I'm quoting TLG here from a portion of his Brotherly Love thread post because it should be addressed here.
Quote:
I think this is more related to the other thread, the one concerning the ground of oneness. There appears to be no practical solution to the matter of our division. Therefore, it appears that all believers simply accept our divisions as inevitable products of humanity. This, to me, appears as a grand exercise in fatalism. If one group branches off from another it is received as somewhat problematic, but then again, "What the heck, they're Christians just like us, so we'll just accept the division as inevitable and continue as if God approves." Well, when one group stands on a particular tenet of oneness and claims that it is proper to meet in this way, they are labeled "sectarian." Both Nee and Lee made a standing in such a way. Of course, in so doing they fell to the same type of fatalism, but in a way that was clearly unpopular.
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TLG,
The problem with your claim is that you have a definition of division which is based on a definition of oneness which is not even defined in the Bible.
Your thinking is circular. You have an ideal--one church per city--and then you judge everything by that ideal. What you fail to realize is you have a very weak premise. (1) The Bible never commands one church per city, so you are never going to convince anything but a very small minority of people it is a requirement, and (2) even if you could convince a large number of people you still couldn't answer even the most basic questions about the organization of the thing, like, for example, how do we determine who the elders over the whole city are.
So the idea is dead before it even gets out of the gate. This isn't fatalism, it's realism. If you want your ideal to become real then get practical. Until then you don't have much to offer people but guilt.