Focus Press has put out a few videos this year calling into question if large church conferences are at odds with the local church. The idea that they were discussing is that a conference with 7000 people is often faithfully attended with much enthusiasm while the local congregation’s assembly is dwindling in many cases. Although Focus Press is a group of individuals who are all part of institutional congregations, they could still see that something wasn’t right about this huge conference but suffering local congregations. They peaked my interest when they mentioned the local church several times and realized the problem though they never reach a definite conclusion. I have since seen several responses by individuals trying their best to show that the two, (the huge conference and the local church), complement one another and that the large conference or lectureship build up the local church – though the original video called that into question. I can’t pass up the opportunity to comment on this as subjects such as these have been my focus for the past two years.

To keep things simple, Christians can come together from anywhere and study, work, or worship at anytime, but we do not see the congregations joining their leadership together in any formal way for any event in scripture. We do not see boards and committees, chairmen or board members over any Christian effort in any of our inspired instructions. The same stands all the more for the local church who might want to hold a gospel meeting, inviting other saints or visitors; the inspired example is the elders and deacons leading the efforts of the church, we again do not find committees or boards in addition doing the work that the elders should directly be handling. A guest speaker or several guest speakers are in line with our examples of the evangelist traveling from one congregation to another in scripture. Saints traveling to visit, worship with, and encourage one another are examples from inspired letters. And Christians coming together to evangelize and help one another in need is what we find the early church doing. Christians meeting together are not wrong, even many Christians from great distances with a speaker from a whole different congregation is not wrong. But sadly the setup some have created and made common of uninspired leadership with boards, committees, combined leadership and funds are not according to God’s pattern all sufficient for us. In such cases the large conference or lectureship is at odds with the local church which God designed and gave authorized leadership for.

Christians can come together from all over for a large number of reasons, but to form such an assembly into something beyond what we have example of puts that Christian effort at odds with the local church, with scripture, and with God. This is exactly how events such as Polishing The Pulpit or Challenge Youth Conference have been organized, with boards, combined leadership, and funds. As much as I appreciate some of the good things taught at those assemblies, I have to realize the structure is wrong. As with all of these organizations, they look beautiful and so good on the surface, but once you learn of the compromises taking place for speakers and hidden errors being tolerated for the sake of the event then you realize with time why God gave us the design for the local church that He did. The local church is the only organized institution that God designed to teach the gospel, we cannot add our own design and structure to make it better . Let’s keep the pattern.

Charlton Rhinehart