'Ground of the Church'

[Bradley]

Originally Posted by Freedom

This is exactly the kind of question that serves to show how ridiculous the ground of locality teaching really is. I remember hearing that there are three "church in Toronto" groups each asserting themselves to be the church in Toronto. According to the LC teaching, it creates a big problem because the teaching doesn't account for the possibility of two or more groups simultaneously calling themselves the same name.

There are three separate local churches in Shanghai too, where I lived for three years - all of them 'faithful to the ministry', all of them inviting coworkers from overseas to hold conferences, all of them up to date with the morning revival and 7 feasts. All three of them are accepted by the global LSM as legit. But they won't meet with each other, they hardly even know each other. One group is the locals, one group is for foreigners, one group was of 'turtles' i.e. locals who had lived overseas for years (of course, through the gospel, there were locals, foreigners and turtles in every group). I went to meetings at all three: the local group was the most burning and the foreign group was the most dead but thats where the English-speaking districts were so I went out of necessity.

One brother (from the local group) told me he discovered that his next door neighbour was in the LC (a Taiwanese district in the foreign group) and they both hosted table meetings in their homes every sunday morning. He had invited him to join table meetings together for blending and the other brother had refused, as if that would be a terrible sin and he didn't have the authority to do that (though he wouldn't ask anyone who did). They basically had a 'wave at each other and say good morning' -type relationship after that and thats all.

When the local brothers expressed their concern about it to me, I contacted a well-known coworker called Paul Hon. He had already known about it for decades and basically said: "its no big deal, there's nothing you can do, if we can't fix it you can't either so forget about it and ignore it." I had the attitude that a little person can make a small difference, at least to those around him, but his attitude was pretty much "meh who cares, don't even try".

This bothered me no end because I had been taught that the proper ground is the master key to all blessing, and without it, you shouldn't even partake of the bread and wine. Here was a big time coworker telling me to forget about it and carry on like it means nothing, partake anyway. But according to the teachings, in this situation there's no blessing and the work is in vain. He didn't refute that, he just said there's nothing I can do. It was a depressing cloud hanging above my church life while I lived there.