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The Process of Building and Renovating a Church

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The article illustrates the importance of identifying a process for making decisions in building and renovation projects. The final product will satisfy the community’s needs only in proportion to the time spent in soliciting opinions, educating the members, and consulting experts.

Stakes are high when modifying worship patterns. The way people worship does not just reflect their beliefs—it cultivates and shapes those beliefs as well. The early church identified this mutual interaction between the liturgy and faith through reflecting on its own experience. The contemporary church is recovering the significance of this insight as it applies it to the design or redesign of a place of worship. To move ceremonial objects in a church, let alone to shift the walls or the orientation in a worship space moves sensibilities in ways that help or hinder. How do we judge what assists or obstructs? Who makes these judgments?

For eight years I have been helping communities throughout the United States build or renovate their places of worship. As a consultant, I came to each group wanting to listen to the members’ expectations about their place for prayer. As a liturgist, I responded with the best of my training, in hopes that the final product would embody informed judgments and serve generations of Christians well.

After working with diverse communities, I have noticed a pattern that deflates spirits and depletes energies. I have confirmed this pattern with my liturgical colleagues. I wondered whether it would help if someone who regularly encounters these problems could alert those who are approaching the renovation or building of a church. The situation seems parallel to offering assistance to a couple approaching marriage. How can a young couple know the potential problems if they have never been married before or have never been part of the preparations for a family member’s or friend’s wedding? The same is true for renovating or building a church. How can a parish community know the pitfalls if it has never ventured into such a project before?

There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Too often, each worshiping community takes up the task of renovating or building a church as if it has never been done before. Communities need not work in a vacuum; information is available upon which to base informed decision making.

“Never Again”

Renovating or building worship space can be like having a baby. Sometimes it is hard to know what is going on. Sometimes it just hurts. Sometimes the stirring of new life is felt along with the sense that this might work and come out all right after all. When the renovation or building comes to term, the feeling is—one hopes—that it was all worth it. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

The quality of the product depends upon the quality of the process. If the method of approaching the renovation or building is slipshod, the end product will likely be the same. As James White put it in Introduction to Christian Worship, “The process is as important as the product—especially when it comes to the people of God collaborating around the design of their space for worship.” What good is it if Christians go for the jugular in order to build a lovely church where they can celebrate their care for God and for one another? It happens all the time. Christian, atheist, and other-than-Christian architects and engineers have told me they approach the building of a church as if they are daring to go where angels fear to tread.

Who has the ultimate decision-making power? This should be clear to all from the outset. Too often, confusion reigns in this area and various individuals or groups misconstrue their roles as deliberative rather than consultative. Will final decisions be made by the pastor or by some committee? Are there constraints (e.g., the budget) over which the local community has little or no control? Is it out of the question, for reasons beyond local control, to consider a building on the property other than the existing one? Will eventual decisions made at the local church level need additional approval from some hierarchical body within the Christian tradition? Someone needs to offer a clear lead. Presenting the method or approach for decision making clearly can help both to allay fears and to provide data for a choice to get involved. Those convening the process need to think and plan carefully before beginning. Muddling through these questions with a large group of people leaves a wake of dead bodies or, more accurately, broken spirits. To proceed intelligently, a community may need outside assistance if local leaders have little expertise in renovating or building churches. This is all the more reason to proceed with caution and not in haste.

Let Every Worshiper Speak

Before renovating or building a church, everyone who desires to pray in the new worship space ought to be invited to speak his or her mind. Whoever chooses to be part of the smaller group overseeing the project needs to develop the skills of listening to worshipers who wish to speak. No matter how kooky or strange a reflection may seem, it still needs to be received with care, even if not with agreement. It is not helpful to offer impulsive responses while listening. There is no need for immediate judgment and quick closure. If people perceive, even incorrectly, that the pastor or some select group is attempting to railroad something through, they can react as if someone is running away with a precious part of their lives. If you do not give people the time and space to voice their concerns and to sense that their perspectives are considered, you seed the project with disaster.

Caution: Some people interpret careful listening as implicit agreement with what has been spoken. In one way or another, after all, have had their chance to speak and to be heard, the pastor or project leader needs to speak and to be heard. Without becoming defensive, the leader needs to provide some direction (at least concerning method) by way of response. Leaders need to make it clear that the project will not be the result of each person having an equal voice. The process for building or renovating a church is not democratic. Many Christians in the United States find the non-democratic process difficult to accept because it is so different from other parts of their life. Following the culture in this instance, at least uncritically, does not serve a community well.

