Early Christian gatherings for worship included assemblies for the Lord’s Supper, for the sharing of spiritual gifts, and for the baptism of new believers. The discussion of these assemblies in the New Testament, especially the writings of Paul, is clarified when we understand that some of these descriptions apply to the gathering of the citywide church, while others refer to the setting of the local house church.
The Corinthian correspondence is our main source for understanding what went on at a Christian gathering. The data, however, is fragmentary mostly because Paul did not need to describe the details of the assembly to his readers. Rather, he had to deal with problems. Nor does Paul anywhere tell us clearly about assembly activities specific to the house churches as different from those of local churches. Barring any information that would allow us to distinguish between the two assemblies, we must suppose that the two types of assemblies basically functioned the same way. Except for activities related to the size of the assembly and the availability of the full range of gifted persons, the house church, we must assume, did the same things as the local church.
The two most important descriptions of the Christian assembly, those in 1 Corinthians 11:17–34 and 1 Corinthians 14, both describe citywide meetings. Dealing with the Lord’s Supper, Paul begins, “When you come together in the same place” (1 Cor. 11:20 author’s translation). Speaking of the exercises of tongues and prophecy, Paul explicitly refers to the whole church (hē ekklēsia holē) coming together in the same place (1 Cor. 14:23). In both references, however, Paul has a specific reason for dealing with the city church. For the Lord’s Supper, Paul wants to deal with the problem of the rich and the poor coming together, a situation virtually inevitable for a citywide assembly and one less likely to occur in the house church. For the tongues and prophecy assembly, Paul wants to picture an outsider’s reaction to the two forms of activity. Again such a situation would be more likely to occur at the large gathering of the local church than in the privacy of a house church. Because Paul thus describes the Lord’s Supper and the celebration of the gifts at the level of the local church, we cannot immediately conclude that those types of celebrations occurred only on that level.
The Lord’s Supper. On the contrary, the details of Paul’s description of the Lord’s Supper, especially when contrasted with later descriptions of the ritualized Eucharist, strongly suggest the individual household as the normal environment. Paul describes a full meal. His expression for celebrating the Lord’s Supper is kuriakon deipnon phagein. The Greek word deipnon indicates the main meal, usually in the evening (cf. Luke 14:12; John 13:4; 21:20). The word describing participating in this supper is the normal word for “eating” (phagein). In contrast, Justin, writing about a century later, describes participating in the now ritualized Eucharist as “sharing.”
The entire focus of Paul is on the manner of eating, and specifically how the Christians relate to each other in this eating. He is concerned about who goes hungry and who fills up. Later descriptions of Eucharist focus almost entirely on the manner in which an official is “to conduct the Eucharist” (eucharistein, Didachē 9–10; Justin, Apology I, 67). Paul is completely silent about any regular presider or official at this event. In contrast, the Didachē (late first century) speaks of prophets offering Eucharist (10:7), and Justin refers to “the president” (ho proestōs) as the one who prays over the bread and wine.
Even the action with the bread and wine recalls a family meal in a Jewish home. Breaking and distributing bread was a normal way of beginning a meal in a Jewish home of the time, just as sharing a cup of wine was the usual way of ending a meal. For each gesture, special blessings were said. In effect, it becomes difficult to visualize how such a meal could have taken place with a group as large as “the whole church.” Even supposing a very large dining room and a very generous host, we are faced with logistic problems most people are willing to face only on special occasions.
Once the Lord’s Supper became a stylized meal, with a chip of bread and a sip of wine, a weekly gathering of a large group became feasible. Justin does, in fact, speak of a ritualized weekly eucharistic gathering, a blessing, and a sharing of bread and wine without any accompanying meal “on the Day of the Sun.” By Justin’s time, the Eucharist had been separated from the supper.
A weekly “Lord’s Supper” or “breaking of bread,” however, appears much earlier. Acts speaks of Paul at Troas gathering on the first day of the week “to break bread” (20:7). Other early texts speak of Christians celebrating on this day. If there was a weekly Lord’s Supper, then, it most likely was in the individual household church. Special occasions would have called for a gathering of the whole church for this celebration, such as Paul directly addresses in 1 Corinthians 11.
Nevertheless, a real tendency toward larger gatherings for the Lord’s Supper appears in Paul’s interpretation of the meaning of this action:
Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks, participation [koinōnia] in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break participation [koinōnia] in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf. (1 Cor. 10:16–17)
Paul sees this action as an activity and a realization of the unity of the body of Christ. Paul draws up this picture by the contrast between “the many” and “the one.” The more included in “the many,” the more dramatic becomes the realization of “the one.” It is to the whole Corinthian church that Paul addresses the words “Now you are the body of Christ” (1 Cor. 12:27). It would seem, therefore, he has in mind the whole Corinthian church as involved in the blessing of the cup and the breaking of the bread.
