I have my tri-fold assumptions in place: (1) the church is made up of people; (2) that the church could only come into being after certain historical requirements were in place; and (3) that the church’s leadership is divine—God is the church’s true leader. The goal of the church is found in glorifying God via glorifying Christ by the use of a specific work which is tied to the work of the Holy Spirit. As such, I made a point of setting up markers that define what a local manifestation of the church looks like while eventually showing that even if all those markers are not in place, the local assembly of believers is still an expression of the universal Church.
Now one of the markers that I didn’t address, which is a combination of Marker-4 (discipline of the assembly) and Marker-6 (purity in moral practices), is the Eight Marker: leadership in community with other leaders. A past guest blogger mentioned the oversight and I wanted to address that.