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Four-in-one: Witness Lee & Trinitarian Ecclesiology

Occasionally, Witness Lee referred to the Body of Christ as a “four-in-one organic entity.”1

In this post, I will explain the origin, meaning, and theological function of this phrase. I will do this by looking at a few representative uses of this phrase and analyzing the key components that regularly appear. The take away is that the phrase is:

  1. rooted in Scripture
  2. clearly explained and qualified, and
  3. supported by historical theology

By my count, this phrase, or a slight variation of it,2 appears 35 times in Lee’s published works, dotting his oceanic output like tiny South Pacific islands. This linguistic archipelago surfaces intermittently between his first use of it in 1960 and his last in 1996. Given that his collected works swell to roughly 100,000 pages, the phrase barely registers, turning up about once every 3,800 pages. That’s 0.026% of his corpus by page count. It’s clear that Lee did not rely much on this terminology, nor was this particular formulation essential to his doctrinal construction; he could use it or not, without any substantive change to his view. Obviously, he chose to use it on occasion.

Of the 35 instances, “four-in-one” is the most frequent formulation (21x). The most dramatic is “the four-in-one God,”3 which appears only once and with far less fuss than you might imagine. Standing alone these two phrases call for explanation. Thankfully, they were never left hanging. In these two forms, they always appear as a final exegetical flourish: intelligible enough in their context, never isolated, and certainly not presented as an independent theologoumenon. Though it may sound troubling or confusing at first, what Lee means by it is well within the bounds of traditional theology. Some, however—either reading it out of context or reading into it more than is warranted—have fixated on this phrase, either 1) blowing it out of proportion, as if the phrase itself were the focus, or 2) calling it heretical, as if “four-in-one” replaced or compromised the Holy Trinity. Neither is the case.

The phrase—variable and perhaps negotiable in certain of its starker forms as a soundbite—points to something that is central to Lee’s theology: the nature of the relationship between God and God’s people or Christ and the church. The language he preferred for describing this relationship was terms such as union, mingling, incorporation, deification, reproduction, enlargement, continuation, building, and expression. The church, for Lee, was no waiting room for heaven nor even simply the place where the gospel is purely taught and the sacraments rightly administered. The church is “the organism of the divine Trinity”—a view similar to the Eastern Orthodox, who say that the church is an “icon of the Trinity.” The church is taken up into the inner life of God and functions to manifest that life on earth.

1. Rooted in Scripture

It’s important to understand that every time Lee mentions the phrase “four-in-one” he is commenting on Scripture—almost always Ephesians 4, but a few times John 14-17. This is important because it prevents people from thinking that this is some free-floating, unhinged speculation. In fact, Lee thought this was a rather basic textual observation: “This truth is clearly revealed in John 14:20; 17:21; and Ephesians 4:4-6.”4

John 14:20 In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.

John 17:21 That they all may be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us; that the world may believe that You have sent Me.

Ephesians 4:4-6 One Body and one Spirit, even as also you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

In a sense, all Lee is doing is counting the persons, noting the “ins,” and seeing the oneness. This is a oneness modeled on the Triune God (“even as”), secured by mutual indwelling (“you in Me and I in you”), and manifested in the church (“one Body”). The human and historical “they in us” of this mutual indwelling is the church. The relationship between God, Jesus Christ, and the church is perichoresis all the way down (although nuances are needed)!

Here are two representative quotes, one on Ephesians 4 and one on John 17, with a little of their surrounding contexts. Both use the fullest and most precise form of Lee’s formulation: “a four-in-one organic entity.”

Ephesians 4

Ephesians 4 reveals the Body of Christ as a four-in-one organic entity that is the mingling of the Triune God with the believers—one Body, one Spirit, one Lord, and one God and Father. In Ephesians 4 there is a mingling of four factors. The first is God the Father as the source; the second, the Lord as the element; the third, the Spirit as the essence; and the fourth, the Body as the human element. Thus, the Body of Christ is the mingling of the divine element with the human element.5

John 17

In John 17 we see the Triune God in His relationship with man as a four-in-one organic entity… According to this verse [v. 21], the believers coinhere with the coinhering Triune God. The Father and the Son coinhere, that is, mutually dwell in each other, and the believers coinhere with the coinhering Triune God. This produces a four-in-one entity in which the believers are the same as the Triune God in life and nature, but they do not share in His Godhead.6

2. Clearly explained and qualified

Explained

Another thing to note: all these “four-in-one” statements belong to soteriology and ecclesiology.