Solicit the view of each person, listen to it, and promise to take it into consideration. But do not in any way pacify people in the short term with an ambiguous response that could be misconstrued to mean “Your way will win in the end” or “If you just convince enough people (and maybe circulate a petition), then you can get your way.” The all too common dynamic of “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” breeds an unhealthy spirit of competition and, more importantly, divides a community. A building project should not be a contest of wills. However, inviting opinions about what to do with the community’s worship space is potentially explosive. The person in charge needs to be politically savvy and must be able to make clear which norms must be used when making decisions.

Knowledge of Criteria

In the end, the spectrum of opinions needs to be sifted in light of a hierarchy of criteria, the most decisive of which are liturgical. Surely there are competing values: aesthetics (what individuals consider pleasing); devotional taste (how individuals prefer to relate to God and others in the church); cultural sensibilities (what people expect because of culture and custom); ecclesial understanding (what people believe about the relationships within the church—lay with clergy, the assembly with God, worshipers with each other); and financial realities (what people consider essential given limited funds, what people would want if additional sources of revenue could be found).

Once the consultation is completed, the liturgical criteria must be given priority. Values other than liturgical ones do matter and must temper decisions by, at the very least, improving the quality of understanding between the worshipers and the leadership. Values other than the liturgical ones, though, should not be determinant.

One of the most effective and liberating tools the church has at its disposal is knowledge. From a broad-based knowledge of liturgy, people can make informed choices for their renovation or building projects. If knowledgeable people are not available locally, the parish should invite competent outsiders to help the members, or at least the leader, understand more about the liturgical principles operative in this situation. For example, in the Roman Catholic tradition, those who will deliberate and decide upon the eventual shape of worship space need to understand, at the very least, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy and Environment and Art in Catholic Worship. Structural engineers, artistic consultants, or architects should not be given the power to make decisions without demonstrating knowledge of the liturgical criteria.

Often I have seen well-intentioned but undereducated leaders of a renovation or building project relinquish decision-making power to individuals who claim liturgical competence. In reality, these artisans have made choices in brick and mortar, wood, and glass that betray priorities other than the liturgical ones. The end product, while lovely in its own way, does not serve the gathered community at prayer. Having a beautiful building does not necessarily mean having a good place for worship (see Bill Brown, AIA, “Space as Servant of the Assembly,” in Building and Renovation Kit for Places of Catholic Worship).

Timing

Timing is no small issue when modifying or building a church. It takes time to raise the funds necessary to complete the project. It takes time to raise the consciousness of those worshipers who are ready and willing to learn. If the leaders show a desire to learn, this will go a long way in fostering the receptivity of the worshipers to learning and possible change. The leaders must show that they do not know it all. Learning needs to happen on many fronts. Some individuals will not be ready and willing to learn more about liturgy but will want only to voice their preconceptions. Others will grow through the intelligent presentation of liturgical information, provided you offer it with care. This will take time. Those who tend to prefer quick decisions and action may be hard-pressed by the extended efforts needed to educate others. But the time and the effort put forth to help others understand are worth the trouble.

A few years ago, I explained to a beloved aunt the thinking behind the renovation of a church on which I had worked. With exasperation, she stated passionately her desire for the traditional church. I realized that my heart and my head were responding in different ways. With my heart, I felt compassion for my aunt who did not like this unfamiliar approach to how a church “should” look. With my head, I knew that traditional goes beyond the twentieth century and that the thinking behind the renovation I had explained was rooted in early church understanding and practice.

How traditional should Christians be? What should educated Christians use as the ultimate criteria for the design of liturgical space? The best of contemporary liturgical thinking has patristic roots. All the same, we need to be patient with people, like my aunt, who feel less and less at home in places of worship that are outside their experience. Feelings cannot be rationalized away, but people can be invited to reexamine them in light of new data. On many occasions, new learning has served to initiate remarkable movement. Will everyone learn? No, of course not. Will some people reconsider their perspectives in light of education? Yes. Will the numbers be sufficient to justify the time it took to offer education? As the American educator, Derek Bok said: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

The community needs to avail itself of the best thinking. This is especially true at the beginning. Doing this will benefit the community for years to come. Relegating decisions to popular opinion or to power broking will lead to a finished product with which nearly everyone will have problems. It will be like the horse that was put together by a committee and ended up looking more like a camel.

