Properly applying New Testament examples and instructions today requires noticing what obedience looked like then. Misreading the original situation throws everything off.
For example, people sometimes cite 1 Timothy 2:9 as backing for their claim that the young women should not show inordinate amounts of skin. Other Christians, especially those preoccupied with the failings of “purity culture,” will point out (correctly!) that in the original context, 1 Timothy 2:9 isn’t talking about necklines and hemlines. Indeed, it isn’t talking about sexual modesty at all. Taken in cultural context, the verse is clearly speaking to ostentatious displays of wealth. Thus far, the critics of purity culture are correct. But they stop thinking too soon.
Once we grasp the original situation and the clear intent of the command, we can see how the same principles forbidding ostentatious displays of wealth also apply to ostentatious displays of skin. True, the text is not directly talking about skin, but any ostentatious display runs afoul of the principle Paul sets forth. Once we grasp that, applications to other ostentatious displays (dietary choices, say) are easier to see. People who just assume “modest” means necklines and hemlines miss the primary interpretation of the text; people who understand that it’s talking about wealth, but stop there, are making a different mistake. But both of them are missing the point, and cheat themselves of the full range of application.
We make a similar set of errors when we read the household codes as though they’re addressed to a 1950s situation where men “go to work” at the plant or the office, and women “stay home;” in fact, those codes are addressed to productive households. Grasping that was a major reformation in the way my own household worked — and that set of changes was a lot of fun. So anytime I find something that’s widely different in New Testament practice than how we do it today, I get very interested: in what ways are we reading the Bible as though it’s talking about our contemporary practice when it’s not? What lessons are there to learn? What do I need to repent of?
When it comes to church praxis, there’s a really big one: Every single church in the New Testament met in homes. In every attested case where we used larger spaces (the School of Tyrannus in Ephesus, the Temple in Jerusalem), the text pointedly tells us that those churches also met in homes (Acts 2:46, 20:20). Today, we have inverted New Testament practice. We think of the big gathering in a public building as inevitable, the “real” church service, and the small-group gathering in a home as an optional add-on — nice to have, perhaps even important, but not what church really is.
I think it’s worth spending some time with this observation, because in North America, we tend to read the church epistles’ instructions about church life as though they were addressed to bodies of a few hundred people who meet in white buildings with steeples. For all intents and purposes, we have forgotten that the original authors and readers had in mind a different kind of social organization altogether.
It has been easy to forget, because today in the Christian West we put up dedicated buildings everywhere we go. You could write a pretty thorough history of Christianity in Europe, or America’s Westward expansion, or missions in sub-Saharan Africa, just by telling the story of the buildings Christians have built. Having dedicated space for worship and education of believers is very useful, and not that difficult to do…in areas controlled by the Christian West. Why wouldn’t everyone have done the same, even back in the first century?
Because in our first 300 years, we were small, intermittently persecuted, and semilegal. There is zero evidence that any first-century church ever had a building of its own. The oldest known Christian church building is the Dura-Europos church in Syria, which dates to the middle of the third century. The oldest known purpose-built Christian church structure is the Aquaba church, which dates to the dawn of the fourth century. In New Testament times, we met in homes (see Acts 2:2, 46; 5:42, 12:12, 20:20, Rom. 16:5, 1 Cor. 16:19, Col. 4:15, Philemon 2).
As I mentioned above, even when we had access to large mixed-use communal spaces, we met in homes. The Jerusalem church made extensive use of Solomon’s Porch before the persecution that broke out in Acts 6-7, but Acts clearly tells us they were also meeting from house to house (Acts 2:46). Paul regularly evangelized in synagogues until he inevitably got kicked out, but in Ephesus, he was able to use the School of Tyrannus after he left the synagogue. There, too, he taught from house to house (Acts 20:20). As obvious as it might be to us that we could have one big meeting in a dedicated space once a week, that’s just not what they actually did. That seems noteworthy.
The New Testament simply knows nothing of our modern custom of gathering in large numbers and not in homes. In cities where the gospel made more progress (like Ephesus) and the converts became numerous, they thought of themselves as one church (“the church in Ephesus”) that met in multiple homes across the city (again, see Acts 20:20). Thinking of all the separate gatherings as a single church is another thing we wouldn’t do in the territorial post-Great-Schism hellscape that is modern church praxis, but that’s another post. For today, the point is pretty simple: all the commands in the church epistles are addressed to churches that gathered in homes, and it is within the life of such churches that those commands were first obeyed.
