About House Churches in the Bible
Q: I can’t imagine that churches met in houses as much as you allege. It had to be only a temporary arrangement. Didn’t the early Christians meet in houses because of persecution?
TRW: In the New Testament, it’s clear that house gatherings were the standard meeting venue. They were not just a makeshift temporary convention. I know it sounds strange today, but house assemblies were the norm in the first century.
These verses identify gatherings in specific Christian houses:
Greet Prisca and Aquila (and) the church that is in their house. (Rom. 16:5)
Aquila and Prisca greet you … with the church that is in their house. (1 Cor. 16:19)
Greet … Nympha and the church that is in her house. (Col. 4:15)
To Philemon … and to the church in your house. (Phlm. 1:2)
If anyone … does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house. (2 Jn. 1:10)
Several other verses also indicate that house gatherings were common:
And suddenly a noise like a violent rushing wind came from heaven, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. (Acts 2:2)
Day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart … (Acts 2:46)
And every day, in the temple and from house to house, they did not stop teaching and preaching the good news of Jesus as the Christ. (Acts 5:42)
But Saul began ravaging the church, entering house after house; and he would drag away men and women and put them in prison. (Acts 8:3)
And when he realized this, he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John, who was also called Mark, where many were gathered together and were praying. (Acts 12:12)
They left the prison and entered the house of Lydia, and when they saw the brothers and sisters, they encouraged them and departed. (Acts 16:40)
And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, along with a large number of the God-fearing Greeks and a significant number of the leading women. But the Jews, becoming jealous and taking along some wicked men from the marketplace, formed a mob and set the city in an uproar; and they attacked the house of Jason and were seeking to bring them out to the people. (Acts 17:4-5)
Paul: “You yourselves know, from the first day that I set foot in Asia, how I was with you the whole time, serving the Lord with all humility and with tears and trials which came upon me through the plots of the Jews; how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was beneficial, and teaching you publicly and from house to house …” (Acts 20:18-20)
On the next day we left and came to Caesarea, and we entered the house of Philip the evangelist, who was one of the seven, and stayed with him. Now this man had four virgin daughters who were prophetesses. As we were staying there for some days, a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea … (Acts 21:8-10)
Because of Persecution?
Some have alleged that the early church met in homes because of persecution. Yes, the church was occasionally persecuted, and sometimes, meeting in a home may have provided some degree of privacy and shielding from government influence.
But it’s unlikely that the church met in homes so that they could hide from an oppressive government. In Acts 8:3, Saul persecuted the church, “entering house after house,” dragging away men and women and throwing them in prison. So, in this case, meeting in a house provided no protection from persecution.
The social situation then was dramatically different than today. In our fast-paced and residentially secluded culture, most people don’t know what’s happening with neighbors. But in the first century culture—with no trains, planes, or automobiles—people knew their neighbors. They saw their neighbors every day and took notice when neighbors had many guests in their house. That’s probably why the first-century house provided no guarantee of safety from persecution.
Besides, the notion that “they were persecuted” presumes that Christians—in every city throughout the Roman Empire—lived in a full-time, non-stop persecution environment. But that’s just not true.
In a recent book, Christian Persecution in Antiquity (Baylor, 2021), Wolfram Kinzig detailed all the available evidence of the nature of persecution in the first three centuries. He concluded that imperial persecution, while sometimes vicious, was only sporadic. For much of the time and in many places, the government was quite tolerant of Christians.
Homes: The First Choice
The scriptural evidence (see the verses above) strongly indicates that the church willingly embraced the home format from the very beginning. A house was not a makeshift temporary option that Christians tolerated. Rather, a home was the primary and natural place for Christians to gather. The “house to house” gathering habits of the earliest Christians (Acts 2:46; 5:42) was likely driven, not by persecution, but by a Spirit-led camaraderie, a burst of Christian hospitality, and a feeling that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ.
I’m not saying that a house was the only acceptable venue for meetings. I’m also not saying that other venues were forbidden. But since Christianity grew rapidly and geographically via house assemblies, we do well to consider their advantages.
The Significance of the House
In a scholarly article on “The Significance of the Early House Churches,” Floyd Filson, a renowned New Testament scholar of a century ago, said, “The New Testament church would be better understood if more attention were paid to the actual physical conditions under which the first Christians met and lived.” He added, “The creative and controlling aspects of their faith and life … found unhindered expression not in temple or synagogue but in the house gatherings.” (Floyd V. Filson, “The Significance of the Early House Churches,” Journal of Biblical Literature 58 (1939): 105-106, 109.)
More recently, Yale scholar Wayne Meeks described the house church as the “basic cell” of the early Christian movement, and “its nucleus” was an existing household. (Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 75.)
Why was the house so suitable for Christian gatherings? Brad Blue, another scholar who has studied early assemblies, noted that houses provided meal-preparation facilities for the Lord’s Supper and the ἀγάπη meal, as well as a comfortable and informal environment for facilitating fellowship. (Brad Blue, “The Influence of Jewish Worship on Luke’s Presentation of the Early Church,” in Witness to the Gospel: The Theology of Acts, ed. I. H. Marshall and David Peterson (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1998), 475, 486.)
A One-Anothering Assembly
The dozens of references to “one-anothering” in the New Testament also point to another advantage of a house venue. The home was an ideal relaxed setting for building relationships and fostering deeper personal interaction. Such interpersonal activity was obvious in the many NT references to one-anothering: “greet one another” (1 Pet. 5:14), “admonish one another” (Rom. 15:14; Col 3:16), “encourage one another” (1 Thess. 5:11; Heb. 3:13; 10:24-25), “be hospitable to one another” (1 Pet. 4:9), “teach one another” (Col. 3:16), “comfort one another” (1 Thess. 4:18), “confess your sins to one another” (James 5:16), etc.
A house gathering is not the only place for “one anothering,” but it is an ideal place for it. By contrast, a gathering in a holy sanctuary tends to limit genuine interactions and curtail the establishing of deep relationships. A man told me today that, in only two months, he and his wife developed a closer relationship with other Christians in a house format than they ever developed in a traditional church building setting after 20 years.
Confused by “Church”
It’s possible that some people can’t see the advantages of a house church because of the word ‘church’. In English, the word ‘church’ commonly connotes a sacred building. So, people often have a hard time thinking that a “house church” is “the real thing.”
However, in the New Testament, the word ‘church’ (Greek: ἐκκλησία) never refers to a building. Rather, as is widely known, the Greek word refers to an “assembly,” a “congregation,” or to a community of Christians in a given area. In reality, translators confuse the reader when they translate ἐκκλησία as “church.” As Yale scholar Wayne Meeks once said, translating ἐκκλησία as church “cannot fail to mislead.” (Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 108.)
The important element of the ἐκκλησία of the New Testament is the gathering, not the building. The sacred elements of the ἐκκλησία are the people, “the saints,” not the pews or the pulpit.
One of the major distinctive features of first-century Christianity was that it had no sacred building, and it had no sacred places, which was unusual to the surrounding pagan and Jewish culture. Rather, the Christian movement was built upon loyalty to one another, not loyalty to a sacred place.
These are just some of the important reasons why the first-century church met in homes. These houses were not viewed as makeshift or temporary. They were actually ideal.
For more on this topic, watch my video, One-Anothering in the Ekklesia on YouTube.