Patterns of Ministry among the First Christians

Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged

Giles

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781625641595
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

This new edition of Patterns of Ministry Among the First Christians tells the story of how the first Christian leaders emerged and, with the passing of time, developed. The book includes sections on Jesus and Paul and their understanding of Christian leadership, on bishops, deacons, elders, apostles, prophets, and teachers, and on ordination. The focus is primarily on the first century but historical development is noted. The author also discuses the ways the New Testament may speak to the present.

Chapter 1

Premises, Aims, Sources

The aim of this book is first of all to take my readers back into the communal life of the earliest Christians. The biggest barrier to doing this is what is in each of our twenty-first century heads: our contemporary understanding of the church. It is almost impossible for us to conceive of first-century churches, which had very little in common with our twenty-first-century churches. As a consequence, we assume that what we know and experience of church life today is what the first Christians knew and experienced. This is an erroneous assumption. There is a huge gulf between church life in the first century and the twenty-first century. To “see” what the reality was in the first century we have to lay aside our twenty-first century spectacles. This is not easy to do and it can be very threatening. We want to believe that what is going on in our church today is justified by the Bible.

To address this problem I first spell out the presuppositions that I bring to the text. These are the fruit of more than thirty years of scholarly study of the Bible as an historical document, and of writings on the church in the first century. These presuppositions lie behind everything said in subsequent chapters.

Presupposition 1

The word “church”/ekklesia in the New Testament is used of 1. all Christians in the world, or 2. all the Christians in one geographical location, or 3. the Christians who meet each week in a home, never of a congregation with say sixty or more people.

For at least the first ten years of my Christian life, even after I had completed a four-year degree in theology and post-graduate research degree, I assumed that when Luke or Paul spoke of “the church” in Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, or Rome they were speaking of churches just like I knew. They were speaking of Christians who met in a large building with seats in rows, with a minister/pastor who did most of the out-front stuff and anything between fifty and two hundred people present. Paul’s epistles would have been read in this setting when they arrived, I assumed. Nothing could be further from the truth.1 The Greek word ekklesia, usually translated into English as “church,” is better translated “community.”2 First of all, this word is used of all Christians, the sum total of those who believe in Christ. In this usage it speaks of the world-wide Christian community—all Christians (Matt 16:18; 1 Cor 10:32, 12:28; Gal 1:13; Eph 1:22, etc.). Second, and most commonly, the Greek word is used of all the Christians in one specific geographic location. So we read of the church in Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, Rome, and so on. These Christians in one geographical area may have never met in one place at the one time. In this usage it means the Christian community—all the Christians—in the city or town mentioned, not of one congregation that gathers together on Sundays. And third, Paul uses this word just three times to speak of the Christians who meet in the home of someone (Rom 16:5; 1 Cor 16:19; Col 4:15). In this usage, the word church/ekklesia refers to the believers who assemble together on Sundays. What this means is that when we see the word “church” in the New Testament we must not understand this word as it is generally understood today.

Nowhere in the New Testament does the word church (ekklesia), refer to what we think of as church today—a congregation of fifty to two hundred people (let alone five hundred or more people) with a pastor, meeting in a building large enough to hold everyone.

Presupposition 2

Jesus did not institute the church; he constituted the Jesus community.

Jesus called men and women to follow him, taught them, and sent them out to preach the Gospel. He said not one word on how they were to organize themselves or be led after his departure. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find him telling his disciples to meet regularly, and nowhere does he lay down who should lead them. True, he appointed twelve apostles, but he does not depict them as congregational pastors/ministers or say anything about who should succeed them or even if he anticipated their successors. After the first Easter, Christian communal structures emerged and developed as the need arose. We could almost say the church as an institution in the world was invented on the run and has developed over the centuries.

In this book, I therefore hold apart what we learn about the Christian community and its leaders in the first century and these realties in the twenty-first century. In contrast to most books on church and ministry, I do not begin with what I know and seek to justify this by appeal to the Bible. I begin by trying to work out what was true in the first century, accepting fully that this inevitably stands in tension with what I see and experience in the twenty-first century.

Presupposition 3

The early Christians normally met in homes.

It is agreed by virtually all New Testament scholars today that for at least two hundred years Christians as a general rule met in private homes. 3 The local church—the congregation to which the early Christians belonged—was normally a gathering in a home.4 These “house-churches” physically limited the number of people who gathered. Even the largest homes that have been excavated could accommodate no more than fifty people, most large homes far less, often no more than twenty people. This home setting determined the character and form of these gatherings. It encouraged informality and wide participation (cf. 1 Cor 14:26). It was simply not possible for someone to be “out the front,” leading everything and doing most of the speaking. We also need to recall that house church gatherings usually involved eating together. In this context of a meal, bread was broken and shared and the wine poured into a cup and passed around to remind those present that Christ’s body had been broken on the cross and his blood poured out (Acts 2:46; 1 Cor 10:14–22; 11:17–32). Setting out the food, eating it, and talking together as the meal progressed must have made “church” something like a dinner party.

Because the house setting of church gatherings was taken as axiomatic by the writers of the New Testament, much is left unexplained. Luke, as the historian of the early church, is the most informative. Both in Jerusalem and in the Gentile world he speaks of Christians meeting in homes (cf. Acts 1:13; 2:2, 46; 4:31; 5...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Premises, Aims, Sources
• Chapter 2: It All Begins with Jesus
• Chapter 3: Paul
• Chapter 4: Bishops: From House-Church Leaders to Prelates
• Chapter 5: All Christians are Deacons/Servants/Ministers, Yet Only Some are Distinctively Called “Deacons”
• Chapter 6: Elders: From Communal Leaders in the Plural to Congregational Leaders in the Singular called “Priests”
• Chapter 7: Apostles and Apostleship Before and After Paul
• Chapter 8: Prophets and Prophesying
• Chapter 9: Teachers and Teaching in Church
• Chapter 10: Ordination
• Bibliography