[YP0534]

Originally Posted by aron

Now I think I catch your logic. Thanks for having the patience to restate it. I think I completely missed your point the first time through -- in fact, I had it reversed!

So, you see what I'm getting at here?

Not that every group less than the "whole assembly" is "AN assembly", as is so commonly and widely held, but rather, that there is at least some implicit authority in scripture indicating that a group of less than the "whole assembly" meeting together is "THE assembly" regardless of the particulars.

This doesn't give approval to divisiveness but instead requires us to look beyond the divisions and see the oneness in Christ.

Thus, for instance, the First Baptist Church could be legitimately recognized as "the assembly" meeting as "the First Baptist Church" and we could be done with the harmful effects of the exclusive doctrine of localism.

Without endorsing a name or their practices, we return to the true ground of oneness, namely, that all the believers in a place are "the assembly" in that place and we don't have to condemn others implicitly or explicitly for their denominational affiliations.

It's not that we're the great ones standing on the "local ground" and all others are in error and the flesh for not joining us. It's just that we have grace and light to assemble this way while they have grace and light to assemble that way and, should the Lord sound the trumpet, we would all gather as "the whole assembly".

And I think it's a very good point awareness made concerning numerosity in modern urban settings. It is a practical impossibility that "the whole assembly" should meet in this day and age. Has God set before the saints in a locality the requirement that they accomplish an impossible task?

It's a rigid and legalistic conception of the assembly that compels that interpretation, not the life and glory of God.



But I'd really like additional confirmation of this before I concluded that this notion of mine truly has any merit. Scripture confirms scripture and I do not trust myself to see so clearly as I think I might.

And my first thought, which I admittedly haven't given much time to since I posted this, was that verses containing this word
"comes together."
G4905 συνέρχομαι synerchomai
might be an area of study which may bear fruit.

I've never heard this word before and yet it appears a number of times in the New Testament.

It apparently has three defined meanings.

1. to come together
2. to travel together with
3. to "have relations"

The odd thing is that Paul uses this term in 1 Cor. 7:5

1Cr 7:5 Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

and then again in 1 Cor. 11:18

1Cr 11:18 For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you. And I believe it in part,