Originally Posted By: zmjezhd
at least grammatically

I offer a nit to pick. The collocation local congregation is perfectly grammatical. It may suffer from some logical or semantic problem, but I think not.

Yes, I more correctly would have said "semantically" not "grammatically." In any case it was only the minor premise in the argument.

 Originally Posted By: zmjezhd
I can see nothing which specifies that a congregation must be local to the speaker.

Not sure we mentioned speakers, local or otherwise. The locality refers to that of the gatherers and/or where they agree to gather. The word refers to the gathering of the group, but regardless of where they all came from to gather, they have to meet at a particular locale. However, it can also be used of the group at times when they are not gathered to mean something like "all those who normally meet for this reason at this place" as in for example "I rang around the congregation to find out what they thought..."

Last edited by The Pook; 05/03/08 06:01 AM.