http://jehovahs-witness.net/jw/friends/164633/1/Meeting-the-Challenge-of-Loyalty
From Jeremy C:
The concept of giving loyalty to men, either individually or collectively, is foreign to the Scriptures. If there was anything that Paul was so forcefully trying to convey in his teachings regarding the relationship of Christians to congregation elders was that obedience within the congregation was relative and not absolute.
Obedience was given only to the extent that elders did not overstep their bounds and attempt to reinstitute legalism, or a Talmudic system within the congregation. The account at Acts Chapter 15 is a perfect example of how Paul stood up to the elders at Jerusalem who attempted to impose circumcision on converts. If the modern-day Watchtower Governing Body model had been in place back then, their imposing of such a ruling would have been final, and Paul would have been disfellowshipped for apostasy in his opposition to the body. As it turned out, the body of elders actually had to reconsider their position and later accepted correction from Paul, as recorded in Galatians.
There was also no concept of giving loyalty to a congregational present within the Apostolic writings. Congregations were described as free associations of Christ's followers with no mention of membership rosters, publisher records, reporting requirements, or arbitrary requirements regarding service hours. Paul in his letters to Timothy described the congregation as a family-like arrangement, not a hierarchical arrangement where subordinates were beholden to superiors. Somehow, the modern day Governing Body has glossed over those letters when it comes to their relationship to the flock within the JW congregation.
First century Christianity was a relationship with Christ Jesus, not a membership within a corporate structure. What the Watchtower organization has built in the twentieth and twenty-first century is a corporate business style model whereby Christians are to relate to the leadership as employees would relate to an employer. I actually learned a great deal by reading Ray Franz's book, In Search Of Christian Freedom. His chapters on centralized authority, legalism, and the congregational arrangement in the first century were very well researched and helped me untangle a lot of the convoluted JW thinking that I held toward Christianity.
Franz points out that modern-day Jehovah's Witnesses are so deeply ingrained with the organizational concept, with its top-down management structure, that they project this view onto the historical accounts of the first-century Christians. They filter the New Testament through this lens which seriously distorts the facts. If one takes the time to do research into church history (instead of merely reading WT publications about it) one will find that the modern-day JW organizational model is totally absent in the New Testament. It was something that developed after the deaths of the Apostles in the emergence of the Church of Rome.