Brotherly babies and baptismal bathwater

Last year I wrote about David Peterson’s Engaging with God and how it radically transforms our view of Christian assembly by showing that the New Testament never describes, or intends, such meetings to be for worship. Inasmuch as “worship” forms a part of Christian life, it is transformed from the Old Testament temple-locus of God’s presence, to the concept of Christ and his people being the temple and the priesthood, and therefore Christian living itself is our “spiritual sacrifice.”

More recently I showed how such a concept integrates nicely with the concept of two kinds of temple developed in my book The Generations of Heaven and Earth, the “temple” of the New Creation being one of open access to God through Jesus. This contrasts with the cosmic temple of the first creation of Genesis 1 and the tabernacle/temple modeled on it, in which holy separation from God is the pattern.

I also mentioned how in modern Christianity we have never quite recovered from the obscuring of this transformed view of worship through the sacerdotalism of Constantine’s time. In fact, paradoxically sacerdotalism has been given a recent boost amongst Evangelicals through Neo-pentecostalism and the Contemporary Christian Music industry. The very concept that worship is the central activity of corporate church life sacralises what, actually, is an unbiblical view, so that the more Charismatic a church is, the more resistant to “meeting as edification” it is likely to be. You’d have to sack your Anointed Apostle as well as your Recording-Contracted Worship Leader, who as well as having a redundant title would find it hard to adapt to enabling other people to sing about God to each other, rather than trying to “break through” to some new theophany of the Spirit by singing to God on their behalf.

In ancient times the pagans were awed by the glories of Orthodox or Catholic worship, with its “bells and smells.” Nowadays the temples are the holy prayer-mountains with the sound-systems and lights, the priests are the worship leaders and the worship bands playing their worship music to the laity (who can’t reach the high notes!) are the liturgy. Proskunesis (obeisance, mistranslated “worship”) is sometimes literal, in “slaying in the Spirit,” though it is ubiquitously represented by holy hand gestures of obscure origin.

Needless to say the emphasis is on “encountering God in worship” rather than on building up the body as the New Testament directs. A good common example of this is the worship leader who tells people to ignore those around them because “it’s just between you and God.” 1 Corinthians 11:29 actually speaks critically to that, though the sacerdotal baggage of the Supper even now blinds us to the horizontal breadth of what Paul meant by “discerning the body” in the breaking of bread. We are actually celebrating that the broken body of Jesus is now reconstituted as his Church, breaking bread together in his name.

In a footnote to that article, I mentioned another proponent of this “meeting is not worship” view, Tom Wadsworth, whose seven-part series on his channel on YouTube, based on his PhD thesis and decades of study, is a must-see if you want to gain a more biblical understanding of Christian assembly.

But today I want to explore some cautions in applying these insights. Not that the insights themselves are wrong, but that it is possible to miss the point and so lose out both on the meaning of meeting and the meaning of worship. For example, it is astonishing how often, in the comments under almost any YouYube video I’ve watched on this subject, there are remarks from people who say they have discovered it for themselves, and have therefore abandoned going to church and instead build their personal relation with Jesus at home, on their own.

This, of course, is the very opposite of what the New Testament, and those like Peterson and Wadsworth, are saying. The whole point is that the entire New Testament urges us to meet often in order to build up others, and be built up by them, in order to reach spiritual maturity, which is our true worship. That maturity is unlikely to happen in isolation, and in fact is going to result as a by-product even in church “services” with “worship” along traditional lines.

A more sensible response, with which Tom Wadsworth at least seems highly sympathetic, is to return to the undeniable New Testament model of the house church, and along with this idea goes (according to Wadsworth) the idea of greater participation in all things, the most radical being the abolition of the lengthy Bible message from the pastor and its replacement with, perhaps, three ten-minute sessions of teaching and/or exhortation by multiple people.

Now, for myself, I became receptive to this whole approach to Christian assembly through two main experiences. The first was the formerly-Brethren church I attended before I retired, which still had a weekly breaking-of-bread meeting in which, whilst someone would be delegated to kick proceedings off and administer the bread and wine (no, we’d not reinstituted the laudable custom of the αγαπη meal instead), anyone could then contribute, and when they did, the Holy Spirit usually unified proceedings remarkably.

The second experience was the enforced closure of churches during lockdown, when I thought deeply about the limitations of our well-conducted live-stream services. In general, I realised that piped music, worthy video testimonies and sermons do not an assembly make. In particular, the closest approximation to the real thing, if live-streamed it must be, was to put as many familiar members as possible on screen, and to use the church’s musicians to record familiar arrangements of well-known songs rather than use higher quality commercial versions, thus creating some semblance of the illusion of fellowship that might even encourage folks to sing. Accordingly when, as the second lockdown began, I and a friend insisted as elders that we would hold a Sunday meeting willy-nilly, participation was the watchword.

I’m glad to say that, once the church was freed to be obedient again, our then Pastor took the opportunity of opening up far more of the proceedings to others than before. Nearly all services are led by other members, the musicians are, for the first time, delegated with choosing and leading the songs, open prayer and testimony are a more integral part of the proceedings, and so on. The fellowship is big enough that those with teaching gifts already preached occasionally, and that was continued even when an assistant pastor was added to the mix.

