[3] From early on, members of this group emphasized a personal experience of Christ and the establishment of a pattern of church practice according to the New Testament.
[4] Though assemblies identifying as "local churches" can be found worldwide, there are no definitive statistics available on membership, partly because the largest number of members are in China.
Matters came to a head when Exclusive Brethren leaders discovered that Nee had broken bread with non-Brethren Christians, including T. Austin-Sparks in London and Thornton Stearns in Hartford, during a 1933 visit to the United Kingdom and North America.
[12][13] Nee's seminal works expounding his view of local churches—The Assembly Life[14] and Concerning Our Missions[15]—were written against the background of his experience with the Exclusive Brethren.
"[18][19] According to Nee, this means that "the church in her locality must be inclusive, not exclusive,” that is, it “must include all the children of God in the whole spectrum of Christian faith and practice.
[30] The local churches practice mutuality in their meetings based on verses such as 1 Corinthians 14:26 ("Whenever you come together, each one has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, has an interpretation.
[31] This is particularly evident in "prophesying meetings" in which members speak one after another usually based on their recent learnings and experiences from their Christian walk and/or what they have studied throughout the previous week from the Bible, usually with the help of the commentary books by Watchman Nee and Witness Lee, including the periodical Holy Word for Morning Revival published by Living Stream Ministry.
"[35] After a six-year study, the Christian Research Institute published a 2009 special issue of their journal in December 2009 with the words "We Were Wrong" on the cover.
In it Hank Hanegraaff, Elliot Miller, and Gretchen Passantino published their findings, which resulted in a complete reversal of earlier criticisms.