Local Ground and Names: Are they really important?

What did the Bible say about this? The answer is no direct answer; if you do not try really hard to read between the lines, piece together certain information, and do a bunch of reasonings and inferences, you don’t derive an answer. Is this God's style? No.

About the "local ground" and how to name a gathering: you call it "local churches," meaning one city, one church. Let's try to do a time travel back in the days. Imagine you were one of the believers at that time, believed the Lord through an apostle. Other believers meeting with you were also not too far away from where that apostle traveled, likely within walking distance of his path, maybe with one or two outliers. But there were not that many of you, even in the entire city.

Later, you were wondering what you should call yourselves—your gathering—so you asked this apostle. But given that this apostle was very unlikely to be a big fan of naming, he probably just said: "You are in this city, so the church in this city." I highly doubt that this apostle, or any of his peers, prayed to the Father, fellowshipped with one another, received a specific revelation, and reached the same position of naming gatherings after their city name, but somehow ALL forgot to say it explicitly, if it was not an intentional coordination. An assumption we make here is that those apostles were all physically together when they were fellowshipping over this topic; otherwise, there was simply no way for information to travel as if they were living in today's technology environment. However, there is no indication in the Bible that our assumption ever happened. Then why did all the apostles in the Bible use city names to name the gathering? Because it was that obvious and simple—no need for coordination.

How about God? I don't know exactly how He thinks about the "meeting ground" (if there was such a thing in His concerns) and names, but what I do know is that He can’t hold anyone accountable for naming or not naming their gatherings. Why? Because He designed us not to be mind-readers. If He had any crucial preferences on the names of gatherings—which determines if a gathering is a "harlot"—but without telling us clearly, it wouldn’t be righteous for Him to hold us accountable for not knowing His mind.