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Introduction: Christian oneness—the Bible stresses it, believers long for it, the world expects to see it...but where is it? In the local church. This vital truth was rediscovered and heralded by Watchman Nee and Witness Lee, prolific and visionary twentieth-century Christian writers. As this website will demonstrate, their revelation of and fervency for the scriptural local church still resonates in their writings.
Witness Lee followed in the footsteps of his co-worker Watchman Nee to proclaim the indispensable scriptural key to the obtaining and maintaining of a genuine, practical oneness among the believers in Christ: There can be—and in reality there is—only one church in a city. This is the local church. These brothers proclaimed and practiced in mainland China what they had discovered in God's Word regarding the practical, local ground of the church. This practice of meeting as the church in each city spread from China to other countries in the Far East and then to the United States, Western Europe, South America, and Russia. Today, along with Watchman Nee and Witness Lee, tens of thousands of Christians have seen this principle of the ground of locality in the Bible and have therefore willingly dropped all divisive names, doctrines, and preferences in order to simply hold the faith which is common to all believers. These Christians can be found all over the globe meeting as the local churches and practicing the church life as prescribed in the New Testament.
Just as with other essential New Testament truths, the crucial matter of one church in each city, the local church, was prefigured in the Old Testament in order to more clearly convey it to the New Testament believers. Many Christians realize and appreciate the fact that the early history of the children of Israel typifies the experience of the believers in Christ—beginning with their bondage in Egypt (typifying the world), followed by their deliverance from the judgment on Egypt through the blood of the lamb (typifying Christ) and their passing through the Red Sea for a complete deliverance (typifying baptism—cf. 1 Cor. 10). But many stop there, unaware that God's magnificent and comprehensive portrayal of the church in the history of the children of Israel continues through their experience in the wilderness and on into the good land of Canaan. Both Watchman Nee and Witness Lee, in their study of the Bible, realized that the history of the Israelites in the good land and their subsequent captivity and recovery likewise prefigured the New Testament church. These two brothers drew from this vividly significant history to help illustrate the matter of the ground of the church, the ground of locality, which they had seen in the New Testament. This Website presents a number of quotes from the writings of both Watchman Nee and Witness Lee concerning the ground of the church as typified in the Old Testament, a living principle which believers can not only see but experience today in the local church, the church in their city.
The Ground of the Church Sequentially Typified in the Old Testament
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