church polity and association

Nobody REALLY calls it polity anymore, except on message boards or in print when they're trying to sound all professional. Even then, everyone kinda goes cross-eyed and thinks "why doesn't he/she just say policy?"

As far as your question, it's kinda like deciding what's for breakfast. It's just common sense to not take the word of one or two, and instead "come, let us reason together" because "in the multitude of counsellors there is safety".
Both are scripture, a quick search on crosswalk.com will find them for you.

 

The council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 is probably the first meeting between leaders of various leaders of local christian churches (more than just apostles in attendance) and they made a decision that impacted all local churches.

 

I disagree. Polity is a readily recognizable word and very appropriate to the topic of this thread.

 

I would say there is no biblical support for the creation and funding of para-church organizations like assocations or conventions. But I believe there is nothing wrong with that. I don't believe polity was an issue in the New Testament church because survival, growth and doctrine were the primary issues of their time. They were not big enough to worry about polity issues.

There is also no biblical support for using unfermented grape juice in the Lord's Supper and nothing wrong with that either. There are many situations the bible does not cover.

 

Although related, polity and policy are completely different words. Polity addresses political structure. Dictionary.com has it this way:

As to this method - yes, there can be many problems.

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• people who don't understand issues are empowered to decide those very same issues - many times based on personal opinion or passion</font>
• people allowed to "gang up" on church leaders during business meetings</font>
• people who refuse to have anything to do with church activities most of the time, have the most to say during business meetings</font>
• Many times, simply having a majority will stand in place of proper prayer and seeking God's will prior to church decisions</font>

There are certainly other drawbacks, but there are positives, too. In this form of polity, every member is accorded the right to be heard - their opinion on the issue matters.

 

To clarify, I mean interchurch polity and not intrachurch polity which is discussed.

 

To clarify, I mean interchurch polity and not intrachurch polity which is discussed. </font>[/QUOTE]Do you think this is any indication on how far off track we have gone today? </font>[/QUOTE]Not at all. I feel it is an indication that many of the issues faced by the NT church were not the same issues we face today.

 

As I mentioned earlier, size and interchurch polity. We should remember that in some megachurches today, there are more Christians than all the Christians in the world in Paul's lifetime. Managing and co-ordinating organizations and groups of local churches at modern scales or even the scales of 400AD were not issues for the NT church. Dealing with persecution, Jew-Gentile relationships, Christian-non-Christian relationships, growth in the churches and doctrine (since they were not systematically formalated as yet) were the major issues facing the early church.

 

Ok. I believe bigger is not always better. But sometimes it is.

There is nothing in the bible that mandates a maximum size for a local church. The church in Rome who Paul wrote to in Romans was probably the "megachurch" of the early church era.

 

I agree. While some make the mistake of focusing on the latest "gimmick", others make the mistake of focusing on criticizing the latest gimmick.