From a strictly organizational standpoint, that might be so. But what is the opposite side of that coin? It's to have congregations in which the leaders are untrained, untested, and unqualified. Often, the kind of church that's described is a "family church," which is to say a small congregation with no outside supervision in which a few members, usually related by blood or marriage, are allowed to run everything as though they own it. Often, they did found the congregation, so that's not surprising.
To me, that's worse than jumping from the frying pan into the fire. It's an argument for substituting a glorified Bible study group for the historic church.
I suppose what I'm trying to convey is that it really doesn't matter what means are employed, the end results should be satisfactory: disciples should arise.
This is what makes the organic church able to bear fruit, grow disciples:
1 No pressure from leadership: truth is best sought after with no biased authority figures breathing down your neck.
2 It is God who preaches/teaches, believers are given stewardship of revelations.
3 it is God who makes course corrections: every prophecy will be tested. Is God's word not like fire, a hammer that shatters rocks?
Saying speakers are untrained, unqualified, untested is ignoring the examples of the apostles, who surprised the Pharisees with their knowledge, surprising because it came from uneducated tradesmen. Ironically, they recognized that associating with Jesus had brought about the change, ironical because Jesus was a carpenter, some one looked down upon in his own village!
I'm saying that these are promises, that the last days would be as Jeremiah prophesied, young men would have visions, ordinary folk would prophesy. The Holy Spirit would lead believers into all truth. If you deny this, you are reducing all that verbiage to nonsensical.
I know that if we all claim to be led by the Spirit, what does one do with the fact of the different denominations that this inspiration gave birth to?
The problem isn't too many teachers, quite the opposite. The problem was that all these denominations were person centred.
What the organic church proposed was the free and open discussion of doctrine until a coherent body of works, interpretation of the entire text, was arrived at in the small pool of believers.
Views that informed them of what God desired, the different roles of believers, the qualifiers, the yardstick by which the selection took place, not as the world ranked, but how many who were first would be last.
Initially organic churches were DIS organised chaos. Meetings would end in disarray and darkness.
The reasons were:
No one knew how to decide what the right view was.
No one knew how to study Scripture.
These are big topics, but the end result is that they finally found out how to solve these problems.
How different from mainstream churches, which have no procedure for course correction.
1 The pastor's job is to toe the party line, teach only the denominational view.
2 The congregation had to listen quietly to the teaching, without questioning.
3 Incoherent views were categorised as mystery, paradox.
The worst part is the teachings, some hard, radical, non intuitive, are rationalised away, skipped over quickly, or plain avoided.
No wonder there are no disciples grown, produced. At least the Israelites drank from the Rock and disobeyed. In most churches, decision forks aren't even presented. No Rock, no drinking...The question of becoming disciples doesn't even arise.
From a strictly organizational standpoint, that might be so. But what is the opposite side of that coin? It's to have congregations in which the leaders are untrained, untested, and unqualified. Often, the kind of church that's described is a "family church," which is to say a small congregation with no outside supervision in which a few members, usually related by blood or marriage, are allowed to run everything as though they own it. Often, they did found the congregation, so that's not surprising.
To me, that's worse than jumping from the frying pan into the fire. It's an argument for substituting a glorified Bible study group for the historic church.