Informal Apostles & Elders

Discuss Biblical locality (Acts 14.23, 8.1; 1 Cor. 1.2; Rev. 1.4, 2.1, 8, 12, 18; 3.1, 7, 14) and the special Work (Acts 13.2) of the Ministry (Eph. 4.11-12) which precedes the existence of church locales. Study Assembly Life (pdf). Discuss various types of meetings in the practice of fellowship at a designated weekly meeting place within walking distance! In a Biblical locality - a city, town - there are many meeting places, and each meeting place is about fifty to one hundred brothers and sisters (1 Kings 18.4) and as many as 3000 to 5000 (Acts 2) in congested areas. An Elder of a meeting place takes care of a meeting place with its various types of meetings.

Though there may not be the title of elders today, there nevertheless are men in every place who are like elders and who do the work of the eldership. They act as informal or unofficial elders. Yet the question still remains, How are they raised up? Who asks them to act as elders informally? We must answer that they are appointed by the informal apostles.

Though this question of apostles remains controversial, there is nonetheless a class of people today who are performing the works of apostles—such works as preaching the gospel and establishing churches. They confess that they fall short of the holiness, power, victory and labor of the apostles because they can only do a small portion—perhaps one thousandth—of the works of the early apostles. Yet God uses these people in our day to labor in various places just as He used the apostles in the earlier days. Formerly it was these apostles who established churches everywhere, but now it is these informal apostles who do such work. We admit they are far inferior to the early apostles, that they are not worthy to be called apostles; nevertheless, we cannot but acknowledge them as doing part of the apostolic work. These men are those whom God uses in today’s ruinous state of the Church as apostles.

There is another aspect of informal as mentioned in Spirit of the Gospel,

Only the relationship between friends is something informal and conducted on the basis of the same or equal position. A good father is not only that to his son but he is also his son’s friend. A judge usually stands opposite to a criminal, yet some judges may even become criminals’ friends.

And meetings themselves if too rigid lose the quality of "informal meetings," as noted in Revive Thy Work by Watchman Nee.