Exerpt from my paper

Here's an exerpt from what I've been working on right now.

The foundations of Darby’s Dispensational system lie within his Plymouth Brethren views on the state of the Church. Like all Plymouth Brethren after him, Darby rejected the formal office of clergy and wrote that Christians should and do have the ability and commission to preach and do not require any earthly ordination. “The leadership was then still as the exercise of a gift (Rom. 12.8) without having become a regular charge.”
Perhaps one of the more striking and more important doctrines of Darby concerned the church and individual Christian’s role as being the temple or house of God. The church takes on two forms, one being the visible administrative church, and then the church as a body on the earth. Darby wrote that “when there is an attempt at displaying the position and unity, there will always be mess and failure.” Essentially Darby felt that the church is failing with its position of being the house of God because it tries to display that God it present in the Church; “God will not take such a place with us.” The Church is not something that can by synthesized by membership or ordination. Rather, membership or ordination comes through the spirit and the church is something that the believer is brought into, not something that the believers create as a result of getting together. The nuance is significant because it gives justification for the Brethren ecclesial structure and it rejects a formal high church ecclesial structure. The formal church may function without any believers, but the body of Christ functions through the believers who are unified under the spirit. The body cannot be formally governed.

I did a copy past thing from my paper, unfortunately none of the footnotes carried over. If you want them you better come to my presentation.

A while ago I had a conversation with my old pastor saying that I've been wanting to be involved in the teaching in some way. I remember him telling me that it's not so simple as that and giving me some long winded speech why I couldn't do anything. I think in reality there was no good reason since we were a community church with plymouth brethren roots. If he knew more about the Brethren then what he claimed to be defending I guess he wouldn't have had much of a leg to stand on. Unfortunately I'm only doing this paper just now to find out that he should have said yes if he really wanted to be true to the Brethren roots that our church had.

~Christopher J.