Quote:
Originally Posted by Evangelical
There is no example in the OT or NT of God leading someone out of his nation (Israel) or church.
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Therein lies the problem. You equate the church with Israel in every aspect. But when it comes to the idea of being "led out," we are not talking about being led out of the church, but being led out of an assembly or a group of assemblies. You clearly have no problem with that. You ask everyone else to leave their assembly to come to yours. But you wouldn't even consider the same about leaving yours. You "know" that it is the only one.
So, if it had turned out that the little church group in the general vicinity of San Francisco that was led by Jim Jones had been a bona fide "church in a city" as Mr. Jones began his slow slide into being something that no longer resembled a sound gathering of Christ's followers, you would have refused to leave?? You would have been all over that. You would have left in a heartbeat.
You speak of church alternately in the universal sense and then in the sense of an assembly of believers without qualification. It is an exercise in equivocation. You want to declare that believers who are not part of your assembly are not part of the universal church. But you dare not say that because the universal church is not assemblies, but the believers. It is little different from saying "church" is not buildings but people. Same goes for assemblies. The church is the people, not the assemblies. But it is expressed in assemblies. And there is no formula for what that looks like. And all the accounts in Acts and all those letters by Paul, Peter, John and others demonstrate the diversity of expression, even if you read past the things that might have been problems that caused the letter in the first place. The cure was never to be just like "the church in X." It was to recognize that we are called to something higher than better teachers, ritual laws, three-ring circus meetings, and so on. But the cure was never to be just like another assembly. It was to recognize that Christ provided a different way in love. Not in lording it over people. Or in better works in hope of salvation. Or anything else. It was just in the belief and faith in Jesus Christ and the living that bears his image on the earth.
You complain that we spend so much time complaining about the LRC and its teachings and ways. But if you listen, you will recognize that it is not so that you would drop all of that and simply go our way. In the important sense, we all, including you, are going the same direction. We believe 4that salvation is only in Christ. We believe in the basic tenets of the faith. And beyond that, we probably have as many variations in understanding of the other things as there are people here. That includes each separate current member of the LRC that comes and participates or even just lurks. They don't all think the same thing. They dare not admit that they don't. But they don't. There are a myriad of variations in understanding of many things within your group. They dare not speak about it because there is a clear history of silencing any sign of variation.
But it is there.
The problem is that you insist that one church one city is effectively among the fundamentals of the faith. Failure to follow this rule results in your group's effective "washing of the hands" with respect to them. But there is no such imperative of the faith. Our goal isn't necessarily to insist that you drop your belief in this formula. Only that you admit that it may not be as you understand it, and that even if it is, it does not define a Christian as somehow deficient. It is so interesting that your group effectively dreamed up this little rule in the 1900s and then argued it as being there for centuries even though not even mentioned by a single apostle as anything approaching a rule.
There is a chance that one church per city is a rule. But given the pains that the Bible goes to in spelling-out so many clearly important things, it seems almost ludicrous that something that should be raised to the level of a "tenet of the faith" would be couched in such veiled terms that it took 1900 years for someone to realize that it was there and was so blinkin important.
With that as the background, you have to understand why it is that despite throwing out references where it says "the church in [city]" that there has never been anyone consider that this meant that only the boundary of a city should define the contents of an assembly. A word that by its very usage clearly means "Christians" because they are the body of Christ suddenly has to mean "assembly." Why? "Because I think it does."
There is a huge body of Christians in this world. It is far from a majority of the population. Even in America. But it is immensely larger than the meager group that calls itself "THE church" and dismisses all others. We are not cutting your off from fellowship with the larger body of Christ. You are. You insist on it. You insist that the right little toe is all that is needed. There is no need for the rest of the toes, or feet or other "body" parts. The church is so much more. You have settled for a toe and are busy using self-congratulatory phrases over and over to keep yourselves pumped up so you won't think about how poor and naked and blind you are as an amputated little toe.
I don't condemn you to hell for that. I implore you to drop your need for being special and segregating yourselves into the LRC. Join the whole of the church. You can keep your beliefs, but in the understanding that they are nonessentials.
The only true essential is Christ.