This 13-part series of classes has been many years in the making. About 25 years ago I began in earnest to examine the features, character and characteristics of the church as it existed in its earliest years. As I sometimes do, I kept my notes all along the way, and this series of classes is to a large extent the product of those years of on-and-off studying the subject. Several things in my experience contributed to my interest in making this 25-year study which I will mention along the way, and those go much further back.
There may be some difficulty in using the individual parts of this series separately, although viewers are free to do so if it serves their purposes. But to those whose interest is in knowing what the church was like in its earliest years, I recommend starting with Part 1 - Introduction to the Church of the New Testament and proceeding through the parts consecutively.
I have prepared some slides that I used in presenting the series in a classroom setting before adapting it to use as sermons. I have left my cues to advance slides or activate animations in the notes as posted on Sermon Central. If anyone is interested in having the PowerPoint files with the slides, I will be happy to send them. Send me an Email at sam@srmccormick.net and specify what part(s) you are requesting. Be sure that the word “slide” appears in the subject line. It may take me several days to respond, but I will respond to all requests.
THE CHURCH OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
OUTLINE OF THE STUDY
I. Introduction
II. The Origin of the Church
III. What is the church?
IV. The First Christians
V. Authority in the First Century Church
VI. Problems in the New Testament Church
VII. How the Church Functioned
A. Introduction to Functions
B. Apostles, Prophets, and Teachers
C. False Apostles, Prophets, and Teachers & Various Gifts and Functions
D. More Gifts and Functions
E. Evangelists, Preachers, and Ministers, Servants and Deacons
F. Pastors, Elders, Bishops, etc.
VIII. How the Church Worshiped
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WORSHIP IN THE FIRST CENTURY
The day of Pentecost must have led directly to the emergence of questions about worship. The first converts to Christianity were Jews. They knew how to worship according to the Law of Moses. Little did they realize that worship—sacrifices, washings and purification, festivals, the articles of the temple--under the Law of Moses were precursors of the worship of Christ. Even while they had not come to know Christ, their worship foreshadowed Christ’s work of salvation. It is highly improbable that they knew right away that Christian worship would in time entirely displace the familiar system that their worship merely prefigured.
The first Christians must have wondered, “Will our worship as Christians be different? Will new things be incorporated into our familiar pattern of Sabbaths, festivals and sacrifices?” Many questions must have percolated immediately.
We will examine the effects of this massive change in the first century, and what it portended for worshipers in later generations, by asking the questions presented by five pronouns and adverbs: What? Who? When? Where? and How?
*Advance to pronoun and adverb slide
What? Who? When? Where? How?
WHAT is worship?
To worship means to “bow down before and give honor to a higher being.”
Vines Expository Dictionary defines worship this way: "to make obeisance, do reverence to."
Worship of God, then, is laying ourselves prostrate before God, in subjection and reverence, as an expression of adoration. When I was a child many years ago, men used to kneel beside the pews to pray. I believe those men were worshiping God in their physical bodies. Although we worship when we assemble insofar as we revere God, we do not assemble so that we can worship, as though worshiping is enabled by assembling. We may worship God individually and personally, whether alone or assembled with other worshipers.
WHO is worthy to be worshiped?
It’s an easy question to answer. God alone is worthy. No one here today will dispute that.
Why are we so certain and agreed on that?
God has made it plain that he is extremely displeased when his people worship someone or something other than himself, to the point that he destroyed a nation for it. The first of the ten commandments is:
You shall have no other Gods before me. Exodus 20:3
The second of the ten commandments:
You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God Exo 20:4-5
Tempted by Satan, Jesus responded this way:
Be gone, Satan! For it is written, “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.” Matthew 4:10
In Jesus’ quote from Deuteronomy 6:13, Moses in turn quotes God himself, saying, “…for the Lord God in your midst is a jealous God – lest the anger of the Lord your God be kindled against you, and he destroy you from off the face of the earth.”
When we say that God alone is worthy to be worshiped, do we exclude Jesus and the Holy Spirit, who are involved and included in all the works of God? Do we sing wrongly?
Jesus, we love you, we worship and adore you
Magnify your name in all the earth.
Spirit, we love you, we worship and adore you
Magnify your name in all the earth.
Jesus was indeed worshiped in the scriptures, and readily accepted worship.
• The magi from the East “fell down and worshiped the child in Bethlehem.”
• Joseph and Mary allowed and accepted their infant son to be worshiped, both having been visited by an angel to tell them what Jesus’ miraculous birth was about.
• On the Sea of Galilee, when Peter had attempted to walk on the water to Jesus, and became afraid, they got into the boat, “and those in the boat worshiped him saying “Truly you are the Son of God.”
Jesus clearly accepted worship.
May the Holy Spirit be worshiped?
• God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and Truth (John 4:24).
