Quote:
Originally Posted by Hope
Finally for now. I have found this teaching to be very practical and very easy. It is almost like falling off a log. You just meet in the Lord's name only. Receive all whom God has received. That is all believers in the Savior Redeemer Son of God Jesus Christ. If some of the believers want to eat meat and some do not, then let Christ be their Lord. If some are weak then bear them up and assist them in whatever way you can. Do not quit on folks just because they go through a hard time.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Norm
There is one church in the city. There are many fellowships within that one church breaking bread within the city, they gather according to their revelation from Christ. The particular fellowship we are participating in is a small fraction of that one church. We meet as we do because we feel we have received a particular commission from the Lord which we are to carry out in this city. We receive whoever the Lord has received into our fellowship, with no other requirement other than regeneration, and the members are free to participate in whatever fellowship they believe brings spiritual profit to them.
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I wanted to address these two together.
To
Hope, this is pretty much what I believe and practice. If we recognize the oneness of the Body and receive all believers and don't force our agenda on anyone and pray that the Lord causes us to love God and love people to work out the salvation of the lost and the building up of believers then things work out pretty well in my experience. When you do this you find the church everywhere, you see and experience the universal church (sorry, YP) in a local and practical way.
When you have such a mindset, you still see some of the shortcomings of "Christianity" but they don't blind you to the wonderful things God is doing among his people because you don't have an organizational agenda to impose on everyone (i.e. one organized church per city) and to judge them by.
This is in keeping with the way the Lord describes "the kingdom of heaven" in his parables. Alongside his heavenly, perfect descriptions he gave earthy, imperfect descriptions. And it's interesting that he didn't say, "Now this is bad and this is good." He just described. We can appreciate the heavenly aspects of his Church while recognizing the shortcomings.
To
Norm, this is kind of what Gubei said, that there is one church per city expressed in many assemblies. But I'm not sure there is much difference between saying this and saying "There is one universal Church on earth and many assemblies," except that it gets confusing when you ask, "Okay, is our group a genuine
church?" However, I think I understand that this is a natural stepping stone for someone who has been under LC influence.