Before the Church

3 John 1:6 

Which have borne witness of thy charity before the church: whom if thou bring forward on their journey after a godly sort, thou shalt do well:

I find in this passage another subtle but significant evidence that the church is local and not universal in nature. Barnes Notes says, "It would seem that they[1]  had returned to John, and borne honorable testimony to the love manifested to them by Gaius. Before what church they had borne this testimony is unknown. Perhaps it was the church in Ephesus."

They could not have borne witness before a universal church. It would be an impossibility. Even a Universalist as Barnes knew that such could not be the case. This must have been a local church. Which one was a matter, as far as Barnes knew, of conjecture. But that it was a local church was not.

·       It could have been the church in Ephesus where John was stationed shortly before his death

·       It could have been one of the nearby churches in Asia that kept close fellowship with John and the church in Ephesus

but it was not an invisible, universal mystical church.

To hold that such a universal church exists is to hold it with no biblical evidence to support it.

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[1] The brethren and strangers of the previous verse.