Cheryl Schatz

Again 1 Cor 14 and 1 Tim are church gatherings. What you and others here are classifying as church are not what Paul is discussing. If you can disprove this please do? The fact is, both texts are in the context of believers gathering together in a ‘formal’ way, what is appropriate and what is not!

Mark, I think that the questions you have received on where instruction would be for “informal” meetings is a key question that has been asked of you. I haven’t yet read your latest answer so pardon me if I am behind a little. The fact is that any gathering of Christians to study the Word of God, give of their gifts to edify the body and to pray for one another is “church”. I don’t recall Paul or anyone else saying that the gatherings of the believers don’t qualify as Christians assemblies (or church) unless they have missing elements added.

Also it is up to all of you to show how Paul is NOT addressing a formal gathering in these 2 texts.

Since two or three Christians are guaranteed the Lord’s presence and since two or three may operate in edification, worship with prayer and bible reading and each person’s service in edification, the scriptures don’t limit “church” to large gatherings and neither should we. Place, amount of people, gender, social standing were not limitations of what qualifies as the gathering of the “church”.

I believe the onus is up to all of you to show how the Levital Priesthood should be understood as literarily growing into a kingdom of Priests where men from other tribes and any women would have been aloud to perform the sacrificial system of Israel.

If I believed that, then the onus would be on me. While I have stated that the whole nation would be a kingdom of priests, I never once said that I believed that they would all be killing lambs. I just go with what the scripture says in that they would all be “ministers of God”. I didn’t say that these ministers all had to be killing the lambs and offering a bloody sacrifice. The old priesthood is not the highest order of priests. That part of the priesthood was always meant to be abolished. Yet the priesthood continues in Christ without animal sacrifice and as priests we are all equal and they too, when they come into faith will be in the fulfillment of what God gave to them when they were not yet faithful.