House Church Talk - We've been noticed :-(

[forwarded]

>From a feature article entitled "What Constitutes a Biblical Church?" at 
patriarch.com.

So what about the three families meeting in a living room on Sunday 
morning? While a family would be far better off in that living room than 
in a church that has become a synagogue of Satan, that does not make the 
home meeting a biblical church. This group lacks a plurality of qualified 
elders to guard doctrine, oversee the sacraments, and exercise church 
discipline -- and that is a very serious lack indeed. Also, due to its 
small size, it lacks the rich diversity of spiritual gifts that a church 
needs to be healthy. Again, far better to be in such an informal group 
than under wicked elders, but we must not pretend that fathers are church 
officers or that two or three families gathered constitutes the church of 
Christ. 

We need to be careful here. The family is indeed a building block of the 
church, fathers do serve a priestly function in their families, and two 
or three families gathered can truly enjoy the ministry of the Holy 
Spirit and the reality of true fellowship in Christ. Further, a true 
church can in fact exist before it has elders in place as is evidenced by 
Acts 14:23, where Paul and Barnabas returned to churches they had 
previously organized, and it reports: "So when they had appointed elders 
in every church..." (cf. Tit. 1:5). There were churches before there were 
elders. On the other hand, these churches were very much under apostolic 
authority from their inception, having been planted by an apostle! So 
they never existed apart from the oversight of God-ordained authority. 

We conclude then that the home meeting may indeed be the seed of a new 
church, but it does not yet constitute a biblical church because 
God-ordained authority is an essential ingredient of the church, and 
since the time of the apostles this means the oversight of a plurality of 
qualified elders. (In an ideal world such small groups would be daughter 
churches under the oversight of elders from an established congregation, 
the new group being, in effect, a part of the original church until the 
new work meets the standards of an apostolic church on its own