Quote:
Originally Posted by Igzy
...If the Bible wanted us to believe that as bad as you do it would have told us to.
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Hi Igzy, am well thank you, hope you are too - grace to you and peace in the Lord Jesus.
This topic is related to the discussion had in the other thread where we talked about descriptive versus prescriptive commands in the Bible.
I agree there is no clear prescriptive command in the Bible that a church must be organized around a city. There is no black and white text that says this is how the church must be done.
In the book of Acts we see a lot of things that were not clearly written down as an instruction or a command. There was no Old Testament command that says "Christians don't have to be circumcised". The early Christians followed Christ. They followed Christ out of the Jewish synagogues and into the church. Christ forming the church was not clearly foretold by the OT prophets. The first time church was mentioned was Matt. 16:18. Had a person followed the Scripture at that time, they might have stayed in the Jewish synagogues. Just like the early Christians followed Christ out of Judaism, we try to follow Christ out of religious Christianity. We don't do this because there is a black and white command in the Bible to do so (well there is, if we consider Babylon), but because of the leading of the Lord. The important thing is that we follow the Lord. We believe that if the Lord leads one to the denominations then do that, if the Lord leads one out, then do that, if the Lord leads one to stay at home and not go to church, then do that too. This does not mean, however, that the denominations are approved by God, anymore than Jesus meeting with the Pharisees meant they were approved by God.
The idea of one city per church is meant to be about freedom from the religious institutions. If we leave "Babylon", believers in each city is what remains. That is, it is more about coming out of Babylon, than entering any particular thing called the "One City Per Church" church. We are not about building up another denomination in the name of a doctrine of one city per church. I know that is contrary to what many claim and experience, but this no way invalidates the ideals or God's plan.