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Rethinking Church, part four

I have spoken here several times about how I am no longer in a regular church denomination or attend traditional ‘church’. Instead, for the last 2-3 years, a small group of us have been meeting in our front room each Sunday. We have songs, Bible reading, a sermon, etc.

Note: all this is facilitated through Church with UTB, if you are interested.

There aren’t very many of us: it is usually just me, my wife, my children, my Dad, and 1-2 other people. I heard recently that someone had spoken very disparagingly about our gatherings, saying: “That’s not church, it’s family worship!” From conversations I’ve had with people, that’s not an uncommon attitude. People seem to think that simply meeting together in someone’s living room isn’t “proper” church, even if they wouldn’t come out and say it.

In my previous piece about church leaders, I said that I wanted to explore further the relation of church and family. In this post today, I am going to do just that. Let’s start with the Old Testament.

Church and families in the Old Testament

It’s a common misconception that the Sabbath commandment requires us to go to church. However, it says no such thing. Look at the actual words from Exodus 20:

“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

Exodus 20:8-11

Do you see any mention there of gathering together? If anything, the Sabbath commandment suggests simply taking time with your family and loved ones, rather than meeting together in a formal gathering. So the Sabbath doesn’t speak about meeting together.

What about festivals? Several are mentioned in the Old Testament. The first one was the Passover. The original Passover was to be a meal within one’s own household, and Jewish people continue to celebrate it like that to this day. (Of course, having a meal within one’s own household doesn’t mean you can’t invite guests!)

There were a number of other festivals, and you can find a list of those in Leviticus 23. Reading through the chapter, it seems that no formal gathering was required. Rather, each community and household would participate wherever they were. There were occasions when offerings needed to be brought to God — which would entail travelling to the temple in Jerusalem — but there was nothing like a ‘church service’ as we would recognise it today.

Speaking of offerings at the temple, once again, there was no requirement for any kind of formal gathering there on a regular basis. Families would travel up to the temple to offer sacrifices, as Elkanah’s family did in 1 Samuel:

Year after year this man went up from his town to worship and sacrifice to the Lord Almighty at Shiloh, where Hophni and Phinehas, the two sons of Eli, were priests of the Lord. Whenever the day came for Elkanah to sacrifice, he would give portions of the meat to his wife Peninnah and to all her sons and daughters. But to Hannah he gave a double portion because he loved her, and the Lord had closed her womb. 1 Samuel 1:3-5

It seems that Elkanah travelled up to Shiloh to offer sacrifices with his wives and children — it was a family celebration. This pattern seems to have been repeated up until the time of Christ, when Mary and Joseph presented Jesus at the temple (Luke 2:22-24), and later on travelled to Jerusalem for the Passover Festival in the company of their relatives and friends (Luke 2:41-50).

The final thing in this section is the question of synagogues. Jews of the day used to gather in the synagogues on the Sabbath day to hear the Scriptures and pray. It was probably the closest thing we see in the Bible to a ‘church service’ as we know it today.¹

It’s important to understand that, although by Jesus’ time synagogues were in common usage (we don’t know for sure when they started to be used regularly) this is a development of tradition and custom rather than one which was mandated by the Scriptures. Jesus and the apostles used to go into the synagogues to preach and evangelise, but there is never any suggestion that synagogue worship was a requirement (still less that it continues to be a requirement for Christians today!).

In summary, it seems that the Old Testament did not prescribe any particular type of regular formal gathering for the Israelites. There were occasions when there were gatherings of all the people or all the elders. However, on a day-to-day basis, the Israelites did their religious duty to God in families — there was nothing like the ‘church services’ we have today.

Church and families in the New Testament

Given the Old Testament background that we’ve seen already, the gospels contain a moment that must have been truly shocking:

Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.” …

Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.”

“Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked.

Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”

Mark 3:20-21, 31-35

At one point in Jesus’ ministry — probably fairly early on — his family think that he is “out of his mind” and decide to take charge of him. They arrive at his house and send someone to go and get him. But, instead of going with them, Jesus redefines his family: he says that “whoever does God’s will” is part of his family. He rejects his (biological) family’s claim over him in favour of his true family. As I said in a sermon a few months back, this is the most revolutionary teaching in the Bible!

This teaching is developed in the rest of the New Testament. The apostles would often refer to “households”, who would often come to faith together (e.g. the Philippian jailer in Acts 16:31 — in those days, if the head of the house came to Christ, it followed that the rest of the family would as well). But it seems that the church was not simply comprised of individual Christians but households as well. Furthermore, Paul makes the point that Christians are members of the “household of God” (Ephesians 2:19; 1 Timothy 3:15). The church is seen as a household in and of itself. Pastors (as I spoke about before) are therefore “overseers of God’s household” (Titus 1:7) — they are, in a sense, the heads of the family.

