any of what you have stated. Your claim of special status is not founded on anything any more substantial than the RCC's claim that their pope links back to Peter and therefore has the keys of the kingdom.
And you distill the differences down to how they baptize. But if baptism is everything, then the Baptists were around practicing full immersion before the LRC came along practicing the same. I will use your own rhetoric on you to point out that despite the fact that you claim no set doctrines or practices ("No doctrines or forms that you have to learn to come and meet with us. Just . . . .") yet you do practice in certain ways. You would only immerse. Yet since the Baptists were around before you, why did you start a different group that opposes them. (Yes, you oppose them because you argue against their very legitimacy, not just think differently.)
You are not open to all believers. you are only truly open to those who will come to you. Who will agree to set aside other teachers and only learn from Lee (and a little of Nee). And who, to the extent that they can't quite do it all, will at least keep their disagreements about any of it quiet.
Otherwise it is the door.
There is a big difference between disagreement on issues and ideas and disagreement on who is actually in the church. And if you dare to say that we are all in the church, then when any of us get together to meet, we are the church no matter how much you don't like something about our positions on certain issues and ideas.
If there is a problem in the unity of the church, it is much greater when observed from the perspective of the LRC v everyone else. The 50,000 ft. view of Christianity as a whole looks more like a continent with cities and states while the LRC appears as an island with gunboats surrounding it. Why is that? Because you insist that it is so. You are so closed to everyone else (despite rhetoric about unity) that you put up a wall of partition. You declare that everything on your side of the wall is church and everything on the other side is sect.
And you think that if you just talk to the people individually you can persuade them. But what if the organizations do not come to you, but the mass of people who are in them and they collectively do not agree with you. What do you do then? It would no longer be about denominations. Your boogeyman would have been destroyed. I can assure you that I do not speak from the perspective of one denomination and not the others. We agree that when someone is saved they should become connected with the church. And not just my church. We would welcome them. But it is more important that they know Christ and connect with Christians than that they join my group.
How's that for your divisiveness claim??
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The fact that a new convert has to "choose a group", such as "your group" or "another group" after becoming a believer demonstrates the issue here. That is, being a born again believer and member of the universal body of Christ is not enough to grant a person connectivity with the
whole body of Christ. The reason for that is denominations which create cuts or divisions in the body which simply did not exist in the new testament church.
You are pretending that denominations in a city are merely different groups of believers that see differently on a few things, which I know not to be the case at all.
If one wishes to be "connected with the church" the next question is "which church"?
In the bible this was not the situation of having to choose a church. They simply joined "the church" in the city.
In the denominational world, a person who wants to meet simply on the basis of them being a born again believer and living in a particular locality and being member of the universal body, does not have anywhere to go unless they choose the particular "type" of group that they want to join.