• …for we are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh (Philippians 3:3).
Like Christ, the Holy Spirit is not separated from, in competition with or contradiction of the Father.
The Holy Spirit, then, is worthy of worship.
He is God.
No person or object that is not deity is worthy to be worshiped. Peter, for example, is not deity. He refused worship at the house of Cornelius (Acts 10:25-26).
Someone may ask, “Since angels are in the heavenly realm, is worship of angels appropriate?”
Paul wrote to the Colossians,
• Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by delighting in self-abasement and the worship of the angels, taking his stand on visions he has seen, inflated without cause by his fleshly mind... (Colossians 2:18)
• The angel who showed John the river of the water of life flowing through the street of the heavenly Jerusalem refused John’s worship. “I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I heard and saw, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed me these things. But he *said to me, "Do not do that. I am a fellow servant of yours and of your brethren the prophets and of those who heed the words of this book. Worship God." (Revelation 22:8-9)
WHEN does the New Testament say should we worship? On the first day of the week? Sometime in the middle of the week? Day by day?
When did the earliest Christians worship?
• We worship at any time we prostrate ourselves before God, whether as individuals or as an assembled group.
• Worship is a whole life proposition, not something we push into a few hours.
• Paul wrote to the Christians at Rome:
Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship (Romans 12:1).
• Everything we have comes from God, and belongs to him still. He is sovereign over every phase of our lives, whether we acknowledge it and bow before him or not.
• So don’t think of worship as an occasional action, or as necessarily a group activity--let your life be worship.
While we recognize that we do worshipful things both when we are--and are not--assembled, does the New Testament specifically instruct us when to assemble?
In the 11th through the 14th chapters of the first Corinthian letter, Paul gives various instructions that pertain to the assembled congregation. Here's one such example:
When you come together, it is not the Lord's supper that you eat. (1 Cor 11:20)
But Paul doesn’t specify “when” the church is to come together.
Here's another:
If the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and ungifted men or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are mad? (1 Cor 14:23)
Here Paul makes it “if” the whole church comes together. But verse 26 shows that he presumes that they would do so:
What is the outcome then, brethren? When you assemble, each one has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, has an interpretation. Let all things be done for edification (1 Corinthians 14:26).
These passages show that Christians assembling together was a normal occurrence that he expected to happen, but Paul and other writers do not specify in these or any other passages that I can find, when Christians are to assemble.
*Advance to Troas slide
Someone might say, “Christians are commanded to worship on Sunday, because that’s what the Bible commands in Acts 20:7.
At Troas, the disciples had come together:
Acts 20:7 On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul began talking to them, intending to leave the next day, and he prolonged his message until midnight.
By a reasonable estimate, that was about 28 years after the church’s beginning, about 1000 miles from Jerusalem.
And what were they doing that day?
Breaking bread. It literally means “breaking bread, or a loaf.”
It is often suggested that this occasion is our model for Christian assemblies - or scheduled “services” - on the strength of the suggestion that by “breaking bread” they came together for the explicit purpose of taking the Lord’s supper because in the observance of it, bread is broken.
Precisely the same expression was used in the bible’s original language for taking a meal. About Jesus feeding 5000 with 5 loaves and two fishes Matthew wrote:
Ordering the people to sit down on the grass, He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up toward heaven, He blessed the food, and breaking the loaves He gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds…(Matt 14:19)
In his account of that event, Matthew used exactly the same words in the original language that Luke used in Acts 20:7 - “break” is from the Greek klao, meaning to break of pieces, and “loaves” is from the Greek artos, meaning bread.
Note that what they did at Troas on the first day of the week on the occasion in Acts 20:7 is reported using the exact words the same writer used to report what the first Christians did daily.
Acts 2:46 Day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart,
The same writer used exactly the same words for “breaking bread” in both passages – they broke bread on the first day of the week in Troas, and daily in Jerusalem, and in Jerusalem the passage in Acts 2:46 explicitly says they took meals together.
We need to be careful when we read the Bible to understand what the writer intended to say. Perhaps the “coming together” in Troas was to take the Lord’s supper. There is no compelling evidence against it. But neither can I raise a compelling argument that their gathering was for taking the Lord’s supper rather than simply to take their meal together, for the early Christians did both.
The other reference to the first day of the week is in 1 Cor 16:2:
On the first day of every week each one of you is to put aside and save, as he may prosper, so that no collections be made when I come.
ESV – “put something aside and store it up”
KJV – “lay by him in store”
“Lay by in store” is another of those expressions that has become idiomized in the church context to mean “place your contribution in the contribution tray.”
But the meaning of the words is simply holding some money aside, stored for a special purpose. Doing so on the first day of the week suggests regularity and priority and possibly convenience. And the funds thus laid aside were not for the general costs associated with the operations of a local congregation. The funds were for Judean Christians 1000 miles away, who were suffering through a famine.