One important point is that churches in the New Testament are only ever described as meeting in people’s homes. The apostles’ ministry is described from the earliest days as both public and in houses:

Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah. Acts 5:42²

And, where the church locations are mentioned, they only refer to churches which meet in houses: Priscilla and Aquila (Romans 16:5, 1 Corinthians 16:19), and Nympha (Colossians 4:15). Dr Tom Wadsworth makes the point in one of his lectures that the earliest known church building dates from around 240AD in Dura-Europos (Syria). This was a private dwelling which had been converted into a church building. The earliest purpose-built churches start to appear a few years later around the turn of the century. This means that, for about the first two hundred years of the church, meeting in houses was normal for the church. I don’t know what the ordinary house size was in those days — I’m guessing that, apart from the most affluent in a society, most houses would have been pretty moderately sized. Surely this means that, for the first two centuries of the church, there must have been a whole lot of house churches!

Perhaps meetings were much more ‘ad-hoc’, with believers visiting one another at different times or moving to different people’s houses. I think this is a clue as to how Paul can address a letter to (say) “the church of God in Corinth” (1 Corinthians 1:2) — not that there was an enormous church building where they all came together every week! But rather that they saw themselves as one church, despite the fact that they all met at different times and different houses.

Let’s think a bit further about the significance of meeting in an ordinary house. What’s the difference between a house as opposed to a purpose-built church building? A house is not a public building — it’s a family home. It strikes me as entirely fitting that the household of God should be meeting in a family home. Rather than Jesus being seen as someone who’s only ‘out there’, in big, grand buildings, he’s someone who is there in the midst of our very lives, in our homes.

In summary, the New Testament envisions church itself as a family. In fact, the household of God should even take precedence over the biological family (where the two come into conflict). This was reflected in the early church by one household welcoming others in to gather together — every church in those days was a ‘house church’.

What this means for us today

Think for a moment about your experience of family. Obviously every family is different and will have its own quirks. I can only speak for my own. At the same time, I think there are some commonalities:

• Families can live miles apart and don’t need to be together all the time in order to be one family. We see ourselves as one family, despite the fact that we live in various places!

• Although they might not live close together, families should love one another and WANT to be together as often as possible. (For example, My Dad recently moved to our town, and he now joins us several times a week for dinner — it’s great that we now live close enough to be able to do that).

• When families come together, it’s usually in a house. Can you imagine a family hiring out a community centre for a regular gathering? Maybe for a big party, but not on a regular basis!

• Most families today are informal — not at all the way that things were in the days of e.g. Jane Austen.

When it comes to families, in my experience they are almost the polar opposite of institutions today: we form bonds, meet together, call one another, and so on — not because we have to, but because we love one another. I don’t want to paint a too rosy picture here, this is the real world and every family has its problems — mine is no exception. But the point is that even in the messiness of everyday life, love manages to bind us together.

Compare that to our experience of church. Too often, it seems to me that what binds churches together is the regularity of meeting at a certain time on a Sunday. More often than not — in my experience at least — it’s not real bonds of love but institutional ties. That doesn’t mean there is no real love to be found, but that at the moment the institution is dominating.

It strikes me that one of the worst things that could have happened to the church is when it stopped meeting in people’s homes and started meeting in purpose-built buildings. A church which meets in a home is in a family context to begin with. A purpose-built building has become an institutional building. Long gone are the days of strong local communities who would build and maintain a local church as part of their community.

But imagine what church would be like if it had a ‘family’ feel, rather than an institutional one:

• freedom to meet when it is right and convenient;

• meeting together informally because we love one another, not just formal meetings;

• meeting together in homes;

• the pastors are the heads of the family, whose role is to help, support and guide the rest.

I appreciate that I’ve probably raised more questions than answers at this point! In particular I still want to examine the question, practically, of what this means for churches getting together. But I believe that the Bible does make clear that, whatever else we can say about church, and however we go about it, it should feel like a family rather than an institution. It is with this thought in mind that we can proceed to thinking about what a church gathering should look like.

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Footnotes

1. I put ‘church service’ in quotation marks because, as Tom Wadsworth point out, the gathering of a church in the New Testament is never called a ‘service’. That’s material for a future post in this series, but I want to flag up for the moment that ‘church services’ as we know them today are different from what the New Testament would have envisioned. ↩︎
2. See also Acts 20:20, “You know that I have not hesitated to preach anything that would be helpful to you but have taught you publicly and from house to house.” ↩︎