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

[jesusislord343 at juno.com]

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

Dear saints,
For those unfamiliar with it, "Patriarch" magazine has been a benefit to
many families over the years, in pointing them to the purity and
corrections of the word of God in many important areas of the Christian
life.  Following are a few brief repsonses to this article, which
espouses that all churches must have the oversight of
biblically-qualified elders in order to exist and function legitimately.

> 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. 

True.  
ONE family alone is unable to constitute a "whole church" (I Cor. 14:23).
 Yet conceivably as little as two generations (father, sons and
granchildren) of the one family may do so.

> 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. 

False.
Most if not all churches will NOT, at first, have qualified elders, as
the verse alluded to (Tit. 1:6) depicts churches functioning well for a
time apart from elders being appointed.  [Indeed they must function
sufficiently well for an extended period of ttime as to be able to raise
up a *plurality of fully biblically-qualified* elders.]
Furthermore, elders are NOT at all necessary for the church to be able to
function, in guarding doctrine, baptism and the Lord's table, church
discipline, etc.  
And finally, two or three families may well constitute in many cases a
healthy and well functioning church--as is conceded below, in the
following paragraph of the article.

> 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. 

Authentic apostolic authority is not possible today, the baton having
been passed to the elders of the body of Christ (as those recognizable by
scripture) even during the days of the apostles.  Just as not all
churches were planted by apostles even in their time, so also not all
churches since have been (or will be) planted by elders.
Crucially, it is the churches which must produce the elders, rather than
the elders giving legitimacy to the existence of the churches.  We have
precious few biblically qualified elders in our day to oversee churches,
and the solution is not in restricting the movement of saints in the
formation of churches, but rather in seeing churches formed which will be
faithful to the Lord in seeing genuine, Spirit-made elders raised up from
among them.

> 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. 

Again, God-ordained authority in a plurality of elders is NOT an
essential ingredient of the church, which may function quite well apart
from it.  Indeed many churches lacking elders will function best for a
time in seeing the men of the church alike submitting to their Head (I
Cor. 11:3) in serving one another, rather than prematurely recognizing
certain men for oversight (often the "best" qualified) whom the Lord
Himself has not yet made to serve as its overseers.

Grace in Christ,
Glenn S.

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