But Paul does not tell the Christians at Corinth to assemble on the day they put money aside for their Judean fellow-Christians.
As far as I can see, these two verses (Acts 20:7 and 1 Corinthians 16:2) have traditionally borne the full weight of the question of what day Christians are to worship.
So why do we assemble on Sunday, and why do I nevertheless advocate Sunday as a day when Christians ought to assemble and worship?
• The Bible doesn’t tell us this, but Justin Martyr and other early Christian writers wrote that the earliest Christians set the first day apart from other days to meet together and hear the word.
• The apostles clearly participated in that choice.
John used the expression, “the Lord’s day” in Rev 1:10, saying “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day,” without saying what the Lord’s day was, but it signified that by the time he wrote the Revelation, there was a day that was especially devoted to the Lord. But John said nothing about Christians assembling on that day—merely that he was “in the Spirit,” and saw visions.
I do believe Sunday is the day Christians should assemble for worship, but I believe Acts 20:7, often quoted as the key proof, offers - at best - weak support of it. Let me explain why.
Sunday is appropriate for our worship as assembled Christians, but neither because the disciples at Troas came together to “break bread” on that day, nor because Paul told Christians at Corinth to put aside some money for needy Judeans on the first day of the week. Nor because assembling on Sunday is commanded anywhere. I find no explicit instruction concerning the time of assembling to worship.
Sunday was chosen apart from other days for assembling to worship because...
• The day that Jesus rose from the dead was Sunday, and the early Christians recognized the resurrection as a seminal event in their faith.
• Sunday was the day of at least one of Jesus’ post resurrection appearances. The early Christian writers make that connection.
• The day the Holy Spirit came on the disciples and the gospel was first preached (Pentecost) was Sunday.
History does not command us. The Bible is our sole authority in all matters of faith and practice.
Without Biblical command to assemble on Sunday or to do otherwise, we willingly follow the traditional choice of those first Christians, who were blessed in worship and serving.
That is why I believe it is appropriate for us to assemble and worship on Sunday.
May Christians assemble and worship at other times? Most certainly. Nothing prohibits it, and in my own experience, most do so.
WHERE are Christians to worship?
A woman Jesus met at Jacob’s well had questions about worship (John 4:2-26).
“Where?” the woman wanted to know - on this mountain (Gerazim), or at Jerusalem?
The questions touched upon a ferocious controversy that had raged for hundreds of years. Samaritans believed that Gerazim, located in Samaria, was the proper place for worship, to the outrage of Jews who had rock-solid proof in the bible that worship was to be at Jerusalem.
How did Mount Gerizim become the Samaritans’ place of worship?
The Pentateuch was the Samaritans’ Bible. There were frequent mentions of the “place God would choose for his name to dwell.”
Deut 12:11 ...then it shall come about that the place in which the Lord your God will choose for His name to dwell, there you shall bring all that I command you: your burnt offerings and your sacrifices, your tithes and the contribution of your hand, and all your choice votive offerings which you will vow to the Lord. (and various other passages in Deut 12-14).
But Moses didn’t mention, and in fact didn’t know, where that place would be.
It lies beyond our purpose to explore and settle the complicated history of how Mount Gerazim came to be considered “that place” by the Samaritans, but they believed they had a strong case for Mt. Gerazim as the place.
Briefly, Sanballat (one of those who opposed and troubled Nehemiah when he returned from Persia to rebuild Jerusalem) built a temple on Mount Gerizim for worship about four centuries before Christ was born. By Christ’s time it was old and revered, and thus presumed the right place. (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews xi.c.viii.s.4 and 2 Maccabees 6:2)
Jesus didn’t get caught up in the history and controversy. He said, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father (John 4:21).
The church is not a place. The church and the place it assembles are two different things. Jesus explained that the place does not matter, so he didn’t and we shouldn’t try to make it matter.
There were no meeting houses for Christians for almost 300 years. One of the earliest mentions of one was by Cyprian of Carthage (more later about him). In Jerusalem, Christians worshiped in homes and in the temple – but not in meeting houses, or “church buildings.” Bear in mind that from the very start there were thousands of Christians, with the number growing rapidly in the comparatively small town of Jerusalem. It would be practically impossible for all of them to meet in a single assembly.
Beginning around the end of the third century, spectacularly opulent buildings were built for Christians at government expense, for the emperor Constantine – breaking the patterns of earlier emperors - had embraced Christianity.
E. HOW? In what way are we to worship?
In my lifetime, and for some time before, “how we ought to worship” has been a subject of consuming interest in the church.
Few religious questions have been more bitterly debated than various questions centering on the assembly, and how we are to conduct it acceptably.