First, it is a basic insight into the nature of salvation. Salvation doesn’t culminate in forgiveness or reconciliation; it culminates in union with God. Since God is Triune and the Body of Christ is one, such a union is—in a kind of obvious way—a oneness involving four persons. This oneness is the result of salvation, as Lee says, “In God’s salvation the believers become mingled with the Triune God to become a four-in-one organic entity.”7 Central to Lee’s theology is the notion of deification, a doctrine that is trending in the academic world right now.8 The Body of Christ is the result of Athanasius’ famous axiom at the end of De Incarnatione. Lee thinks that the Body of Christ as a “four-in-one” entity just is the outcome of “God became a man so that we, His redeemed, might become God.”9 Deification has communal contours. As Mitchell Kennard says, “Here, the myth of deification as the peculiar prerogative of an ascetic elite evaporates entirely.”10

Second, the subject of these statements is almost always the church. For instance, “The church is a four-in-one entity.”11 In one place where he uses the term, he introduces the whole section with the question, “What is the church?”12 In another place: “What is the oneness of the church?”13 Even in the few instances where the church is not technically the subject of the statement, Lee is still talking about, or describing, the church. This is obvious in the contexts of these quotes because they almost all appear as comments on Ephesians 4:4-6. This is the passage that prompts the four-in-one language, for here Paul is talking about the oneness of the church in the unity of the Spirit and then lists out—in a kind of reverse trinitarian creedal snippet14—one Body, one Spirit, one Lord, one God and Father. These four “persons” are united through three things (faith, baptism, hope). Lee takes these verses to indicate the “base of our oneness.”15 But in a deeper way, in light of the Trinitarian-ecclesial-experiential thrust of the whole book of Ephesians, he takes these verses as indicating “a divine and human constitution” in which “God and man are united, mingled, and incorporated.”16 Or combining the two: “the oneness of the church… is the mingling of the Triune God with the believing human beings.”17

Qualified

Not only is Lee’s terminology clearly explained, it is definitely qualified. For instance, in connection to “four-in-one,” he repeatedly provides disclaimers and outlines the limits of this language. The following qualifications appear after affirmations related to “four-in-one”:

…only the first three are the divine Godhead and are worthy of our worship.18

…[some people] erroneously claim that we teach that the Body of Christ evolves into the Godhead. We do not believe that the believers as the Body become part of the Godhead…19

…this does not mean that the fourth part, the church, becomes an object of worship. We can never participate in the Godhead; it is unique to God.20

These statements demarcate a boundary to our participation in God. Clearly, Lee didn’t think that the church becomes a fourth member of the Trinity. When he says “four-in-one” it never rivals or replaces “three in one.” This difference has been traditionally articulated like this: the believers become God by grace, while God is God by nature.21 The church does not become a fourth subsistent relation in the divine essence. God is three hypostases in one ousia. Deification does not change that.

Not only does Lee negatively delimit how the church does NOT participate in God, he also highlights the positive distinctions that he has in mind when commenting on John 17 and Ephesians 4 related to this four-in-one organic entity. Incorporation does not involve confusion, as Lee says: “The three of the Divine Trinity cannot be confused or separated, and the four-in-one also cannot be separated or confused.”22 Lee describes the economic distinctions and roles like this:

The Father is the Originator, the Son is the Accomplisher, and the Spirit is the Executor. The Father, the Son, the Spirit, and the Body constitute a four-in-one entity.23

The first is God the Father as the source; the second, the Lord as the element; the third, the Spirit as the essence; and the fourth, the Body as the human element.24

So we have:

  1. Father: originator / source
  2. Son: accomplisher / element
  3. Spirit: executor / essence
  4. Body of Christ: constituents / framework

Taken together, these observations show that Lee’s “four-in-one” formulation is a deeply soteriological and ecclesiological insight. It names the climactic reality of salvation—union with the Triune God—and describes the constitution of the church as the organic result of that union. With careful qualifications, Lee guards against theological confusion while emphasizing the full extent of the church’s participation in God’s life. Far from collapsing the Creator-creature distinction, “four-in-one” expresses the mystery of divine incorporation: that the church, while never becoming part of the Godhead, is truly joined to God in Christ through the indwelling Spirit becoming thereby the Body of Christ—one with Him in life, purpose, and love.