Worship is too important to be left to less than the best we can bring.

The Church Building as a Setting for Liturgical Action

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The following comments discuss the relationship of the design of the worship space to the actions that take place there. The function and significance of these actions provide the needed guidelines for liturgical architecture.

The church building and setting for the liturgical assembly. Nothing more, but nothing less. Liturgical worship happens in space, and space is shaped into place by the meaning people discover within it. Jews and Christians have shaped space into place by discovering that the Creator abides throughout creation. Christians especially can never forget the spatial concreteness the Incarnation entails. God did not become a movement, a concept, an ideal, or even a committee, but a man of flesh and bone with a parentage, friends, a language, a country, a home. He inhabited not just a time but places, streets, rooms, countrysides, and by his presence in the flesh he changed them all. The memory of this has never died because his continuing presence by grace, faith, and sacrament still does the same in the world through his body, which is the church, enfleshed locally in the liturgical assembly.

It goes counter to Christian instinct, therefore, that the place in which the church assembles should be devoid of all evidence of his presence or that this presence should be regarded as temporary, capricious, or discrete so as not to restrict him or inconvenience the assembly. He restricted himself by becoming incarnate, and the assembly’s only inconvenience is his real absence.

Raw space becomes liturgical place through the change his presence by grace, faith, and sacrament causes. Liturgical place is thus not a monument to the pastor’s tastes or the locale in which the assembly feels most comfortable. Jesus Christ’s incarnate presence caused notable discomfort even for those who loved him best, and he is reported to have resorted to violence on one occasion when faced with the obduracy of the temple clergy’s tastes. Liturgical place belongs to the assembly only because the space it occupies is first his. He alone makes it a place by specifying its meaning as distinct from all others. To this specification the assembly can only be obedient; for it the assembly can only pray even as it cooperates with him by faith in its specification.

What the church building shelters and gives setting for is the faithful assembly, the church, in all its rich diversity of orders from catechumen to penitent, from youngest server to eldest bishop. As it meets for worship of the Source and Redeemer of all, the assembly is the fundamental sacrament of God’s pleasure in Christ on earth. The eucharistic food and drink are the sacred symbol of this ecclesial reality, which Paul calls simply Christ’s body. Christian instinct has been to house this assembly as elegantly as possible, avoiding tents, bedrooms, and school basements.

The assembly uses its place to do something in. This is the liturgy, by which the assembly celebrates the nuptials of all things with their Creator. Because the celebration outstrips being merely an instruction, a pageant, a meditation, a preachment, or an act of therapy, the assembly, as a rule, has kept its place open for movement on the part of all. Furniture is used for a public purpose and for those who find it difficult to stand or move.

The strong and elemental openness of liturgical place makes for dynamism and interest. It is a vigorous arena for conducting public business in which petitions are heard, contracts entered into, relationships witnessed, orations declaimed, initiations consummated, vows taken, authority exercised, laws promulgated, images venerated, values affirmed, banquets attended, votes cast, the dead waked, the Word deliberated, and parades cheered. It is acoustically sonorous, rarely vacant of sound or motion. It possesses a certain disciplined self-confidence as the center of community life both sacred and secular. It is the Italian piazza, the Roman forum, the Yankee town green, Red Square moved under roof and used for the business of faith. It is not a carpeted bedroom where faith may recline privately with the Sunday papers.

Find the most serviceable places for the altar, font, and chair and leave them there. Altars on wheels, fonts that collapse, and presidential chairs that fold away do not free but neuter liturgical place. Since crucial values are perennial rather than disposable, they flock with usage to sustained focal points and thus help to reduce raw space into human place. Crucial values so incarnated become roots for people’s lives. Gymnasia rarely play a profound role in most people’s maintenance of a secure identity.

