The One Thing That Matters In The Church

As a child growing up in the church, it was easy to assume that the way church services are conducted today is how they’ve always been.

Two songs.

Welcome, and announcements.

Another song (but a slower, more worshipful one).

The Lord’s Supper.

Prayer.

The Offering (a non-negotiable).

Another song.

A sermon with three points on how to do life better.

A prayer while the worship band got back up on stage.

One more song that often included a call to give your life to Jesus Christ.

A benediction.

Amen.

This was the typical order of service for virtually every church service I attended over my four decades in the church. It was always in a dedicated church building, usually with a pitched roof, a steeple, and some stained glass windows. At the front was an enormous lectern, or pulpit, where the preacher would stand, bang his fist, and deliver both great and terrible tales about life, death, and the constant threat of Hell.

You knew exactly what was coming next because it was exactly what happened last week. And the week before that. And the week before that. At the time, it all felt completely normal. Nobody sat me down and explained why church happened in that order. It was just the order.

I never stopped to question whether this was all the church should be or if this was all the church ever was. Even when I became an adult and entered the ministry myself, I continued to replicate the same tired model of doing church because, well… that was all I knew.

But you know… most of what we call “church” today was never part of the “church” as the Christians in the New Testament understood it. Much of what Christians today believe is essential to the form, practice, and theology of the Christian church developed and evolved in response to cultural, historical, and theological shifts over centuries.

In fact, most of the key elements of a church service today were not part of the church at all until hundreds of years after Christ had been and gone. It’s worth reminding ourselves of that fact before we get too precious about our quaint religious traditions. Let’s take a look at the parts of the church that were not originally part of its earliest expression.

A churchless church

Did you know that for the first 300 years of Christianity, there was no such building known as the "church"? In the earliest days of Christianity, believers met in homes, synagogues, or other communal spaces rather than purpose-built structures.

The church was not a place that you went to but a group you were part of.

What if I told you that when the Bible was first published, it didn’t contain the word "church"? Would you find that hard to believe?

Well, in fact, in the Tyndale Bible — published in 1524 as the first complete English Bible — the word “church” was nowhere to be found. Rather, it used the word “congregation” or, in the original language, "Ekklesia", which literally means “community” or even "society".

As time went by, the word “congregation” was substituted with the word "church", which eventually replaced almost all 115 mentions of the word “Ekklesia” in the New Testament. Sadly, when translators inserted the word “church” in English versions of the Bible, they included a word — with all its associated baggage — that did not reflect the original intent of Jesus’s words.

The church was never meant to be a building, so in the beginning, it had no buildings.

That started to change after Constantine legalised Christianity in 313 AD. Once Christians no longer had to meet in secret, dedicated buildings began to appear. At first, they were fairly ordinary places. Christians often gathered in converted homes or existing meeting halls because there wasn’t yet a long tradition of church architecture to draw upon.

As Christianity became more accepted throughout the Roman Empire, the buildings became larger and more elaborate. What had begun as a movement meeting in homes eventually produced cathedrals, basilicas, stained glass windows, and towering spires. Whether that development represented faithful growth or a departure from the simplicity of the early church is a question Christians still debate today.

What seems beyond dispute is that when Jesus first spoke about building his church, nobody listening would have imagined a cathedral.

A Bible-less church

The Bible was such a central part of my church experience growing up. Everyone had one. The preacher would teach from it. My parents would read it to me. It was virtually a member of the Holy Trinity… the Father, Son, and Holy Bible.

So you might be surprised to learn that for the first 400 years of Christianity, there was no such thing as a Bible as we know it today. In the earliest days of the Christian movement, believers relied on oral tradition, letters from apostles, and Jewish scriptures (what Christians now call the Old Testament) for guidance and inspiration. The concept of a unified collection of sacred texts did not yet exist.

There was no Bible sitting on the coffee table because there was no Bible yet. If you wanted to learn about Jesus, you learned from other Christians. Stories were told, letters were read aloud, conversations happened around dinner tables, and the teachings of Jesus were passed from one generation to the next.

The idea of compiling authoritative writings into a single, standardised text came much later in the fourth century when Christian leaders sought to establish a definitive list of sacred texts to guide doctrine and practice because, by then, people had started arguing over their theological differences.

The completion of the Bible, as it is recognised in its entirety today, can be dated to around the early 5th century AD, with the formalisation of both the Old and New Testaments. But even today, different denominations still don’t agree on whether certain books of the Bible belong.

