Does the New Testament provide a pattern?
If you suggested changing any other doctrine — salvation by faith in Christ, the deity of the Lord Jesus, or the inspiration of Scripture, for example — it would invite strong reaction from Bible-believing churches. But somehow many feel we are free to redesign the church any way it suits us. Yet we have no more right to make a new way of meeting than a new way of salvation. “At the very outset of the New Testament it is striking that the Lord Jesus and the apostles labored to establish only one situation — the local church.3 Paul stated, ‘As a wise master builder, I have laid the foundation, and another builds thereon’ (1 Cor. 3:10). The local church lies at the heart of God’s program today. Indifference to the doctrine of the church is certainly indifference to the plan of God.”4 Francis Schaeffer writes, “The church did not sit there as a group of believers with no form. The New Testament form is commanded by God.