3. Supported by Historical Theology

Having established the biblical and theological coherence of the phrase, I will now turn to historical theology to demonstrate that Lee’s view resonates with earlier Christian thinkers. In this section, I will simply cite a number of examples of theologians in the past who make similar affirmations about the relationship between the Trinity and the church.

David Meconi on Augustine25

Creation’s “fulfillment is realized in the glorification and divinization of the human person who alone is personally and freely capable of becoming one with God.” (p. 33)

“Deifying union with God is the goal of humanity’s existence.” (pp. 171-72)

“God’s reason in creating is ecclesial: a collective body of creatures praising the divine glory through perfect, unceasing participation in the Trinity.” (p. 184)

Jordan Daniel Wood on Maximus the Confessor26

The whole man pervading the whole God and becoming everything that God is, without, however, identity in essence, and receiving the whole God. (p. 91, quoting Ambiguum 41.5)

The tantum-quantum principle therefore posits the profoundest possible identity between Incarnation and deification—that both achieve the complete perichoresis of created and uncreated natures possible on in the Word’s person. He himself becomes the continuity of extremes so that realities infinitely different by nature can now, in a totally supranatural manner, become each other’s terms, as if they inhabited the same metaphysical mode of existence. The deified ‘as wholes,’ says Maximus, ‘were deemed worthy to be wholly intermingled through the Spirit with the whole of God.’ (p. 103, quoting Ambiguum 10.9)

Just as the Lord’s particular body welcomed the ‘whole Father’ and the ‘whole Spirit’ into itself, which the Son had ‘actualized in himself’—so too will the whole world, his mystical Body, become and manifest the Trinity… There in the Son’s one Body not only will the Trinity be present to all things, as Dionysius said. All things will be, by grace, the Trinity. (p. 140)

Gerald McDermott and McClymond Michael on Jonathan Edwards27

“Elect creatures” are “brought home to [God], united with him, centering most perfectly in him, and as it were swallowed up in him: so that his respect to them finally coincides and becomes one and the same with respect to himself.” Here Edwards cites John 17:21, 23—a rich text on the mutual indwelling of God in Christ, Christ in God, believers in God, believers in Christ, and believers in one another… This teaching on divinization closely followed the language in the Gospel of John… regarding the mutual indwelling of God and believers—designated by theologians as the doctrine of perichoresis… God incorporates creatures into the inner divine life. (pp. 421-23)

Joint RCC-Orthodox Commission

“The church finds its model, its origin and its end in the mystery of the one God in three persons.”28 

Metropolitan Emilianos Timiadis

“The Triune God… becomes… one with us, one body.”29

Robert Jenson30

The church is predestined to abide, finally in God. (p. 174)

The church exists as anticipation… [of] inclusion in the triune communion… The communion that is now the church is itself constituted by an event of communion or participation, with the communion that is the Trinity. (p. 222)

As the church shares in the life of the triune identities, she shares in the relation of the Son and the Spirit to the Father. (p. 227)

“Created fulfillment is inclusion in the triune life… The church hopes for fulfillment by inclusion in a perichoresis of irreducible personalities.” (p. 317)

“God will reign: he will fit created time to triune time and created polity to the perichoresis of Father, Son, and Spirit. God will deify the redeemed: their life will be carried and shaped by the life of Father, Son, and Spirit, and they will know themselves as personal agents in the life so shaped. God will let the redeemed see him: the Father by the Spirit will make Christ’s eyes their eyes. Under all rubrics, the redeemed will be appropriated to God’s own being.” (p. 369)

These examples span the centuries and demonstrate a consensus shared by West and East, ancient and modern—from Augustine to Maximus, from Edwards to Jenson. In diverse voices and vocabularies, they articulate a common vision: the church is destined not merely for moral renewal or institutional longevity, but for communion with the Triune God. These quotes show that the vision of the church’s participation in the Triune life is not a novelty or a fringe speculation. It is a theme deeply embedded in the tradition of Christian theology.

