Expert: Tom Smith - 2/27/2004

Question
Witness Lee and, to lesser degree, Watchman Nee believe that each city (or administrative unit) should only have one church by the name of that city. They believe that the early churches in the Bible, such as church of Philadelphia, church of Laodecia, etc. are models for us to follow. What is your view from study of Bible and church history.

Answer
When looking at an issue or question such as this, we need to look at the context. First, in the New Testament church, we see a small group of believers in each city who met together in homes to have fellowship with other believers. For this reason, it would nto have made sense to have more than one church in a city.

Second, today we have many different organizations called churches. Some are sound, some are heretical, some are not even Christian. Even in NT times, there were divisions, as we see in 1 Cor 11:

1 Cor 11:18-19
For first of all, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you, and in part I believe it. For there must also be factions among you, that those who are approved may be recognized among you.
NKJV

This recognizes that not all who were in the church were Christians. Today, what this would mean is that we would need to bring together those who believe in heresy, those who are into New Age, as well as those who believe in sound doctrine all into one church. Would that church be sound?

It would depend upon who had the most numbers and from we see in the Bible, that would not be the true believers, especially as we head towards the second coming of Christ. Thus, this approach we effectively neutralize the church as an organization. It would also mean that we would risk having the one church in each city being an apostate church.
The only way around that would be to devide upon doctrine, and once you do that, you now have two churches.

Now, one could argyue that the one church would only be those who are true believers. Who is going to make that judgement? Already you have a problem, so you either come up with a restrictive approach of determining who is a true believer, in which case those who are not included will form their own churches, or you are back into an all inclusive single church which waters down the gospel.

Bottom line is that it is not realistic today. The situation is much differnt than the NT times.

The final point that I would like to make is that the idea of looking at a single church organization is wrong in it's focus. The important thing is not whether we have one organization, but whether there is one body of Christ, whichy is the true church, and indeed the body of Christ is made up of all who have received Jesus as Lord and Saviour and thus all who are members of the body of Chjrist are in unity, not just in each city, or country but worldwide - a unity of the Holy Spirit. That is true unity, and that is the unity that bound the early church.

The focus therefore must be on God, and not on the organization.

I hope that this helps. If I can help further, please feel free to post a follow=up question.