[Sidenote:  Nature of its organization]

The primary object for which the local church was formed was the establishment and extension of the kingdom of God among men.  A secondary object was the encouragement and mutual edification of the believers themselves, which was best obtained by united worship in prayer, exhortation, praise, thanksgiving, and religious instruction.

We have already noted the conditions of membership in the local church.  None but those who were already members of the body of Christ could properly be recognized as members in a congregation which was designed by Christ to exhibit in local and temporary form the true idea of the church universal.  According to this standard of membership, every individual owed allegiance directly to Christ himself as the great head of the church.  Christ was the only lawgiver.  The relation of the individual to the local church, then, did not in any sense supersede his personal relations to Christ, but simply strengthened and further expressed this higher relationship.

In this standard of church-membership is found the secret of the union in one body of all apostolic Christians.  The standard was personal relationship to Christ, and this relationship could be obtained only by an experience of salvation and humble obedience to the law of Christ.  Therefore all the truly saved were members of Christ and members of each other.  This standard being the same for all, it led to absolute equality among members.  Hence Paul could say, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female:  for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

The law of the church, as already stated, was simply “the law of Christ”; first as delivered orally by specially inspired apostles, and afterwards expressed by them in the Christian Scriptures.

[Sidenote:  Organization and government]

The closest relationship necessarily existed between the organization of the church and its method of government.  It is impossible for us to get a clear conception of either independently of the other; and in order to understand the subject at all, we must bear in mind the fundamental nature of the church itself, what it was and what it was designed to accomplish.  The church was not, as we have seen, a mere aggregate of individuals that happened to gather or that assembled for ordinary purposes.  A social club or a business organization would have possessed all those features.  The church was the body of Christ, the body to which he gave spiritual life and through which he designed to manifest his power and glory.  Hence its visible organization was secondary, merely incidental as the means for the accomplishment of those higher ends involved in the transcendental element of the church.  The relation of the divine and the human characteristics was, therefore, the relation of soul and body—­Christ, the soul; redeemed humanity, the body.  The establishment of this relationship was the manifestation to the world of the “body of Christ.”  It was organization of the church.