The continuation of Rabbit Trail #2: roger: <> i guess i see the essence of the question one of structural composition. let me use a metaphor for the sake of clearing some stuff up.... for this metaphor we'll use water to represent the gospel/kingdom and glass to represent the human/church structure. surely, we all agree that both a 10 gallon aquarium and a 12 ounce cup hold water equally well. "But that aquarium holds a heck of a lot more water than the cup," one might say. And if your goal was to hold as much water as possible for the sake of keeping some fish alive, I'd say, choose that aquarium. If your goal wasn't to keep fish, but to take some water with you on a walk, suddenly that aquarium becomes inappropriate and the 12 ounce cup makes more sense. Both containers contain the same quality of water--though one might have some fish crap in it and the other some saliva. In this application, only one of the two containers really makes sense. Though, to be fair, you could have it either way, if you really wanted to lug around 75 lbs. of water and glass. Even though the essence of the water was not affected by its container, the delivery of the water was. some people will say that there's no reason to only have a bunch of cup-holders running around carting very small quantities of water when there can be gigantic 1,000,000 gallon aquariums out there teeming with life. And to that I would respond, "Very true. However, it's difficult to transport a million-gallon aquarium across town at a moment's notice." Really, wherever there is a very large aquarium, it becomes an attraction--a museum or theme park to come and visit every once in a while. The only people who stay there for any length of time are the workers and the fish. The fish can't leave the tanks either...... and here's where the metaphor gets really weird and starts to deal with coral reefs and that time i accidently caught an octopus in florida. As J. Cannell said the other day, "There is no model for church provided anywhere in the Bible." And, going off of that, my point is: if there's no model, then why do we only support one model and look askew at the other models? We don't condemn the idea of house churches, but we don't go and do them either. So, at least for me, the issue of "being fed" circulates around the supported structure of a body of believers. It seems more and more clear to me that there are some really excellent, excited, effective 12 ounce cups out there that are getting no or little help from the 1,000,000 gallon showcase aquarium museums.