Whether expressed as deification, perichoresis, mystical union, or incorporation into divine life, the goal of salvation is not simply to be with God but to be in God—through Christ, in the Spirit, to the glory of the Father. This is not an eccentric or marginal claim. It is a deeply rooted affirmation, echoed across theological traditions, that the life of the church is a foretaste of the eternal communion for which humanity was created.

Witness Lee’s claim that the Body of Christ is “a four-in-one organic entity” belongs within this broad and venerable stream: a distinctive, but not discordant, contribution to the tradition of Trinitarian ecclesiology.

  1. CWWL, 1991–1992 2:123 ↩︎
  2. The variations, from most frequent to least, are: four-in-one (21 times), four-in-one entity (7 times), four-in-one organic entity (3 times), four in one (2 times), four-in-one person (1 time), four-in-one God (1 time). ↩︎
  3. CWWL, 1990 3.527 ↩︎
  4. CWWL, 1980 2:421 ↩︎
  5. CWWL, 1991–1992 2:123 ↩︎
  6. CWWL, 1982 1:462 ↩︎
  7. CWWL, 1980 2:421 ↩︎
  8. See the new massive Oxford Handbook of Deification, ed. Paul L. Gavrilyuk, et. al (2024). ↩︎
  9. CWWL, 1994-1997 1:118 ↩︎
  10. M. Kennard, “Deified by the Triune God,” in Affirmation and Critique 24.2 (Fall 2019), 104. ↩︎
  11. CWWL, 1960 2:519-20 ↩︎
  12. CWWL, 1990 3:527 ↩︎
  13. CWWL, 1968 1:373 ↩︎
  14. See Lynn H. Cohick, Ephesians, NICNT (2020), 249: “The confessional nature of these verses suggests that Paul draws on creedal statements.” ↩︎
  15. RcV, Eph 4:4, note 1 ↩︎
  16. CWWL, 1994-1997 4:427 ↩︎
  17. CWWL, 1966 2:114 (emphasis added). See also “The Mystery of the Faith,” in Affirmation and Critique 30 (2025), 28: “to arrive at this oneness is actually to become something: the church as a full-grown man.” ↩︎
  18. CWWL, 1969 3:296 ↩︎
  19. CWWL, 1980 2:421 ↩︎
  20. CWWL, 1977 3:76 ↩︎
  21. E.g., Augustine, en. Ps. 49.2 (WSA III/16), 381-382: “It is quite obvious that God called human beings “gods” in the sense that they were deified by his grace [ex gratia sua deificatos], not because they were born of his own substance.” ↩︎
  22. CWWL, 1990 3:527 ↩︎
  23. CWWL, 1970 3:166 ↩︎
  24. CWWL, 1991–1992 2:123 ↩︎
  25. David Vincent Meconi, The One Christ: St. Augustine’s Theology of Deification (Catholic University of America Press, 2013). ↩︎
  26. Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (Notre Dame UP, 2022). ↩︎
  27. Gerald McDermott and McClymond Michael, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (OUP, 2011). ↩︎
  28. The Mystery of the Church and the Eucharist in the Light of the Mystery of the Holy Trinity (Munich Report, 1982), ii.2. ↩︎
  29. Metropolitan Emilianos Timiadis, in Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches, ed. TF Torrance (1985), 22. ↩︎
  30. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (OUP, 1991). ↩︎

5 thoughts on “Four-in-one: Witness Lee & Trinitarian Ecclesiology”

  2. Hey Kyle,

    I really enjoyed reading your treatment and defense of Witness Lee’s “four in one” trinitarian ecclesiology. It is no doubt the case that the “life of the church is a foretaste of the eternal communion for which humanity was created”.

    Question for you, do you think that the Protestant definition of the church (“where the gospel is purely taught and the sacraments rightly administered”) is sufficient to make a body of believers a “true church” or must a church actively subscribe to the mystical union model in order for a church to fully “participate in God’s life”? If 1 Timothy 1:4 necessitates that we teach nothing but “God’s economy” (which in Witness Lee’s definition is this mystical union/theosis) are churches with only pure gospel and rightly administered sacraments falling short and possibly not churches at all?

    Also, and somewhat related, I am very interested in any patristic support for Witness Lee’s ecclesiology as it relates to the “church in the city”. The articles at — provide some biblical witness, but, considering an apparent silence on the part of the fathers, I am left thinking that such a claim is unheard of in church history until the time of Watchman Nee.