Yet I can see enormous problems, were the whole Church to abandon both its basilicas and its school halls in order to return to a literal house-church model. Lacking a culture of ultra-rich patrician villa-holders, I would suppose an average semi-detached meeting, even if it ignored health and safety, might cram up to twenty folks into a living room, or maybe up to thirty in a big open-plan lounge. City flats would be even more constrained. Thirty is probably about the size when the law of diminishing returns kicks in on active participation in speaking, anyway. I wonder how many “prophets and teachers,” on the model of Antioch in Acts, most of those tiny fellowships would contain? I don’t think most would have three gifted teachers “sound in doctrine” (2 Timothy 4:3).

I find it ironic that Tom Wadsworth, promoting mutuality in the teaching and exhortation ministries in such a setting, as opposed to the credentialed pastor delivering a homily six feet above contradiction, nevertheless spends over seven hours of monologue in his series teaching the important discoveries of his PhD thesis. Granted, he takes occasional questions or comments too. I don’t fault him for this, because it takes time and application both to study and to expound Scripture, especially when correcting long-held traditional errors. The knowledge of the faith, though, is an accumulated cultural heritage that doesn’t just spontaneously generate. That was true for Judaism, and it is true for Christianity.

Small groups do not generally arise from a spontaneous revelation of the Holy Spirit. Rather, they are started by one or a few people grounded in the faith by some church or evangelist, and they carry on the traditions of their mentors largely unquestioned. Witness those small fellowships in far off countries with Charismatic-style worship bands singing Waymaker in the local tongue, or of course African village churches whose leader officiates in a decent cassock and surplice. I remember one curate at St Pauls (later Holy Trinity Brompton), whom I had known in Cambridge, describing house groups as “the blind leading the blind,” which is at least potentially true, especially if there is no source of external oversight.

What, I think, is often forgotten is that from the start, even the first century house church model inherited serious theological training, somehow. We forget that the apostles were not simply stumbling along making gaffes to be included in the gospels, but had a three-year intensive degree course under Jesus’s instruction – probably added to some solid childhood synagogue teaching under the Pharisees, who studied and instructed diligently for all their faults.

Paul, appointed apostle to us Gentiles, already had the best rabbinic training available under Gamaliel in Jerusalem, and it shows in the profundity of his scriptural understanding. For him to recognise the talents of someone like Apollos as an equal in teaching ability demonstrates that in-depth rabbinical training was also available elsewhere. The theological depth of the non-Pauline New Testament writings proves this: the profound theology in Revelation or Hebrews did not arise from folks in house-groups sharing what they had read in Every Day With Yshua. And we’re simply naive if we believe the Holy Spirit dictated it to untaught disciples.

You might argue that your own house group contains folks with great depth of insight into God’s word. But if I’m to go on my own group’s experience, they have learned what they know from good teaching ministries at our own church, or centres like St Helen’s Bishopsgate, sometimes in recorded form or on YouTube, and/or from reading books that somebody had to know enough, and be funded, to write. In some cases church members have studied the Bible at college or by distance learning. Of course reading two hundred pages of Tom Wright, or even of Irenaeus, is as passive a learning experience as listening to half-hour sermons, but none the less valuable for that.

Irenaeus, and the other Ante-Nicene Fathers, are an object lesson in how the Church remained theologically on the ball during the stage when the informal house-church model, rather than the sacramental temple model, reigned. The necessity for training must have emerged as the Church separated from the Synagogue, and as Judaism excluded Christians from the established biblical training (especially as Gentile believers began to predominate). We find that the famous apologists were often also the proprietors of schools of theology, presumably founded on the Greek model, bearing in mind the Apologists’ interaction with the classical philosophy in which they had learned critical thinking.

It seems likely that, whilst their wisdom was distributed to the whole church assembly in their meetings (probably in lengthy homilies from the start, if Paul in Acts 20:7-12 was their template), their need to charge fees to live would limit their students to the upper classes. That may be one reason the later priesthood tended to centre on those with existing social standing. So from Paul the rabbi, through to the educated Church Fathers, a full-time ministry of study, and teaching, formed the backbone of orthodox teaching, however much lay-participation may have happened “on the ground.”

It is the doctrine of those early advanced teachers that forms the basis of what we take for granted as sound teaching now, just as it was their work in refuting heresy that still protects us from many serious errors. The last is true whether we consider the courses in heresies that the seminaries give our pastors, or just the evangelical norms that are taken for granted outside the cults – and even in house churches that, mistakenly, pride themselves in relying only on the Bible and the Spirit.

In conclusion, I believe that a theology of assembly for mutual upbuilding is the way to greater Christian maturity, and that this will result in a much higher biblical literacy, and therefore individual spirituality, among the people. I see traces of that in the early history of my own Baptist Church, which back in 1653 was taking every-member ministry seriously.

But that by no means obviates the need for highly educated teachers who, in the nature of things, will be spread relatively thinly as they were in the early Church.

Our model of church organisation needs to take that reality seriously rather than see the small house-fellowship through rose-tinted spectacles. The Church still needs its Augustines and its John Calvins, and the wider world still needs its Chrysostoms and its C. S. Lewises.