I am leaving for a trip, but wanted to leave you all with some good reading material.
Jeff Straub, professor of history at Central Baptist Theological Seminary here in Minneapolis has a couple posts stressing the importance of “churches working together”. Rather than seeing each church as an island completely independent and in need of nothing (which many local church only advocates do), his picture is closer to the biblical picture of churches working together.
I encourage you to check out his two posts. For those wondering, “local church” onlyism is the idea that there is little if any sense of the “universal church” idea in Scripture. Instead everything said of the church in Scripture is true of one local church ideally. In my opinion, this leads to the conclusion that cooperation between churches and unity and all that is just optional.
Here are the links to Dr. Straub’s posts. He makes the case that churches working together produce longer lasting fruit than churches doing it solo.
- Restoring the Centrality of the Local Church?
- Overstating My Case? A Second Reflection on 1 Tim. 3:15
The comments are worth the read too. Let me know here what you think, too.