Church for Every Context. Michael Moynagh

been the leaders of house churches who were used to assembling together (perhaps to plan the wider meetings).

      Gehring maintains that recent scholars tend to agree that the early Christians gathered in two church forms: the house church and the whole church at any given location. While these two forms of church were geographically fixed, he suggests that the experience of individual gatherings could have been quite fluid. Congregations may often have lived in an in-between sphere hard to define (Gehring, 2004, p. 173).

      New Testament believers appears to have found a way of combining homogeneous people groups with the potential to bridge social divides. This both/and approach held together sameness and diversity, small meetings and larger ones, and intimacy plus exposure to different ideas. Achieving this was far from easy, as the divisions at Corinth demonstrated, but Paul saw it as a priority.

      For reflection

      Some might say that Paul’s house churches were not strictly homogeneous groups. They contained for example slaves and heads of households, who were to relate to each other not in hierarchical ways but as ‘brothers and sisters’. Each house church modelled diversity. The only thing that members had in common was that they lived in the same area. Others might question the assumption that members drawn from the same area are not a homogeneous group. Don’t geographical divides often reflect social ones?

      Is this a question about what counts as a homogeneous group? Or is it about whether, theologically, some forms of homogeneity are to be preferred than others?

      Sustainable leadership

      A key issue for church-starts is their sustainability, and central to this is encouraging local leadership. Does Paul’s practice contain lessons for how quickly and how best this can be done?

      Delegation with support

      Passing on leadership is a central theme in the writings of Roland Allen. An early twentieth-century missionary, Allen carried on a sustained polemic against the missionary methods of his day and contrasted them with Paul’s. His discussion sufficiently reflects the New Testament for Schnabel to commend him (Schnabel, 2008, p. 13).

      Unlike missionaries who remained for several generations, Allen maintained, Paul never stayed in one place for more than a few months, or at the most two years. Once a congregation had been established, he selected leaders from its midst and left the fledgling church in their hands. For example in Acts 14.21–3, having been driven out by their opponents, Paul and Barnabas returned to Lystra and Iconium. Opposition seems to have waned sufficiently for them to stay for a while ‘strengthening’ and ‘encouraging’ the disciples. But they did not remain for long. They appointed elders, even though the believers had been Christians for only a few months, and left.

      The direction to Timothy – to entrust what he had learnt to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others (2 Tim. 2.2) – clearly reflects a Pauline principle of growing leaders who would instruct other people. The heart of Allen’s understanding is that the church lives by faith in Christ, whose gifts – including ‘the gift-bearing missionary Spirit’ – are sufficient for its life (Paton, 1968, p. 26, 29).

      Paul trusted the Spirit to supply whatever an infant church required, and put in place only the bare essentials before moving on: a ‘tradition or elementary Creed, the Sacraments of Baptism and the Holy Communion, Orders [that is leadership], and the Holy Scriptures’ (Allen, 2006, p. 107). Paul made sure that new leaders had support after he left. ‘Between the Apostle and the elders in every Church were the young men whose names crop up towards the end of the epistles – Timothy, Titus, Epaphras, Luke, Onesimus, Silvanas, and all the rest of them.’ They made available to the local church resources it did not have (Paton, 1968, p. 37).

      Pressing forward into new territory, Paul kept a watchful eye on what happened in his new churches and exercised authority through his co-workers. Writing of 1 Corinthians 9.1–2, Dunn notes that the authority of the ‘apostle’ was very much tied in to the apostle’s role in establishing a church: Paul was not an apostle to others because he had not founded their churches, but he was to the Corinthians because through the Spirit he had brought their church to birth (Dunn, 2009, p. 539).

      According to Allen, the early church grew spontaneously by organizing little groups as individuals were converted, handing on to them a simple organization that connected them to the wider church, equipping them with all the spiritual power and authority necessary for their corporate existence and authorizing them to repeat the process (Allen, 1997, p. 143). Speedy delegation was accompanied by continuing support.

      This picture needs qualifying, however. There were times when Paul was forced to leave his new churches more quickly than he wanted. In 1 Thessalonians 2.17–9 he wrote of ‘making every effort’ to see the Thessalonians, having been ‘torn away from’ them. He was anxious enough to send Timothy to them (3.1–3), and was relieved when Timothy brought back good news (v. 6). When he had the chance, Paul stayed longer in Corinth (for 18 months – Acts 18.11) and in Ephesus (for at least two years – Acts 18.10). Yet even these ‘long’ periods are remarkably short compared to the five years or more that many founders stay with their gatherings today.

      Handing over leadership quickly must have been helped by the composition of Paul’s churches. Dunn notes that Paul’s letters were addressed largely to Gentile audiences, yet are peppered with quotations and allusions to the Hebrew Bible. Paul must have assumed that these references would have resonated ‘in the echo-chamber of a much wider knowledge of Israel’s Scriptures’ (Dunn, 2009, p. 563). Presumably, the gospel could take root quickly partly because Jews and God-fearing Gentiles knew their Hebrew Bible.

      Church took its shape from future leaders

It is also striking how the New Testament church was sculpted round the most pervasive form of leadership in ancient society – leadership within the household. Whereas synagogues moved out of the home as the congregation grew, there is no sign of this happening in the primitive church.15 Church gatherings remained firmly house bound. Was this partly because finding leaders for new congregations became relatively simple when believers gathered round an existing household, which had leadership already in place?

      Gehring, supported by Dunn (2009, p. 571), argues that Paul deliberately concentrated on more wealthy people when he entered a town because they were potential leaders and their homes would provide a base of operations. He did this with Lydia at Philippi for instance (Acts 16.13–5), and also at Corinth. Remarkably, even though most of the Corinthian Christians had comparatively low social origins (1 Cor. 1.26), Paul broke his rule of not baptizing converts only in the case of three households – and these were from the upper economic strata (vv. 14–7).

      ‘The church in the house came with its leadership so to speak “built in”’ (Gehring, 2004, pp. 185–7; 194). Among the more wealthy, household heads were educated, had experience of teaching their own families and had financial responsibility for the home. They were well equipped, therefore, to lead a gathering based on their households and to share in the leadership of the church city wide.

      Most likely, leadership tended to take the form of ‘love-patriarchalism’. The social order was retained, but mutual love based on the gospel was fostered by household heads serving as leaders of the congregations in their homes. In poorer areas, where there was no patron to function as a leader, leadership may have been collective rather than hierarchical (Jewett,