As I’ve reminded you in the past, I’ve got several series going, which include the following:

The Moral Nature of God (part one, part two, part three, part four)
Crucial to a Gospel Presentation: Explain Belief (part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six)
Biblical Equality and the Societally Destructive Lie of Egalitarianism (part one, part two)
Answering the “Cultish” Wes Huff Podcast on King James Only (part one, part two)
Profaning the Name of the Lord: How Can or Do People Do It? (part one)

I also have some other things in the works, mostly in the idea stage.  Maybe I’ll get to them soon.  Here are two of those:

A List of Five Great Scriptural Arguments for Premillennialism (Maybe the Best)
The Greatest Causes Undermining the Faith of the Church

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The church is local only.  It is not universal or mystical.  I could end right there.

Childhood Understanding of Church

I don’t remember hearing about the nature of the church as I grew up in, well, church.  It was not a controversy, what the church was.  My dad was a factory worker and my parents started into church a couple of years before I was born.  I was very into church.  If you asked me what a church was, I could have given an easy, basic answer, I believe.  I was a blank slate in my own desert island and completely sincere.

As a child, I knew the church was not a building.  Not.  The little, inside the church are all of the people, I knew was wrong.  No, the people were the church.  But were they?  Nothing was so complicated to say that those people were a visible manifestation of the truth church, universal and invisible.  That never occurred to me.  If you read your Bible, or read it and just hear it taught week after week, you wouldn’t get a universal church.  Somebody had to tell you that.  You wouldn’t get it from just reading your Bible.  It’s not in there.

Not Universal and Invisible

As few people as really understand the concept of a universal and invisible church, it has an amazing number of adverse effects on many.  People barely to never question those effects.  If you believe the church is only local, those effects shouldn’t exist.  This is how that even people, who grew up never grasping a universal, invisible church concept, will accept things that proceeded from that thing they rarely to never consider.

Christ started only one church.  It was not a dual natured church.  It never reads even close to that complicated.  From a plain reading, no one would get something other than local.  Of the twenty-plus times Jesus uses the term “church,” all but one are plainly local.  One could not get a universal church out of that one example.  The twenty plain usages by Jesus should influence the interpretation of the one less plain.  Some usages don’t clearly show the meaning of a word.  It does with the word church in about a hundred of its one hundred eighteen uses.

Ekklesia

“Church” is an English word, which comes from a Greek one — ekklesia.  Ekklesia means “assembly.”  If someone would just consider the actual meaning of the word in the original languages, the few ambiguous usages in the English New Testament would become crystal clear.

An assembly is by nature local and visible.  If you can’t see the assembly, then it isn’t assembled.  An assembly also by nature must occur in one place, that is at least local.

Once someone knows what a church is, he can then get the right interpretation and application of the passages in the New Testament that use the word.  In the utmost way, he will know the meaning of unity in a church.  So many do not understand church unity, because a teacher messed up their understanding of the nature of the church.  Also, an actual church can obey the passages on separation.  For a church to practice true unity, it must also practice true separation.

Effects

Many bad effects come from perverting the nature of the church.  The gospel is important.  I would contend that the corruption or destruction of the gospel arose mainly from misconstruing the nature of the church.

People will find out in the end the highly detrimental effects on their lives and even their eternities, because they reject the true nature of church.  We need a return of true teaching on and practice of the church.