Sharing the Gifts. Paul’s other major reference to the Christian gathering describes the activity of sharing the gifts of the Spirit:
When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church. (1 Cor. 14:26)
Paul then gives precise instructions regarding tongues and prophecy along with their corresponding gifts of interpretation and discernment (14:26–33, 37–40).
The reference to “a hymn” (Greek psalmos) may allude to the Christian use of the Jewish psalter, or it may indicate the development of Christian compositions. Colossians 3:16 speaks of “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” by which Christians taught and admonished each other as well as praised God. Christian poetic compositions have in fact been identified in the New Testament, such as those in Philippians 2:6–22 or Colossians 1:15–20.
The “instruction” must have included stories about Jesus as well as the development of a Christian code of morality, whereas “a revelation” probably involved apocalyptic type predictions of things to come as well as the dramatic presentation of “a word of the Lord” (cf. 1 Cor. 7:12, 25).
The number of Old Testament citations in the letters of Paul gives us a clue to the importance of Scripture in the Pauline churches. The scriptural interpretation was probably the province of “the teacher” (cf. the example of Apollos, Acts 18:24). Full-blown scriptural homilies can be identified in Paul’s very letters, for example, 1 Corinthians 1:18–2:16 or Romans 4:1–25. Composed prior to the letters in which they are found, these homilies most likely were delivered to church assemblies as exercises of Paul’s gift of teaching.
A “tongue” and its “interpretation” formed part of the prayers of the community. Whether in the ecstatic form of “tongues” or in the communicable form of intelligent speech, prayer must have occupied a large part of the Christian gathering. Paul’s letters echo “blessings” (2 Cor. 1:3–7) and “doxologies” (Rom. 7:25; 16:25–27; 1 Cor. 15:57), as well as the Aramaic acclamations that stemmed from the earliest Christians (Gal. 1:5; 1 Cor. 16:22; Rom. 8:15).
In 1 Corinthians 14 Paul dwells on the exercise of both “tongues” and “prophecy” during the Christian assembly. We get the impression from Paul’s emphasis that “tongues” and “prophecy” occupied an important place in the Corinthian assembly. The rules for order apply in a particular way to the city-wide assembly, “Two or three prophets should speak, and the others should weigh carefully what is said” (14:29). The private house church need hardly worry about such an abundance of prophets.
On the other hand, his instructions about prophecy in 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 might concern primarily the exercise of this gift in the private house church. His comments on the citywide gathering begin explicitly only at 11:17. In the preceding verses, Paul deals with both men and women prophesying, in apparent and baffling contradiction to his later prohibition against women speaking in church (14:33–36). The more drastic resolution to this contradiction is to see 14:33–36 as a later addition to the letter. An alternative could be to see the earlier instruction about women prophets as dealing with activities in the private house church.
Whether in the private house church or the city-wide gathering, the orientation of the assembly was praising God while teaching or admonishing one another. Building up the body was the goal of this gathering and the norm of its functions. The interaction among believers reflected the interaction between God and the believer. The family language of kinship that described the bonds among believers paralleled the family language describing the love of God for his people and the love of a father for his children (Rom. 8:14, 16, 19, 21; 9:8, 26; 1 Cor. 8:6; Phil. 2:15; Gal. 3:26–4:8).
The Christian gatherings under Paul may not have even looked like a religion to an outsider. The Christians had no shrines, temples, cult statues, priests, or sacrifices. For Christians, Paul writes, the community is the temple:
Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple of God [naos theou] and that God’s Spirit lives in you? … God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple. (1 Cor. 3:16–17)
One’s whole life makes up worship and sacrifice:
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices [thusian], holy [hagian] and pleasing to God, as your spiritual worship [latreian]. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Rom. 12:1–2)
The Christian gathering as a sharing of gifts, as an exercise in mutual “edification,” was for Paul, then, an act of worship. Sacred space was not an issue. The assembly was its own sanctuary. Hence even the family dining room was an appropriate place for church.
Were these “sharing the gift” assemblies distinct from the “Lord’s Supper” assemblies? Paul treats them separately in his discussion of the needed reforms, and he never speaks about a transition from one type of activity to the other. The principal argument for seeing two separate assemblies for the two types of church activities rests on another issue, namely, the degree to which the Lord’s supper excluded outsiders. We must first examine this issue.
Exclusiveness at the Assemblies? Paul makes mention of the presence of outsiders at the “gifts assemblies,” at least those involving tongues and prophecies:
So if the whole church comes together and everyone speaks in tongues, and some who do not understand or some unbelievers come in, will they not say that you are out of your mind? But if an unbeliever or someone who does not understand comes in while everybody is prophesying, he will be convinced by all that he is a sinner and will be judged by all.… So he will fall down and worship God, exclaiming, “God is really among you!” (1 Cor. 14:23–25)
Would Paul or the Corinthians have wanted outsiders at the Lord’s Supper, where the solidarity or “body” of Christians appeared to be the objective of the service and the norm of its conduct? The only exclusion Paul associates with the Lord’s Supper is an exclusion of idolatry:
You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons. (1 Cor. 10:21)
Dealing with meals in general, Paul speaks also of excluding a member of the community as a means of correcting immorality: “… you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral, greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat” (1 Cor. 5:11).