Altar and font normally should be fixed, elemental, and powerful in their simplicity, free-standing to allow access from all sides, and worthy of the assembly that surrounds them. The amount of space surrounding each should be scaled to the size of the assembly. Neither altar nor font should be so close to the other as to compete for attention or to confuse each other’s purpose, dignity, and quite different kinds of liturgy. The altar is a Table to dine upon. The font is a pool to bathe in, a womb to be born from, a tomb to be buried in. Bathing and dining areas are rarely found in the same room, except in churches.

The presidential chair should be modest but not trivial. It is best located not primarily in reference to the altar but to the assembly, perhaps in an open area in the nave of the church facing both the lectern and altar along with the rest of the assembly. This would shift the ceremonial focus of the liturgy, except for the eucharistic prayer, into the midst of the assembly itself, where it seems to belong given the nature of Christian worship. Outside baptism and the eucharistic banquet, the form this worship normally takes is that of a liturgy of the Word in which the Word is heard and responded to by the whole assembly, ministers included. Locating the ministerial area and the president’s chair in the midst of the assembly may thus be the most versatile arrangement.

As the name implies, the lectern is a reading stand rather than a shrine competing with font and altar. The shrine of the gospel book is the altar. The shrine of the gospel itself is the life of the faithful assembly that celebrates the Word liturgically. The gospel book, which is “sacramental” of all this, is constantly in motion, being carried, held, opened, read from, closed, and laid rather than left somewhere behind votive lights or under lock and key.

The altar and the baptismal font are the primary spatial foci of the liturgy. The altar Table is kept free of contraptions such as elaborate bookstands, pots, cruets, plastic things, electrical apparatus, aids to piety, and the efforts of floral decorators. The book of the Word and the sacrament of the Word are adornment enough.

The baptismal area is kept free of rumpled vestments, cotton wads, stacks of reading material, and folding chairs. The pool itself is kept clean. It contains what is called “living water” not because things grow in it but because it moves to give life to those who lie in death’s bonds.

Liturgical things are designed for the assembly’s purpose. The church building houses the assembly. It is neither a museum for ecclesiastical art nor a pious attic. All it contains should possess a sober splendor congruent with the assembly and its sacred intent.

Bread and wine should be just that, not plastic disks and grape juice, not corn chips and lemonade. The assembly uses bread and wine as food and drink in the Eucharist. These should be present in form, quality, and quantity to correspond with a banquet’s usual liberality, keeping in mind, however, that this banquet’s purpose is not to fill bellies but to give thanks to the Source and Redeemer of all things. The Eucharist, like the Supper that remains its prototype, fills one with more than food, rejoices hearts with more than wine.

Cups, plates, flagons, and bread boxes should be ample. Cluttering the altar with many small cups is logistically and symbolically inelegant. Use one cup of some significance together with a clear glass or crystal flagon large enough to fill smaller cups for Communion later. The same principle holds for the bread plate: Use a single large one from which bread can be transferred to smaller plates for Communion later. The Eucharist that becomes a fast-food operation might be compared to a baptism that proceeds from eye-droppers or aerosol cans.

Vestments are sacred garments rather than costumes or billboards. They are meant to designate certain ministers in their liturgical function by clothing creatures in beauty. Their symbolic strength comes not from their decoration but from their texture, form, and color. The basic vestment of major ministers is the stole, which bishops and presbyters wear around the neck and deacons wear over the left shoulder. No other ministers wear stoles in the Roman Rite. Ministers ordained to lesser orders may wear albs. When laypersons carry out liturgical duties it is more fitting that they wear their own clothes as members of the assembly, which is no mean dignity in itself. Dalmatic, chasuble, cope, and miter can be handsome garments and should be worn as complements to the assembly whose purpose at worship is never merely utilitarian but festive.

Books are means rather than ends. Even so, they should be worthy of the Word they record and of those among whom the Word has taken flesh.

Good images are neither accidents nor fantasies but knowledgeable accomplishments that go beyond what can be observed either now or in time past. As John Meagher says, they are meant to evoke the presence of mysteries the mind has glimpsed, to remind us of the ancestral heritage of worship, to tease us out of mere thought lest we forget that history does not fence in truth, that we may not substitute critical understanding for reverence, that our knowledge is not so complete or accomplished as we often assume, and above all that our memories mix with our longings and our joys to put us in touch with our deepest sense of home.

