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Ephesians and Colossians: Prison Epistles, Part 1

  1. Lesson One
    Overview of Ephesians (Ephesians 1–6)
    22 Activities
  2. Lesson Two
    Authority and Power (Ephesians Review)
    22 Activities
  3. Lesson Three
    Author and Audience (Ephesians Review)
    16 Activities
    |
    1 Assessment
  4. Lesson Four
    Colossians Overview (Colossians 1–4)
    19 Activities
  5. Lesson Five
    Paul's Ethics (Colossians, Romans 6 Review)
    14 Activities
    |
    1 Assessment
  6. Course Wrap-Up
    Course Completion
    1 Activity
    |
    1 Assessment

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When we think of the term “church,” we might assume a certain type of building built specifically for the purposes of Christian gatherings and worship. As we know from earlier lessons, the first-century situation was very different. Paul’s greeting “to Nympha and the church in her house” is one of more than a dozen references to house churches that we find in his letters:

Give my greetings to the brothers and sisters at Laodicea, and to Nympha and the church in her house.
Colossians 4:15 NIV

For early Christians, house churches were convenient and something of a default in the absence of other options.

As with most “foreign” cults in their earliest stages of expansion, the Christian meeting in private homes was probably a practical necessity. For the Christians the synagogues quickly became off limits. The pagan temples involved too many unsavory associations. And the stately basilicas were centuries away. The private home on the other hand afforded a place of privacy, intimacy, and stability for the early Christians.

At a time of persecution, house churches also allowed for a greater degree of secrecy and a smaller, less obvious, civic footprint than an official public meeting place. Financial concerns, with many early Christians being poor, were also likely a factor. But meeting in homes also had a distinctive Christian flavor and represented the character of the early church in a number of ways.

For about a century the private dwelling shaped the Christians’ community life, forming the environment in which Christians related to each other, providing an economic substructure for the community, a platform for missionary work, a framework for leadership and authority, and probably a definite role for women. Above all the private home and specifically the dining room provided an environment that corresponded remarkably with the Christians earliest self-identification, reflecting Jesus’ own choice of an “upper room” for his last supper, his own choice of “non-sacred space” as the environment of his work, and his insistence on familial ties among believers.

The brief Colossians reference notes the presence in the city of more than one church. We might think of each city having a single centralized church, but this wasn’t the case. Writing to the Romans, Paul references five churches by name (Romans 16:3-15), and the logistics of that time, combined with the size of these cities, made anything approaching a “megachurch” a practical impossibility. Instead the church in each city was a scattered and diverse, and in some ways still informal, network of believers. 

Quotes from: Vincent Branick, The House Church in the Writings of Paul, 1989, pp. 14-15.