Church for Every Context. Michael Moynagh
took time in weighing up matters before becoming a believer (for example Acts 13.12). As now, people came to faith in different ways.
For reflection
Paul’s apparent practices of listening (including to ‘persons of peace’), loving and serving, building community, helping people to explore the possibility of faith and forming new gatherings in the heart of life are all echoed in Chapter 11, which discusses the birthing of contextual church among people with little or no Christian background. Did Paul stumble upon a series of practices that make sense whenever churches are founded in pioneer contexts?
Culture-specific churches?
Were Paul’s new churches built around homogeneous people groups – that is, ‘a section of society in which all the members have some characteristic in common’? (McGavran, 1980, p. 95) Schnabel believes not. Paul was committed to a church in which all social divisions were overcome. He did not establish separate local congregations for Jews and Gentiles, slaves and freemen, the rich and the poor. He wanted all to be one in Christ Jesus – Galatians 3.28 (Schnabel, 2008, pp. 404–13).
Jerusalem and Antioch
However, a close reading of the New Testament suggests that homogeneous congregations were very much part of the picture. Gehring argues that Acts 2.46 portrays the Jerusalem church both coming together as the whole church in the temple and meeting as small house churches in private homes (Gehring, 2004, p. 83). These house churches were scattered round the city and would have drawn in people from different networks. Families sharing the same courtyard may have broken bread together, for example (Finger, 2007, p. 238).
Jewish synagogues often met in people’s homes. The Talmudic assertion that there were 390 synagogues in first-century Jerusalem may have been an exaggeration, but there were certainly a considerable number meeting in various parts of the city and catering for worshippers from different social backgrounds.
Acts 6.9 may be referring to no less than five synagogues: one for the freedmen, one for the people from Cyrenaica, one for Alexandrians, one for those from Cilicia and one for those from Asia. (Fiensy, 1995, p. 233)
If the first Jewish churches were influenced by the synagogues, which were the closest model to hand, and followed a similar pattern of attracting people from a specific social group, they would indeed have been homogeneous units. Yet importantly, these units also came together ‘every day’ in the temple courts. Here the different social groupings would have intermingled and the unity of believers been expressed.
The situation in Antioch appears to have been much the same. Gehring believes that Galatians 2.11–4 assumes that a number of house churches existed in Antioch. Peter was accustomed to eating with the Gentiles. When challenged by the Jewish believers from Jerusalem, he began to have table fellowship exclusively with the Jews, a practice made possible by Christians gathering in different homes (Gehring, 2004, p. 112).
Antioch was the third or fourth largest city in the empire and had 18 ethnic quarters (Drane, 2011, p. 160). Jewish synagogues were separated according to ethnic background (Gehring, 2004, p. 113), and it is reasonable to assume that this was true also of the house churches. Ethnic and other social groupings would have lived in different parts of the city, and it would have been natural – if only for convenience – for each house gathering to have drawn in people from its vicinity and from its family and friendship networks.
Gehring does not argue this last point. Indeed, he believes that such separation was improbable because it would have created social barriers in a church that, from its beginning, had been anxious to pull barriers down. Yet as he himself points out (p. 113), the confrontation between Paul and Peter took place in front of the whole Antiochene church – ‘in front of them all’ (Gal. 2.14). This suggests that, as in Jerusalem, all the house churches gathered together from time to time. It was in this setting that people from different ethnic and social contexts most likely met together and expressed their oneness in Christ.
Rome
In Rome there was a similar pattern of scattered house-based churches. Robert Jewett has suggested that the bulk of the early Christians lived in the slum districts of Rome. Two-thirds of the names in Romans 16 indicate a Greek rather than Latin background, which suggests they were immigrants. Of the 13 names about which something certain can be said, nine have slave origin (Jewett, 2007, p. 63).
Christians in slum neighbourhoods would have met either in one of the workshop areas on the ground floor of a tenement block, or in a temporarily cleared space on one of the upper floors. The rooms on these floors were too small to accommodate a church, but – according to Jewett – the partitions between rooms were flimsy. Neighbouring families, each occupying one tiny room, may have temporarily removed the partitions to create a large enough space to hold perhaps 10 to 20 people,14 who would typically have lived nearby and whose social and ethnic backgrounds would have had much in common.
In the wealthier areas of Rome were luxury apartments and for the very rich entire houses. Some churches met in these parts of the city (Jewett, 2007, p. 64–5), drawing on different networks than the tenement churches. In addition to slaves and family members, the head of the household would have had a number of clients, reflecting the ubiquitous system of patronage. Some of these almost certainly would have attended the church.
There is no evidence that the house churches periodically met together, but they were clearly well networked. Paul could address his letter ‘to all in Rome’ (Rom. 1.7), which implies that the letter was passed from gathering to gathering. If they were not already meeting together, did Paul encourage them to do so when he arrived in Rome?
Paul’s churches
Certainly the churches that he founded continued the Jerusalem and Antioch practice of both meeting separately in homes and meeting together. ‘The household was much broader than the family in modern Western societies, including not only immediate relatives but also slaves, freemen, hired workers, and sometimes tenants and partners in trade or craft’ (Meeks, 2003, pp. 75–6). Patronage networks were important, too. New house churches, therefore, were ‘inserted into or superimposed upon an existing network of relationships’ (p. 76). In other words, they were largely comprised of homogeneous people groups, formed around hierarchical ties.
It is clear from 1 Corinthians 14.23, where Paul writes of the ‘whole church’ coming together, that these separate house gatherings periodically met as a single group, probably in a large home such as the one apparently owned by Gaius. In the concluding section of Romans, most probably written in Corinth, Paul sends greeting from Gaius, whose hospitality ‘the whole church here’ enjoyed (Romans 16.23). ‘In the Greek Old Testament this expression consistently refers to an assembly of all Israel; thus it must be the totality of Christians in Corinth which is in view’ (Banks, 1980, p. 38).
The meeting of the Ephesian elders in Acts 20 is suggestive. Luke says that ‘Paul sent to Ephesus for the elders of the church’ (v. 17). The reference is to the church as a single unit, a thought echoed in verse 28, where Paul urged the elders to keep watch over ‘the flock’, again singular. Evidently the house churches in Ephesus, which presumably emerged from the homes Paul visited in verse 20, had a sense of themselves as a citywide entity, a self-perception