Churches are not carpeted. While rugs and runners may occasionally enhance liturgical place by adding festal color, carpeting in quantity wearies the eye and muffles sound. Even with a good electronic sound system, which is a rarity, a carpeted church often has all the acoustical vigor of an elevator. The ambiance of a carpeted church, moreover, is too soft for the liturgy, which needs hardness, sonority, and a certain bracing discomfort, much like the Gospel itself. Liturgical ambiance must challenge, for one comes to the liturgy to transact the public business of death and life rather than to be tucked in with fables and featherpuffs. The liturgy challenges what Quentin Crisp calls the general notion of Christianity as a consolatory religion, as something nice that Jesus of Nazareth could say to those who turn to him for comfort.

Furniture is significant and kept to a minimum. Pews, which entered liturgical place only recently, nail the assembly down, proclaiming that the liturgy is not a common action but a preachment perpetuated upon the seated, an ecclesiastical opera done by virtuosi for a paying audience. Pews distance the congregation, disenfranchise the faithful, and rend the assembly. Filling a church with immoveable pews is similar to placing bleachers directly on a basketball court: It not only interferes with movement but changes the event into something entirely different. Pews are never mentioned in Roman rubrics, nor is there any record that being without pews has ever killed Christians in significant numbers.

Banners are decorative images, not ideological broadsides or opportunities for tricky piety. Rather than a festal gesture for the assembly, banners often are a form of disposable ecclesiastical art bearing disposable thoughts which foster disposable piety. Such banners should be disposed of.

The Church as Community

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In the exodus event, God created a people and brought them into a covenant relationship. The covenant specified that Israelite worshipers display loyalty and faithfulness both to Yahweh, the King of the covenant and to their fellow Israelites covenanted to that same King. In a corresponding way, God has created a people through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; these people are bound together with him and with one another in a new covenant community. Jesus’ commandment for this community, or church, is that they love him with their entire being, and their covenant brothers as themselves. It is out of this relationship with God and one’s fellow believers that worship arises. Biblical worship is intended as a corporate expression of the covenant relationship.

The Church as a Body

In the liturgy there is a vertical movement, the out-going of the person to God; but there is also a horizontal movement. Liturgy is celebrated with others and the relationships between the members of the worshiping community are of the highest importance. Private acts of public worship are a contradiction in terms, as a statement in the Roman Catholic Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy suggests: “Liturgical services are not private functions, but are celebrations of the Church, which is the sacrament of unity” (section 26). At the practical level, all liturgical rites are arranged for the participation of the community. Rites enable people to relate to each other (the kiss, the handshake—both symbolic gestures) and also to the community. One can become part of the congregation and enter more deeply into its life. The sociologists tell us that for true community to exist there must be a face-to-face relationship. For the Christian, this means that the members of the community are persons bound together by faith and love. In principle, they are already related to one another. In the worshiping community, this relationship is deepened and enhanced—or will be, if the members try to act as a community.

The Pauline teaching on the church as “body” emphasizes at once the closeness of the relationship between Christ and the people—they are members, limbs, of the body—and of the horizontal relationships between the members of the body (1 Cor. 12:12–31). In other words, perhaps more strongly than before, it is indicated that the priestly people is also a community, the community of Christ with which he has a vital relationship. He is the source of all its life; it is totally dependent on him as the branches of a tree are on its trunk (John 15:1–5). And the relationships of faith and love between its members are in the first instance created by Christ, though they are to be realized and strengthened by Eucharist, which is the sacramental sign of koinonia of communion, the union of minds and hearts in faith and love. If the church can be said to “make” the Eucharist, in a much deeper sense the Eucharist makes the church. But the depth and richness of the relationship is best seen in Ephesians 5, where Christ is said to be the head of the church of which he is also Savior; and this church is his bride (vv. 25–26), which he brought into existence by the “fragrant offering and sacrifice” that he offered to his Father (v. 2).

It is this people, then, the priestly people, the body of Christ, and the community of Christ, who are the “subject” of liturgical celebrations. In other words, it is they who celebrate the liturgy, and the form of the liturgy must be of such sort as to make this possible. The Christian liturgy by its nature cannot be the monologue of a single participant. It is the action of a whole community.

External and Internal Problems of the New Testament Worshiping Community

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Like any human organization, the church of the New Testament confronted problems and challenges, some from external pressures and some from within.

