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‘The local church is the hope of the world’ – so Bill Hybels, on any number of occasions. Hybels represents (to borrow a phrase from Rob Warner) the ‘entrepreneurial’ wing of the Evangelical movement, and others from a similar perspective could be found claiming the same thing – Rick Warren, perhaps. The point is surprisingly general amongst high-profile American Evangelical leaders, however – whether in the focus on authentic community found in the vision of Rob Bell or Brian McLaren, or the commitment to constructing a Biblical model of the local fellowship and its leadership in John Piper, Mike Horton, or Mark Dever. UK examples are less high-profile, but no more difficult to find.

Of course, there’s lots to like about this as a broad principle (whatever one thinks of the way it is worked out in one or another of these writers). I’m a Baptist. We believe in the primary place of the local congregation; we got rabid about it in the States a couple of times, with the ‘anti-missions movement’ insisting that the only legitimate Christian organisation was the local congregation; parachurch groups, and even organised ministries within the local church, were unBiblical and to be opposed. Less rabid, but more powerful, consider John Smyth, at the beginnings of the movement: ‘is not the visible church of the New Testament with all the ordinances thereof the chief and principal part of the Gospel?’ You can’t get a higher vision of the primacy of the local congregation than that!

But…

Read on…

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