The Recovery of the Local Churches

The Spread of the Local Churches

In the Lord’s recovery of the experience of the church life, there is a progression. In the last century, the Lord recovered the doctrine of the church through the Brethren. Then in the beginning of this century, the Lord recovered something more, that is, the spiritual principles, the spirituality, of the church. But this was still not so practical. Then after the year 1930, the Lord began to reveal the practicality of the church—not just the doctrine, not just the spirituality, but the practicality. The doctrine is certainly right and necessary. The spirituality is definitely right and necessary. The spirituality is definitely required and is even an improvement upon the doctrine. But in what way can we practice the church life? Must we wait until the New Jerusalem? No. The church life must be practiced today, and there is no other way but the local churches. Without the local churches, we cannot have the practical church life. There must be the churches.

(Witness Lee, Christ as Life, 121)

The second main item of the Lord’s recovery is the recovery of the local church life (Acts 9:31; 14:23). Brother Nee stressed this very much. In one of his publications Brother Nee said that he had a dream in which he saw that in every city of China there was a local church. This indicates how much Brother Nee was for the local church. Although he saw the local churches in his dream, under the Lord’s sovereignty he was not allowed to see the fulfillment of that dream. I believe that if he were alive today, he would be happy because he would see that, not including the churches in mainland China, there are more than twelve hundred local churches on the earth.

(Witness Lee, Church Life, 14)

Today the Lord’s desire is to recover the proper church life. From the time of Martin Luther, the Lord began His recovery work in a definite way. Within the Lord’s recovery there have been four main categories of things: 1) the teachings or doctrines of fundamentalism; 2) the gifts of Pentecostalism; 3) the preaching and spreading of the gospel of evangelicalism; and 4) the inner life. The Lord’s recovery has passed through these stages to reach the present-day recovery of the local churches. All the previous recovery work is for this present-day recovery, the building up of the local churches for the building up of the Body of Christ. We need to take Christ as our inner life for the building up of the church.

(Witness Lee, Christ as Life, 57)

Watchman Nee also commented on Congregationalism:

Congregationalism is actually very close to the Bible, but it goes a little beyond the Bible. The Congregationalist brothers studied the Bible but failed to discover the thought of locality. Jerusalem is a city, not a congregation; Antioch is a city, not a congregation; Ephesus is a port city, not a congregation; Colossae is a city on a hill, not a congregation. They thought that Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, and Colossae were congregations, and they concluded that congregations were independent of each other. Church history tells us that not long after its beginning, the church deteriorated until the time of Luther. Afterward there was a recovery, an improvement, until the stage of the independent churches. From the time of the independent churches, the church went to another extreme of taking a congregation as the unit. This included Congregationalists and Baptists and later even the Open Brethren who also went to the extreme of considering a congregation as the unit.

Now I wish to discuss the reason that congregationalism is wrong. It is the closest to the Bible; yet it is still wrong. The Lord desires that we love one another, receive one another, and avoid envy, strife, and divisions in the same local church. The unity of congregationalism takes the congregation as its unit. This poses a problem in that it is difficult to pin down such a thing as a congregation. There may be one congregation at 145 Nanyang Road and another at 143 Nanyang Road. If I love the brothers at 145 Nanyang Road, I will meet with them. When I disagree with them, I will set up another congregation at 143 Nanyang Road. If we have seen that unity is a matter of locality, we could only go and set up a church in another city, not another one in Shanghai. This is not easy, but still we must love one another. Oh, how great is the Lord’s wisdom in putting us in localities and giving us the locality as the boundary! Only here can we really find the cross to bear and the lessons to learn.

(Watchman Nee, Collected Works, Set 3, Vol. 56, 371-372)

Main

The Reformation

The Moravian Brethren

The Plymouth Brethren

A New Beginning

Watchman Nee’s Calling

Watchman Nee’s Revelation

Watchman Nee’s Care for the Local Churches

The Local Church in Foochow, China

Witness Lee’s Revelation

The Spread of the Local Churches

Bibliography

Links