External Pressures

The major challenge from without was that of resistance to the gospel and even persecution by its opponents. In dealing with opposition, the church had to rely on the merciful intervention of its Lord, an intervention that resulted in some remarkable turns of events, such as Peter’s release from prison to the amazement of the fearful church (Acts 12:6–17) and the transformation of Saul, ardent persecutor of the Way, into an even more zealous apostle of the risen Christ (Acts 9:1–31). The church’s principal weapon against external hostility was the development of its unique worldview, which enabled it to see the powers coming against it as doomed to eventual defeat at the revelation of the judgments of God. The present culture and its values are passing away (1 Cor. 7:31; 1 John 2:17); at the day of the Lord, the old order of things will be replaced by “new heavens and a new earth,” figurative language for the just order of the new covenant (2 Pet. 3:13; Rev. 21:1). As events unfold, human secrets will be disclosed and brought to judgment (Rom. 2:16; 1 Cor. 4:5; cf. Luke 12:2). This sense of ongoing and impending judgment was rooted in Jesus’ own teaching; it is present, for example, in his parables of the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 21:33–43) and the marriage feast (Matt. 22:1–14) and his statements suggesting that the persecutors of the church (Matt. 23:34–35; 24:9) will themselves be overthrown within a generation (Matt. 16:28; 23:36; 24:34). From the perspective of the early church, the kingdom of God had already appeared in Jesus (Mark 1:14–15) and the judgment had already begun to occur in people’s response to him (John 3:17–21; Rom. 1:18); the Resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit had made evident the arrival of the new order of the “last days” (Acts 2:16–21). Armed with these convictions, spokespersons for the Christian movement were able to withstand opposition and to maintain their witness in the face of a hostile environment.

Internal Problems

A challenge from within the church organization was false or incomplete teaching. A certain group in the Judean church had difficulty with the concept of Gentiles entering the covenant and taught the new congregations of Asia Minor that it was necessary for them to become circumcised converts to Judaism (Acts 15:1). To deal with this it was necessary to convene a council of church leaders; Paul also addressed the issue of “another gospel” in his letter to the Christians of Galatia. False teachers of various kinds are mentioned in several places in the New Testament (Acts 20:29–30; 2 Tim. 4:3–4; 2 Pet. 2:1–3; Jude 4; Rev. 2:14, 20). The nature of their doctrines is not always clear, but they are accused of advocating licentiousness (Jude 4), idolatry (Rev. 12:14), “Jewish myths and commandments of men” (Titus 1:14; cf. 2 Tim. 4:4), and ascetic self-abasement accompanied by the observance of holy days and dietary practices (Col. 2:16–23). John calls these teachers “antichrists” who deny that Jesus is the Christ (1 John 2:18–22) and who negate the Incarnation (1 John 4:2–3; 2 John 7). Some see many of these teachings as evidence of an incipient Gnosticism, a philosophy that held that the material realm is evil and only the spirit is good therefore the word of God only appeared to be incarnate in Jesus Christ. Portions of John, 1 John, and Paul’s letter to the Colossians are thought to be responding to this notion, which became a more serious threat after the first century. In addition to aberrant doctrine, failure to understand the Christian faith and its ordinances in their true depth was a problem within the church’s constituency (2 Tim. 3:7; Heb. 5:12; 1 Cor. 11:18–34) and even among some of its leaders, such as Apollos (Acts 18:24–26).

Like every human organization, the institutional church of the New Testament had to deal with human weakness in many forms. Immorality was a problem that had to be repeatedly confronted, notably in Paul’s Corinthian correspondence. Economic inequalities within the membership created tensions (Acts 6:1; James 2:2–6), which the leadership sought to address through benevolence programs and the establishment of the serving ministry, or diaconate. The leadership itself was not always united; Paul had a personal confrontation with Peter over the Gentile issue (Gal. 2:11–14) and broke with Barnabas over John Mark’s role in the missionary team (Acts 15:36–39). Overbearing leaders sometimes gained control in local groups, refusing to cooperate with the eldership (3 John 9–10).

Far from idealizing the institutional church, the New Testament presents a true-to-life picture of a social group struggling with the strains and stresses that inevitably accompany a rapidly growing organization. Such honesty highlights the church’s dependence not on human authority but on that of Christ, to whom all authority has been given and who, by the Spirit, must supremely direct and enable the church’s witness (Matt. 28:18–20).

