Every aspect of the church must be organic because the church is the issue of the living Trinity. The Bible tells us that the embodiment of God, Christ, is life. Christ told us in the Gospel of John that He is the life (John 14:6). Christ is not something organizational. As the embodiment of the Triune God, He is the totality of the divine, eternal life. The totality of life, the living Triune God, issues in one thing—the Body of Christ. Since the Triune God is the totality of life, the Body of Christ is altogether a matter of life. We should put anything that is not of life under our feet. We do not like hierarchy because it is altogether a matter of organization and has nothing to do with the organic Body of Christ.

The Body of Christ is an issue of the divine Trinity in the same way that Eve was an issue of Adam. God created Adam from the dust of the ground, but He built a woman with a rib out of Adam's side (Gen. 2:22). Adam dispensed himself in the sense that a rib, a part of his being, came out of him. That part of his being became a woman, Eve. What was Eve? Eve was an issue of Adam. Eve was identical to Adam in life, in nature, and in appearance. This is why Adam and Eve could be one flesh, one couple. In like manner, the church is the issue of the dispensing of the divine Trinity. We have to see the church to such an extent. When we have such a vision, this vision will govern us, protect us, regulate us, and keep us from being misled into a kind of teaching concerning organization. Any thought concerning organization should not be brought into the church life. Any teaching concerning the church in the sense of organization is absolutely wrong, and we must abandon it. It is deceiving, misleading, and of the evil one. The thought of organization related to the church cannot be seen in the entire book of Ephesians, a book on the church. Ephesians reveals that the church is an organism, the Body of Christ.

We studied the history of the Brethren, who practiced the church life under the leadership of John Nelson Darby in the early part of the nineteenth century. Soon after they were raised up by the Lord, they fell into the snare of organization and were divided. Some of them, the so-called Open Brethren, taught that each of the churches was autonomous. The so-called Closed Brethren were accused of trying to form all the churches into a federation. Both autonomy and federation are outside of the biblical revelation according to the teaching of the apostles.

Because the United States is an organized government, we can see the matters of autonomy and federation to a certain extent. The fifty states are autonomous to a certain degree but the federal government forms them into a federation. Thus, we can see autonomy to a certain degree in the states and federation in the country as a whole. The individual states, though, are not absolutely independent from one another or from the federal government. Each state does not have its own currency. There is only one currency in the United States. We citizens of the United States pay more tax to the federal government than to the state government. If a case in a court of law cannot be decided by the state court, it eventually goes to the Supreme Court, a federal court. The defense of our nation, for the most part, is a federal matter. Diplomatic relations with other countries are also a federal matter. There are highways that span the continental United States from state to state. What if Oregon had the attitude that only its residents could travel on its highways? The above examples show us that even the states of the United States are not absolutely independent from one another or from the federal government.

In God's economy and in the Body of Christ, independence is a devilish word. We Christians should never be independent. We should not be independent of God or of one another. We cannot go on in the Christian life if we isolate ourselves from one another. Furthermore, no local church can be absolutely independent from the other local churches. The local churches should be dependent on one another. The church in Seattle should be dependent on the church in Spokane, and the churches in the United States should be dependent on the churches in England. We must be careful concerning the creeping in of different teachings related to matters such as autonomy and federation.

Could any member of a person's physical body be autonomous in relation to the other members? If one member is in pain, the entire body suffers. Likewise, each member of the Body of Christ is dependent on the other members. Concerning the Body of Christ, Paul tells us, "If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if a member is glorified, all the members rejoice with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and members in particular" (1 Cor. 12:26-27). The church is the Body of Christ, and as the Body of Christ, no part of the church can be autonomous. My burden for us to see and enter into the reality of the church as the Body of Christ is very heavy because concepts and teachings related to organization, such as the teaching of autonomy, have corrupted, misled, and deceived the Christians and have created many divisions. We are not in any kind of organization. We are in the issue of the Triune God, which is the unique, universal organism, the Body of Christ. We all must declare: "We are in an organism, not in an organization!" Ephesians 1 shows us that the church is the issue of the Triune God.