    Overall, I fear that an ecclesiology that necessitates items outside of pure gospel and rightly administered sacraments may result in a significant degree of doctrinal triumphalism in relation to a secondary issue like ecclesiology, drawing believers away from focus on the gospel.

    Thank you for your time and effort in writing this piece and for any consideration/interaction you may have with this comment.

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    • Dear brother Swift,

      I also have the same question about the “silence” by the Apostolic Fathers concerning the principle defended by Watchman Nee on the “church in the city”.

      I came up with an explanation (which I am not fully satisfied with). It still requires more light from the fellowship with the Lord and with like-minded brothers.

      This is how I currently see it:

      In the New Testament Paul, Peter and Judas talk about the very serious degradation which the Church would go through as the apostles died out.

      Next, we have the letters of John, in which we see that the degradation was already present.

      And we also see that, in the beginning of the second century, many different practices were adopted concerning the church life.

      I suppose that these changes were aimed mainly to make the local congregations less vulnerable to the attacks of false apostles, as mentioned in Revelation 2:2.

      The institution of “One bishop and many elders” concentrated the leadership of the local congregation to just one person. Possibly this was implemented to make it more difficult for a heretic to persuade members in a local congregation.

      Watchman Nee defines that:

      “The local church is the aggregate of all born again Christians who live inside the geographical borders of one city or village. And all these Christian have the right to participate in the congregation fellowship “except for those who are living in a moral sin and those who promote heresies”.

      According to Watchman Nee, no church leader and no minister has the position to cut a brother from fellowship (excommunicate) except for these two conditions.

      This means that a “divisive” brother, or a brother who disagrees with the leadership cannot be cut out.

      The NT presents other ways to deal with such situations, but the divisive brother maintains the right of being a participant member in the congregation.

      Now we see that by the time of Ignatius of Antioch this changed:

      Now the member of the congregation must be a born again Christian and may not be:

      -Living in moral sin.

      -Promoting heresies.

      AND

      -Opposing the local bishop.

      In other words, the bishop now has the prerogative of excommunicating a brother because he does not agree with him.

      Therefore, by Watchman Nee’s point of view, in the beginning of the second century, the principle of the practical church oneness was lost.

      And soon after that in history, 2 more principles were lost or relaxed:

      First: As long as you are born into a Christian family and receive the sacraments, you don’t have to necessarily be “born again” to be received as a member in the church.

      Second: The principle of the city geographic limits as the church territory was gradually relaxed. From a “city”, the limits grew into a “diocese”. And this process did not stop until the high middle ages.

      Therefore, by my current understanding, this is the reason why we don’t see any emphatic mention of the “church in the city” by the Fathers.

      The principle of “church in the city” being the formula for maintaining the oneness was no longer emphasized.

      And the idea of the “church in the city” being the golden lampstand which holds the testimony of Jesus (Rev 1:12) was replaced with a more organized approach.

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    • Thanks for reading! This is a really good question. I thought about it for a while and bounced between three or so different ways to approach an answer. Hope this helps!

      First off, just to clarify (as I’m sure you can tell) this post is about the universal Church, not about individual congregations. So the claims here apply to all Christians, no matter their ecclesial proclivities. However, holding such a robust understanding of the nature and destiny of the church (lets say: as this post does in the use of terms like deification or “four in one” etc) does not make a group the church or not. So the fear you mention doesn’t apply to Nee or Lee’s teachings, as they did not think this either. One’s status in the church and the quality of one’s extended theology are different things.

      To briefly answer your question, I would put it like this:

      Where the gospel is purely proclaimed and the sacraments are rightly administered (this is what the Augsburg Confession (CA) article 7 calls the “external marks” of the church), there the universal church is present. This is true even if in local expression the church is wrongly divided into multiple denominations. These marks are sufficient in identifying a true church, in the sense that when you see those marks you can say “here is a recognizable congregation of true Christians.” In fact, this is precisely how Luther defined the word church: “a holy Christian people.” So yes, as Luther said, “even if there were no other sign than this alone, it would still suffice to prove that a holy Christian people must exist there, for God’s word cannot be without God’s people” (On the Councils and the Church).

