[Cal]

Hope,

Excellent questions! Now this thread is getting somewhere.

Watchman Nee surely meant well with his locality model. The flaw in it is the insistence on a borders of a city being the borders of a church. It is easy to see that this leaves all kinds of ragged edges, starting with that New Testament doesn't really make this clear, right up to the size, practical overlapping and other nuances of modern cities.

Another problem with it is that it presupposes a model that can be recognized and--and this is key--enforced to the point that those that don't adhere to can be deemed divisive, i.e. we can know who the "good guys" and the "bad guys" are. Seems God doesn't really want us to know this.

It seems to me that if the Lord wanted such a clear model he would have given us one. But referring again to the well-worn analogy of the Trinity, we see the pattern, but we cannot agree about the specifics. The problem is with locality, not agreeing on the specifics equals failure. And there will never, ever, be agreement on the specifics.

Divisions over the flesh are bad. Divisions over the Spirit are not. The LC model seeks to define--outwardly with one simple rule--which these are. Can't be done.