The Not-So Practical Expression of the Church

[Cal]

The doctrine of the local ground is one of the foundational principles of the Local Church movement. It, along with idea of oneness manifested through one ministry, form the two sides of the vice which firmly holds LC members in the grip of the movement. Take away these two concepts and LCers would feel free, as led by the Lord, to leave the movement anytime. This we know is not the case.

My assertion in this argument is not that the local ground teaching is true or false, but rather that it is not viable. It is one of the boasts and selling points of the teaching that it produces a "practical expression" of Christ’s Body for the world to see. My assertion is that it can only hope to do that by insisting on assumptions which are arbitrary and thus ultimately sure to cause contention and eventually division.

So, let’s assume for the sake of argument that the local ground one-church-one-city teaching is viable. At first glance this is possible. One can argue that one does not agree with the local ground teaching. But one cannot argue that the Bible has no ground for believing the teaching might be valid. To be fair, there is also ground for believing that one church per city is not a binding principle. So, whether or not the principle of one church per city is binding cannot be resolved simply by consulting scripture. The principle must pass the test of viability in practice—it must really be practical. A practical church is not simply one that manifests in space and time the attributes of the universal church, as the Local Church movement believes. It is one also whose existence does not depend on arbitrary requirements, because any such requirements are the guaranteed seeds of destruction.

It’s the situation of more than one group vying for the title as the true church in a city which exposes the weakness and lack of viability of the local ground principle. Imagine a city in which an LC church exists. In the same city is a separate group of people who begin to be stirred by the Lord to seek practical oneness. These seekers also see something of a pattern of city-churches in the New Testament and decide to begin to meet in such a way if they cannot find an already existing city-church. After finding the LC church and visiting with them for a while, however, they determine amongst themselves that the LC group is actually sectarian. The reason they make this determination is not important. The LC church might protest vigorously, but the fact is any group or individual has the right to determine for themselves whether a group claiming to be “the church” is in fact merely a sect. Though the LC group might complain, thump their chests and even eventually sue the fledgling band of seekers for the rights to be called “the church,” in the end they cannot rightfully expect anyone to accept that they are expressing anything but their own opinion, no matter how much Bible knowledge and pedigree they claim to hold. Yet, this is what real LCers in their error do.

So the little group has the perfect right to go about their business and meet “as the church.” Whatever the LC group thinks is meaningless. They don’t hold the franchise rights to being the church in the city. No one does. They could and most likely would come up with a laundry list of reasons why the little group is not the true church, and would likely convince many of their own members of it. But that and a $1.69 will get them a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Their opinion about who is the church in the city is not binding on anyone.

Both groups, then, have the right to make the claim of being the one church in the city; and since neither can prove in a sense that satisfies the principle of practicality (that word again) that they actually are that church, it must follow that the “one church in the city,” if it exists, cannot conform to the model of one group under one human leadership.

But, in fact, it wouldn’t matter if it did because there is another problem: There is absolutely no way to practically determine who the one human leadership of the one church in the city actually is. People can make claims or form opinions, but, again, none of that can be binding on others. LC practice has fallen back on the principle that the “apostle” appoints elders, so only elders approved by Witness Lee or his successors are really elders, so only the churches they lead are really churches. But that amounts to just kicking the can down the road, because there is neither any way of determining, in this day and age, who is truly an apostle. You can, again, form an opinion about it. But your opinion can never be binding on others to the point that you can decide for them that they are at odds with the true city-church because they do not recognize a group of leaders appointed by someone you think is an apostle.

The LC also falls back on the claim that genuine local churches have fellowship with other local churches. But that, as employed by the LC, is a circular argument, and a convenient means to dismiss any group which doesn't fall in line with their movement. It should be true that a genuine church has fellowship with believers and groups outsides its walls. But for anyone to decide he or she can determine exactly which persons and groups that church should have fellowship with is going a step too far.

So the arbitrary requirement necessary to make the LC model of the church operate is the acceptance of the presumption that one particular set of leaders have indeed been appointed by God to lead all the Christians in that city. We’ve seen that just who these leaders are cannot practically be determined with anything approaching certainty, so the LC model requires believers to simply accept as a matter of course that the elders set forth by them are indeed who they claim them to be. Such a requirement, however, is neither logical nor reasonable, and will eventually be a source of contention and division, which we have seen in various practical historical examples, it has been. When believers go to godless courts asking those courts to decide which one of them is the true Church, something has gone very awry. Yet such a result naturally follows from the completely arbitrary assumptions--who the city elders are and who the apostle is--required by the LC movement.

Ironically, the demise of the LC principle of “the practical expression of the church” is its lack of practicality.