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Additional Local Church Quotes by Witness Lee on Watchman Nee’s Salvation and Calling
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.
I relate some of the history just to make it clear that the ground of locality is a new discovery, another item of the Lord’s recovery in the last days through Brother Nee, not something of the recovery through the Brethren.
We do not care merely for doctrine. We care for the Lord’s recovery and the Lord’s way. May the Lord’s grace bring us up to date in His recovery. May we see the proper ground of the church, which is the ground of locality, the unique ground of genuine unity, that we may have the proper way for the practice of the church life. May we see the vision unveiled in the last seven epistles of the Lord to His church and hear what the Spirit speaks to the churches, that we may not join the Catholic Thyatira, nor stay in the Protestant Sardis, neither fall into the Brethren Laodicea, but absolutely remain in the brotherly-love Philadelphia, which is the church that has returned to the orthodoxy of the apostolic church. What we urgently need today is to come back to the orthodoxy of the beginning and stand firmly on the ground of locality. The time is short! The Lord is coming! May we prepare ourselves to meet Him in and through the proper church life! Amen!
Witness Lee
Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
(Watchman Nee, Collected Works, Set 3, Vol. 47, 6)
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