      At Luther’s time these two marks of the church were probably sufficient to ID the “true church” since there was really only one church in the Latin West at the time and after Luther there were really only two options. By excommunicating Luther who advocated for the recovery of the gospel which begets and sustains the church, Luther interpreted Rome as rejecting the gospel and therefore forfeiting its claim to be the church. For Luther: no church without the gospel. But this is really just referring to the universal church and salvation itself. The situation is different today. The Protestant churches divided even during Luther’s time and began defining themselves over against each other, each claiming to be the “true church.” The Orthodox Church today still claims to be the one true church (see Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church, p. 238-239: “There is a single, visible community which alone can claim to be the one true Church… Orthodox believe that they are the true Church.”) Catholics essentially claim the same thing, preferring to call Protestant groups, not churches but only “ecclesial communities” (CCC 819), even though they accept our baptisms and salvation. But with 38,000 denominations worldwide (per the last official count that I saw in 2010), it really depends on what you mean by “true” and “church.”

      Already at the time of the Reformation, as new ecclesial allegiances developed, theologians began drawing a finer distinction in their language. Bellarmine (a Catholic theologian devoted to contesting the Protestants) said that the Protestant marks “at most indicate where the true church is but not which church is the true one.” Polanus (Reformed) differed from Luther and said that the RCC was a true church but that it was not a pure church. “Where vs which” and “true vs pure” are the kind of distinctions that I think are needed to really get at what your questions is asking about individual congregations.

      There is a difference between a congregation being truly a church and it being “the true church” (in the typical, historical language of polemics) or, in the terminology I prefer from Nee and Lee, a “proper church.” It’s a tautology, but all churches are truly churches: they are either RCCs, orthodox churches, state churches, denominational churches, nondenominational churches, etc. But “true church” today is a little ambiguous to me, especially in your question. Does it mean 1) these people are part of the universal church and the company of the saved or 2) this church’s basis, identity, organization, and circle of fellowship is the right one and how God intends things to be? “Proper church,” in my mind, removes this ambiguity by 1) granting that they are a congregation of believers and are God’s people, but 2) allowing for the fact that their church itself may not be properly grounded, ie it might not be how the NT describes the basis, standing, and fellowship of a church. This is something more than just preaching the pure gospel and administering the sacraments. So in that sense there may be a state church (eg Church of England) or denominational church (Presbyterian church), but not a scriptural church in the fullest sense because there should not be more than one church locally. The only legitimate reason for multiple churches is geographical. And while the CA famously IDs these two external marks, it also affirmed the Nicene creed, which provides four more marks of the church (often called “predicates” in this context)—the church is “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.” There is much that could be said to unpack each of these additional marks, but oneness clearly is a problem in our current state, as many theologians recognize. For example, Bavinck: “As Christians we cannot humble ourselves deeply enough over the schisms and discord that have existed all through the centuries in the church of Christ. It is a sin against God” (RD, 4.316). Barth said: “To the extent that Christendom does consist of actually different and opposing Churches, to that extent it denies practically what it confesses theologically—the unity and the singularity of God… every division as such is a deep riddle, a scandal” (CD IV/1:675).

      So it’s true that divided churches that have these two marks, are nonetheless falling short of the NT standard of what a local church is supposed to be, chief of which is free of division.

      Bottom line, I follow Nee’s understanding here—what makes a proper church according to the NT is 1) a group of believers’ incorporation into Christ through faith and baptism and thus their reception of the Holy Spirit 2) their holding to the truth of the common faith according to the apostles’ teaching, and 3) their proper standing on the ground of oneness in universal fellowship. This covers all four predicates in the Nicene creed. By standing, I mean the basis and ground of their existence and fellowship. (1) Makes them members of the Church universal. (2) Prevents them from becoming heretical. (3) Prevents them from becoming schismatic. Of course, we have inherited a complicated history of ecclesial splintering. And this is not to say that God has not worked through these different churches or has not allowed this state of affairs to develop. It’s just that it is not what God wants.