Qualifying these instructions immediately before and immediately afterward, however, Paul points out that he is not intending this discipline for outsiders (5:10, 12).
As we have seen, the Pauline church did not exclude the outsider from its meetings (1 Cor. 14:23). General social relationships like those involving meals with non-Christians may have posed some serious difficulties but were accepted as normal (1 Cor. 10:23–33). Erastos, the city treasurer of Corinth, would certainly have had to resign his position was he unable to associate in a whole range of meals and other activities with his pagan peers.
One or Two Assemblies? If the argument concerning outsiders does not demand our seeing two assemblies for the Lord’s Supper and for the sharing of the gifts, do we have any indication of both activities occurring in one assembly? While Paul does not explicitly relate the two activities, his parallel use of words in dealing with the two does in fact suggest their close connection. The term “to gather,” sunerchesthai, is used for the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:17–18, 20, 33–34) and for the sharing of the gifts (1 Cor. 14:23, 26). Forcefully disagreeing with the Corinthians, Paul writes,
When you gather in the same place, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper, because each of you rushes to take your own supper. (1 Cor. 11:20 author’s translation)
The strength of Paul’s rebuke depends on the presupposition on the part of the Corinthians, namely when they did gather epi to auto (in the same place), it was their intention to eat the Lord’s Supper. Paul, however, tells the same group,
When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church. (1 Cor. 14:26)
It is the theme of “the body” (to sōma) that particularly links the Lord’s Supper with the sharing of the gifts. The whole discussion of the organic unity of the diverse gifts centers around Paul’s identification of the assembly as “the body of Christ” (12:12–30, esp. 12:27). The “body of Christ” is in fact the gathering of Christians, who all “have been watered by the same Spirit” and thus have been incorporated by baptism into this body (12:13), who then as gifted with diverse powers and roles need each other and care for each other (12:21, 25).
Paul earlier roots the establishment of the “one body” with participating in the Lord’s Supper. Christians are one body because they partake of the one bread (10:17).
If Paul then appeals to the unity of the body as the guiding idea for the proper sharing of gifts, it seems likely that he expected the sharing of the gifts and the Lord’s Supper to go together. If the two types of activities went together at the same gathering, most likely the sharings of prophecy, teachings, tongues, and other services of the Word followed that of the Lord’s Supper. The hint we have of this comes from those who arrived late and had nothing to eat (1 Cor. 11:21, 33). If the meal followed the “Word service,” as is often supposed, then these people would be late for everything. Paul wants the Corinthians to wait before starting, that is, before beginning to eat the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:21, 33).
Baptismal Assemblies. Along with the Lord’s Supper, baptism appears in Paul’s writings as one of the official actions of the church. In the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians, Paul refers several times to baptism (1:13–17), mentioning how he personally baptized Crispus and Gaius along with the house of Stephanas (1:14–16), but that his mission was to preach, not to baptize (1:17). He was worried about factions arising among the Corinthians from an overemphasis on the person administering baptism (1:13).
Christian baptism is specifically a baptism “into Christ” (Gal. 3:27; Rom. 6:3), which, Paul explains, is a baptism “into his death.” It is a way of being “buried with Christ” (Rom. 6:3; Col. 2:12). For Paul baptism is likewise a baptism “into one body,” an incorporation into that diverse and organic unity that is the church with all the gifts of its members, “Jew or Greek, slave or free.” Christians are baptized “in the Spirit,” for baptism is being “given the one Spirit to drink” (1 Cor. 12:13).
The comparisons made between baptism and entering the tomb of Christ suggest immersion underwater. This does not sound like the activity that could take place at a house church or even at the meeting of the city church at a house. The house impluvium—the small pool in the courtyard—would be only a few feet deep. Furthermore, an assembly of this sort might not be the appropriate place for the nudity generally involved in baptism.
To my knowledge, the earliest indications we have of a setting for Christian baptism come from Justin, some one hundred years after Paul. Writing about the practice in Rome, Justin mentions the preliminary instructions and communal prayers, and fasting.
Then they are led by us to where there is water, and they are reborn in the same manner of regeneration by which we ourselves have been reborn. For they are then given washing in the water in the name of God the father and master of all, of our savior Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit.
This place “where there is water” may be the public bath, over which, according to Justin, the church of Rome assembled.
When the Didachē allows for different kinds of water in which to baptize and specifically describes pouring water on the head of the new Christian, it does not indicate any place where this is to happen. Baptism by pouring, however, could allow baptism to take place in the church. By the third century, rooms would be designed in churches specifically for baptisms, such as that in the church of Dura-Europos.