Witness Lee on the local church: The Factors of Division

	Main
	One Church for One City
	Factors of Division
	Lord’s Workers
	Our Work
	Not Keeping the Results
	Being Liberal
	Links

Introduction

The New Testament describes a church that is universally one, in which all of the believers in every local church across the earth live in a mutual fellowship unhindered by distinctions in race, culture, language, social class, age, or gender. And yet what we see today is a church that is universally divided over these very things – a far cry from the biblical ideal. What went wrong? How did all of this division arise? What were the factors that, over the course of the last two thousand years, contributed to the downfall of the oneness of the Body of Christ and the loss of the practice of local churches? Witness Lee, a prolific Christian writer and teacher from mainland China, learned from his spiritual forerunners (most notably Watchman Nee) and from his own experience that the oneness which God’s people lost so long ago must be recovered. He therefore made it a priority of his ministry to study and teach concerning the practical oneness of the church expressed in local churches. The proper, biblical practice of the church life is a hallmark of Witness Lee’s teachings, and central to it is the New Testament concept of “the local church” (Acts 13:1). In this Website we will examine two chapters from Witness Lee's book, The Life and Way for the Practice of the Church Life, in which he presents not only the biblical definition of a local church but also two main factors for the historical and present division in the church: first, the tendency of the Lord's servants to keep the results of their work for themselves and second, the specialties among the believers.