      Peter Leithart has a good book related to this topic that is worth reading called The End of Protestantism. It came out in 2017 or so, when a number of people were thinking back on the Reformation since it was the 500th year anniversary of the 95 theses. A number of discussions were going on that year about the divided state of Protestantism. Leithart is pretty strong in this book: “Denominationalism is not what Jesus desires for his church. It does not fulfill his prayer [for oneness in John 17]… Denominationalism is not union. It is the opposite. It is the institutionalization of division.” (p. 4)

      Still, Nee’s ecclesiology holds that every Christian in a city is a part of the church in that city regardless of where or how they assemble. I think Nee’s position holds inclusivity and clarity in a good balance. Nee was never out to tear down or criticize but only to faithfully practice what he understood to be the truth. For instance in CWWN 55:154 he says “There are many so-called denominational churches. The Lord has not given us the freedom to criticize them.” Lee echoed this: “Where people meet and how they serve the Lord are entirely between them and the Lord; we cannot intervene in these things… The way they take or where they meet does not matter; we should not consider that our meeting are better than those in Christianity… We do not have any intention of competing with or comparing ourselves to others” (CWWL 1956, 2:432). And yet both of them taught extensively on the ground, nature, calling, practice, and destiny of the church simply because of how they saw the church in relation to God’s eternal purpose, which I always think about in terms of M&M—the church is the means for God’s manifestation and move.

      Last thought: don’t misunderstand me on this, but I don’t think ecclesiology is “a secondary issue.” Of course, certain details about the church are secondary, but the church itself is not. The Apostles creed and the Nicene creed clearly list it as an item of the faith and Lee held it to be such as well based on Matt 16 and Eph 3.

      Hopefully this long response helps clarify what I think related to your question and not bring even more confusion! Clearly, it’s a complicated and sensitive question that requires clarity and charity.

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      • Kyle and Joshua,

        I would like to bring another issue up, which is closely related to the subject in this topic.
        These are questions that I have never been properly clarified.

        Let us think of the Church in Corinth in the period when they received Paul’s second letter.

        We see that they were having a strong influence from the “super apostles” as denounced by Paul.

        My inference is that these “super apostles” were converted Jews, living somewhere in Greece. But not in Corinth.
        I imagine that the “super apostles” were strongly influenced by the teachings and practices which were current in Jerusalem, which were promoted especially by James the brother of the Lord.

        I don’t believe that they lived in Jerusalem and were visiting Greece. It is more likely that they had raised some local church (or churches) in Greece, possibly not too far from Corinth.

        Being Christians who promoted a more judaized Christianity, they were not very comfortable with Paul’s teachings, and they were trying to win the heart of the church in Corinth using unethical and dishonest approaches.

        I am inclined to believe that, with his second letter, Paul exposed their craftiness and the serving brothers in Corinth (elders, deacons & others) were inoculated against the questionable intentions of these “super apostles”.

        There is much inference in the things I stated above, however, even if I am mistaken in some of my assumptions, I believe that these suggestions are not too far from what was really happening in that local church.

        Now, we come to the “what if” part:

        Let’s imagine that after reading Paul’s second letter most leaders saw the truth, repented and gave up trying to reconcile the teachings of the “super apostles” with the gospel that they were receiving from Paul.

        However, let’s imagine for a minute that two or three among the serving ones were deeply offended by the letter. These were brothers who had a special preference for the judaizing teachings coming from the “super apostles”.
        And let’s also imagine that because of being that offended, they decided to split from the rest of the church and to start another meeting somewhere else under their leadership.

        And besides, some of brothers and sisters from Corinth decided to follow them.

        Although the remaining elders tried to persuade them to “bear the cross” and “deny themselves” for the sake of the oneness, they were adamant in their decision and there was a permanent split.

        Very well. Now we have two Christian congregations in the city of Corinth.
        Both of them are orthodox in their teachings. No heresies.
        Although their gospels have perhaps different flavors, they were announcing the salvation in Christ properly.

        We know by the letters by Paul that the first of these groups were “a church”. In other words, they met all requirements (at least the judicial ones) to qualify as “a church in a city” according to what is taught in the rest of the New Testament.

        And how about the second group? Could we call them “a church”? Or just “two or three meeting in the Lord’s name?”

        Now, in case your answer is: “No! According to the NT, this second group cannot be designated as a church!
        My next question is “Why?”

        What if this second group had a growth in number much higher than the first one?

        What if this second group led a spiritual life much more committed and much more fruitful than the first one?

        And assuming that, in spite of all that, this second group did not qualify as a “proper church”. What is the relevance of being a “proper church” after all????

        They were saving more people, their members had a consecrated life better than the original “Church in Corinth”.
        Why not being a proper church should matter?

        I am open and I look forward to knowing all points of view?

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