The remarkable thing is that the church grew for hundreds of years without the thing many Christians now regard as indispensable. Long before there was a completed Bible, communities of believers were gathering, worshipping, caring for one another, and trying to live out the teachings of Jesus.

Who would have thought?

A Guilt-less Church

Ask anyone in my church growing up to explain the Christian message, and they would inevitably say that Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay the price to save us from our sins. This way of believing was so well engrained in me that I just assumed it was a given.

But did you know that this belief — known as penal substitutionary atonement — was not a foundational belief in the early church? In fact, it took centuries for this theological framework to develop and gain widespread acceptance within Christian communities.

In the earliest days of Christianity, the understanding of Christ’s death and its significance varied among different groups of believers. In fact, the idea of penal substitution — that Jesus suffered the punishment for humanity’s sins on behalf of believers — was not explicitly articulated in the writings of the early church fathers or in the early creeds of Christianity.

Go figure.

Instead, early Christians held other views on the nature of Christ’s atoning work, emphasising themes such as Christus Victor (Christ’s victory over sin and death), ransom theory (Jesus’ death as a payment to liberate humanity from bondage), and moral influence theory (Jesus’ death as a demonstration of God’s love as a catalyst for moral transformation).

The development of penal substitutionary atonement as a dominant theological framework can be traced to the mediaeval period and the writings of theologians such as Anselm of Canterbury and later reformers like John Calvin. Influenced by the legal and feudal concepts of their time, these theologians formulated the idea that Jesus’ death satisfied God’s justice by bearing the penalty for human sin.

This is why I get nervous whenever someone talks about penal substitution as though it has always been the Christian view. It certainly became an influential view, particularly after the Reformation, but it wasn’t the only way Christians understood the cross, and for many centuries it wasn’t even the dominant one.

A Priest-less Church

The priest or pastor seems so central to the life of the modern church. I was once a pastor and considered myself far too important, though I didn’t see it then. However, the early church didn’t have the hierarchical structure commonly associated with modern religious institutions.

The role of the pastor feels so normal to most Christians that it’s easy to assume it has always existed in its current form. Yet when you look at the earliest Christian communities, the picture is much less clear. There were leaders, certainly. The New Testament speaks about elders, overseers, apostles, prophets, teachers, and deacons. But there was nothing quite like the modern professional pastor whose primary role is to run a local church and deliver a sermon every Sunday.

Leadership existed, but it looked different. Communities were often led by a range of people exercising different gifts and responsibilities. The highly structured systems that many churches take for granted today would emerge much later.

Can you imagine a church with no formalised leadership structure?

Well, for the first 300–400 years of Christianity, that was the modus operandi.

What do the early churches that we still have in today's church?

Acts 19 While Apollos was in Corinth, Paul travelled through the interior regions and came to Ephesus. He found some disciples 2 and asked them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”

“No,” they told him, “we haven’t even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”

3 “Then what baptism were you baptised with?” he asked them.

“With John’s baptism,” they replied.

4 Paul said, “John baptised with a baptism of repentance, telling the people that they should believe in the One who would come after him, that is, in Jesus.”

5 When they heard this, they were baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus. 6 And when Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they began to speak in other languages and to prophesy. 7 Now there were about 12 men in all.

From the scripture above, you can see that the Holy Spirit came upon the early church, and wherever the disciples went, they spread the baptism of the Holy Spirit to the new converts.

The Ethiopian Eunuch, Cornelius, the community at Azotus and many others received the Baptism of the Holy Spirit as the seal of their salvation, and this has endured right from the early church till today.

This one thing is still keenly contentious in today's church.

Back to the beginning

Could you imagine a church without a building, a pastor, a Bible, or a guilt-based doctrinal system? It’s hard to believe that the church flourished in its infancy without any of those things.

Or is it?

Don’t get me wrong. I have no particular problem with buildings, pastors, or even the Bible. (I have some issues with penal substitutionary atonement, but that’s another story.) Where the church has lost the plot is in elevating these things to central tenets of the faith, sometimes at the expense of the core principles that Jesus emphasised during his ministry on earth.

In the absence of grand edifices and formal clergy, the early church focused on embodying the teachings of Jesus in their daily lives. Love, compassion, justice, and community were the cornerstones of their faith, not ornate buildings or doctrinal purity.

Without the written scriptures, they relied on storytelling and shared memories. Their faith was not confined to the pages of a book but lived out in their interactions with one another and the world around them.

Without the burden of guilt-based theology, they approached their relationship with God and one another with a sense of freedom and grace. They understood that God’s love was unconditional and that forgiveness was always available to those who sought it and they are led by the Spirit in all their endeavours