Internal Life of the Worshiping New Testament Community

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A glimpse of the church’s life in the earliest stages is provided in Acts 2:42, which states that the Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” These categories in general continue to characterize the church’s activities throughout the New Testament period.

Instruction

Teaching, as mentioned above, is not the same as the public proclamation of the lordship of Christ, but is instruction in the theological, historical, and practical foundations of Christian faith (Heb. 6:1–2). The apostles were teachers of the Word (Acts 5:42; 15:35; 1 Tim. 2:7) as well as preachers, and one of the qualities of an overseer was the ability to teach (1 Tim. 6:2; 2 Tim. 2:24). Pastors were teachers also, but teaching was a general activity open to any qualified member of the assembly (Rom. 12:7; Col. 3:16; James 3:1). Women were instructors of other women (Titus 2:3–4) but in deference to custom were not generally given a role in the instruction of men (1 Tim. 2:12).

An important function in the church was the creation of materials for instruction. Some have suggested that collections of Old Testament passages concerning the appearance of the Christ were circulated in the early church and that the apostolic preaching recorded in the New Testament draws on material from these manuals. The teachings of Jesus seem to have been gathered into collections, along with the narrative of his ministry and passion, in an oral stage. The passing of the first eyewitnesses and the linguistic transition from Aramaic to Greek necessitated the writing down of this material as an aid to instruction in the church; the Gospels of the New Testament were the result. In an age before printing, the publication of books required the services of professional copyists. Although most Jewish men could write, the ability to produce a readable scroll was a specialized skill. The church had its scribes, such as Tertius, who wrote down Paul’s letter to the Romans (Rom. 16:22); Paul’s own handwriting was not equal to this task (Gal. 6:11).

Communications

As it grew, the church developed an effective system of internal communication through the travels of the apostles and their coworkers and through an extensive correspondence of which the New Testament Epistles are doubtless but a small portion. Except for government business, there were few reliable public mail or courier services; therefore, a letter or any other personal shipment (such as Paul’s cloak and scrolls, which he asked Titus to bring to him, 2 Tim. 4:13) had to be carried by someone who could be trusted to see that it moved toward its destination. For such couriers, a network of accommodations existed in the various cities through the hospitality of members of the congregations (Rom. 12:13; 1 Tim. 3:2), public accommodations of the time being usable only as a last resort.

Worship

The assembly usually met in private homes for worship and instruction (Acts 2:46; 16:40; 18:7; Philem. 1:2). It appears that, in commemoration of the Resurrection, the congregation assembled on the “Lord’s Day,” the first day of the week (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2). Christian worship focused on the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 10:16–17; 11:20–29) and included the singing of hymns (Eph. 5:19), prayer (1 Cor. 11:4–5), vocal thanksgiving (Eph. 5:20; Heb. 13:15), and instruction (1 Cor. 14:26; Col. 3:16). Worship in Corinth, and probably elsewhere, included both singing and thanksgiving in tongues, with interpretation, and prophecy (1 Cor. 11:4–5; 14:1–33). The New Testament does not specify who is to officiate in worship or to administer the Lord’s Supper, although prophets clearly had a role in corporate worship (1 Cor. 14:23–33).

Mutual Assistance

A notable feature of early church life was the way members of the community were expected to care for one another’s needs. The Epistles contain repeated exhortations to this end: to contribute to the needs of the “saints” (Rom. 12:13), to bear one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2), to do good especially to fellow believers (Gal. 6:10), to share, as a sacrifice pleasing to God (Heb. 13:16). Jesus had taught his followers the importance of serving his “brothers” (Matt. 25:40) or “little ones” (Matt. 10:42), meaning one’s fellow disciples, and had set the example of service in acts such as washing the disciples’ feet (John 13:1–15). In following his model, the New Testament church directed its benevolence toward two groups in particular: widows and orphans, who had meager resources of their own (Acts 6:1–6; 1 Tim. 5:3–11; James 1:27) and the congregation in Jerusalem, beset with persecution and famine (Acts 11:29–30; 1 Cor. 16:1–2; 2 Cor. 8:1–5).