The Recovery of the Local Churches
The Recovery of the Local Churches |
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The BrethrenWitness Lee, in his preface to Watchman Nee’s classic text, “The Orthodoxy of the Church,” relates the history of the recovery of the scriptural ground of locality, the principle and practice of the local church. He explains that this truth was recovered not by the Brethren, but by Watchman Nee in 1937. Some think that the ground of locality is something of the Brethren teaching and that we have adopted this kind of teaching from the Brethren. In fact, the Brethren have never seen the ground of locality and have never used the term the ground of unity. In chapter seven of this book, Brother Nee says: The brothers did not see the “local” ground and boundary of the church…. [They] have not noticed the oneness of each and every local church in each and every locality as recorded in the Bible. And again: The Brethren did not pay enough attention to the fact that the church has the locality as her boundary….The “Exclusive Brethren” exceed the boundary of locality, while the “Open Brethren” are smaller than the boundary of locality. They forget that in the Bible there is one and only one church in every locality. Still further he says: The difficulty of the Brethren..was that they were not clear enough regarding the teaching in the Bible on locality…. Because they have not realized the importance of the teachings in the Bible concerning the locality, divisions have resulted. There is more which Brother Nee says in this regard which I do not quote here. The ground of locality was not discovered by us until 1937, and that through Brother Nee. Even by 1934, Brother Nee had only discovered the boundary of a local church, which is the boundary of the locality within which a local church is situated. Due to the confusion among the Brethren assemblies (that is, in one city there are several Brethren assemblies) which he saw in 1933, he studied the New Testament once again in order to ascertain the boundary of a local church (assembly). Eventually, he discovered that the New Testament reveals clearly that the boundary of a local church is the boundary of the locality (city) in which the local church stands. Immediately after his new discovery, Brother Nee gave a series of messages on this matter in January of 1934 in Shanghai, and these were published in the same year as the book “The Assembly Life.” Thus, in his messages and publications subsequent to that time, he began to use the term the “boundary of locality", not yet the term the “ground of locality." Then, based upon the boundary of locality, Brother Nee came to see the ground of locality. Since the boundary of a local church is the boundary of the locality in which it stands, so the ground of the church must be the ground of the locality on which a local church is built. This is the unique ground which keeps the genuine unity of the church. Any ground other than this is divisive. After he saw this, Brother Nee called a workers’ conference in January of 1937 in Shanghai to pass on this clear vision of the proper church ground to his fellow workers. The same series of messages was given again to the co-workers in the fall of the same year at Hankow and was published in 1938 as the book “The Normal Christian Church Life.” Thus, it was in 1937 that the ground of locality was revealed to us and the term the “ground of locality” began to be used among us. (Watchman Nee, Collected Works, Set 3, Vol. 47, 3-5) | ||||