{"id":41,"date":"2007-11-24T13:34:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-24T20:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/?p=41"},"modified":"2007-11-24T21:07:58","modified_gmt":"2007-11-25T04:07:58","slug":"church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/?p=41","title":{"rendered":"Church"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the Bible, the word we have as &#8220;church&#8221; is an assembly or group. Who is gathered together, and why? By inference, the church assembly is a gathering of Christians, beleivers in the person, work, and teachings of Jesus Christ. By instruction, they are gathered to encourage, admonish, and exhort [<em>ed.<\/em>] one another.<\/p>\n<p>Now this could hardly be a perfect definition, but I deliberately avoid including therein some church-related things on which I might opine; sacraments, leadership, doctrine, etc. The Lord&#8217;s Supper and Baptism and several other issues are important, and intelligible, but not, I think, essential to church as described in the New Testament. I think that I understand what the Bible teaches about these matters, but if I come to joining a church, the question will not be, &#8220;Do they have the right Lord&#8217;s Supper?&#8221; or &#8220;Do they have correct baptism?&#8221; The question will be instead, &#8220;Are these believers gathering to encourage, admonish, and teach one another?&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the Bible, the word we have as &#8220;church&#8221; is an assembly or group. Who is gathered together, and why? By inference, the church assembly is a gathering of Christians, beleivers in the person, work, and teachings of Jesus Christ. By instruction, they are gathered to encourage, admonish, and exhort [ed.] one another. Now this could hardly be a perfect <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/?p=41\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cleverdialectic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}