I’ve noticed a trend when I bring this observation up in different forums: people hate it. American churchmen seem to be allergic to it. And this is before I ever get to any application. Just the observation seems to provoke pretty strong hostility. People often immediately leap to a straw-man. They’ll act like I’m saying that the first-century church met exclusively in homes, that large gatherings aren’t valid or aren’t church, or some other easily refuted claim. No. I haven’t said that it’s wrong to meet in a building, or that the early church didn’t do that, or that nobody should have a large church. At this point I’m just observing what’s here in the text. I haven’t even entertained the question of what we ought to do with a church that has prospects of growing that large, which God sometimes does; He grew the Jerusalem church by 3,000 on the day of Pentecost alone! (And they still met in homes; see Acts 2:46!)
My first point here is not a prescription for ecclesiology; it’s a lesson in practical hermeneutics. We read the church epistles as if they were composed under the same material circumstances that we face today, and in fact they weren’t. As a matter of historical fact, this is simply not controversial. So why are we reflexively hostile to it? Christian men wore tunics in the first century, not pants; nobody gets mad when you point that out. So what is it about this observation that people find so repellent?
I think they realize, instinctively, that this is a different sort of business than tunics vs. pants. Nobody thinks that the New Testament is talking about pants. But we do think that the New Testament is talking about churches–what we think of as churches. We’ve redefined the biblical word such that our common usage is not what the text is talking about. I think we instinctively realize that will have implications we can’t foresee, and it makes us uncomfortable.
So what are the implications?
To answer that, think about the differences between a large gathering of a couple hundred (or more) people in a public building versus a gathering of, say, 20-50 people in a home. Here’s one important difference: home gatherings, even good-sized ones, are small enough that the participants get to know each other. The New Testament commands around the shared life of the Body are all assuming a context where the participants know each other.
“Do good to all, but especially to those who are of the household of faith” and “Remember to do good and to share” are not given presupposing that you’re gathering in an auditorium of strangers; they presuppose that you will know the lives of the people around you: what they do, what they need, and how you might best help. “Consider one another in order to stir up love and good deeds” presupposes that you spend enough time with people to be able to study them and know them well enough to intervene in meaningful ways.
“Encouraging one another daily” presupposes that you see one another daily. Hebrews 3 doesn’t mean that every member of the church has to see every other member of the church every single day, but it certainly does mean that church members should expect to see other church members every day. You have to ask: if you only see your fellow believers once a week in an auditorium where you barely know anyone, in what meaningful sense are you obeying the command?
And likewise for the rest. If you don’t know the people you go to church with, or you have vague surface-level interactions with them, how are you going to meaningfully stir them up to love and good deeds? How will you do good to God’s people and share with them if you don’t know what they need? It won’t do to say, “Well, I do encourage them when I see them (once a week).” “I do share when I know of a need (which is almost never).” “I happily encourage good deeds in a generic, one-size-fits-most kind of way.” Do we seriously think this is the Body life that the New Testament is encouraging us toward?
To be clear, I’m not saying that big churches are wrong. I used to be a snob about that, and I had to repent. I watched a big church here in the Denver area rescue a friend of mine through their thriving small-group ministry. That church is so big it looks like an airport concourse inside. That big building was what got my friend in the door; he was looking for a place to blend into the crowd. But at the doorway, a greeter singled him out, connected him to a small-group leader, and that small group became his community. Given what was going on for my friend at the time, I’m pretty sure that church saved his life.
So I’m not saying that these biblical commands can’t be done in a big-church context. But they really can’t be done in a room full of 700 strangers, with the worship band cranked up so loud that you can’t hear the people singing on either side of you. Participatory groups where people know each other are the context for the commands, and if we’re going to obey the commands, then we need such groups, one way or another. It may not matter whether the groups meet in a fellowship hall at Airport Church or at Denny’s or in a living room, but we can’t do without them.
So the next question is, how do we get there? It’s convenient to want the church staff to put together a program…perhaps a bit too convenient. If we are the church, and if the need of the hour is small groups of believers that know and encourage one another, what’s stopping us? It’s probably not the church staff. Let’s take some responsibility here.
We can start by taking another look at things we’re already doing. We’re going to educate our children anyway; can we do that together? We’re going to start businesses; is there work we can join forces on? We’re going to buy groceries; can we develop a food co-op based on buying staples together? What else are we doing anyway that we might do together?
There’s a reason that paragraph is all questions, no answers: I couldn’t possibly know the answers for any given community. I’m doing well just to have a few answers for mine. This isn’t a McDonaldized Christianity; I have no idea what will work in your context. But I do know that God blesses our efforts to fulfill His commands. Let’s get to it—together!