As discussed earlier, a woman of Samaria perceived that Jesus was a prophet, and wanted to know, “Where do you say we should worship - in this mountain (Gerazim) or at Jerusalem?” But Jesus answered the woman not with “where,” but “how.”
"But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers (John 4:23).
In spirit and in truth.
• It would be a spiritual, not physical, worship like the Law of Moses.
• It would be in truth, with Jesus himself--the way, the truth, and the life--being the object; not bulls and rams, which only prefigured the truth that is Christ.
The early church consisted of Jews, and they continued to practice Judaism.
We see evidences of this in scripture.
Here’s Paul at Jerusalem:
After he had greeted them [the elders at Jerusalem], he began to relate one by one the things which God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry. And when the elders at Jerusalem heard it they began glorifying God; and they said to him, "You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed, and they are all zealous for the Law... (Acts 21:19-20).
The elders’ reference to “the law” was in respect to circumcision, sacrifices, distinctions of meats and days, festivals, etc. It may seem remarkable that they should still continue to observe those rites, since it was the manifest design of Christianity to abolish them. But we do well to remember:
(1) That those rites had been appointed by God, and that the new Christians had been trained to their observance.
(2) That the apostles conformed to them while they remained at Jerusalem, and did not deem it best to set themselves adamantly against them.
(3) That the question of their Jewish observances had never been agitated at Jerusalem. It was only about the Gentile converts at Antioch that the question had arisen, and there it must arise, for if they were to be observed by Gentile converts, they must have been imposed upon Gentiles by some authority.
(4) The decision of the council Acts 15 was to address the question of what was required of Gentile converts. It did not touch the question whether those same rites were to continue being observed by the Jewish converts.
(5) It was presumed that as the Christian religion became better understood - that as its large, free, and universal nature became increasingly developed, the special institutions of Moses would be laid aside of course, without trouble and tumult. Had the question been agitated at Jerusalem, it would have excited tenfold opposition to Christianity, and would have rent the Christian church into factions, and greatly hindered the advance of the Christian doctrines.
(6) In the arrangement of divine providence, the time was drawing near which was to destroy the temple, the city, and the nation, which was to put an end to sacrifices, and effectually to terminate forever the observance of the Mosaic rites. As this destruction was so near, and as it would be so effectual an end of the observance of the Mosaic rites Jesus, as the head of the church did not allow the question of their obligation to be needlessly stirred up among the disciples at Jerusalem.
Was the keeping of the Law required of Christian Jews? No. But it would be very difficult to persuade them to abandon the traditions handed down by Moses and meticulously kept by their ancestors, before the doctrines of Christianity were fully revealed and grasped, making the Law of Moses a thing of the past.
What should be the order of worship?
The clearest instruction in the entire New Testament about conduct of worship is in 1 Cor 14 (allowing that the historical backdrop was the Corinth church’s fascination with tongue-speaking, thought to be a prestigious spiritual gift). If we want to see if we measure up to the church of the New Testament, we need to look at 1 Cor 14. Nowhere in the scriptures will you find a more concise on-point instruction about the assemblies of Christians.
Read 1 Cor 14:20-40
Are we a good match to this description? Does it describe us?
Can we account for our deviation from that description on the basis of the expiration of miraculous revelations and other phenomena?
My answer: Not entirely. Our assemblies as currently practiced have been packaged over a long period of time, mostly by people who lived and died long before us. Over time they became comfortable like a broken-in pair of shoes.
There is no reason we need to change our assemblies. But we should be aware of the scriptural guidance, and where it has and has not guided past decisions.
The Pulpit
Today, the sermon is considered by many to be the centerpiece of the Christian assembly. Others may say, “No, the Lord’s Supper is why we come together.” Or Christian association and fellowship. Or other things.
But the sermon is usually given more continuous time in Christian assemblies than anything else.
There is no scriptural reference or historical evidence of a pulpit in the New Testament church until the middle of the third century, in a letter of Cyprian, bishop of Carthage.
Even then it was not used for preaching or expounding the word. Cyprian’s letter refers to its use in ordaining a “reader” in the Carthage church.
*Advance to the slide showing pulpit greatly elevated with stairs behind it
Is this okay?
In my opinion, a pulpit is an expedient without command or early history. But it can be misused.
I think it becomes harmful to the spirit of worship if it is excessively large or ornate, or if it is constructed and placed in such a way as to suggest a distinction of clergy as above laity.
We are all laity, including the one using a pulpit. We have differing work assignments as the Holy Spirit has imparted gifts, but we are all on equal footing as we stand in God’s presence.
The assembly - for worship, or for mutual encouragement?
Read Hebrews 10:24-26
The writer shows here why Christians should never stop assembling with other Christians, which some appear to have been doing. Further, he shows the reason why it is important: that Christians should stir one another up to love and good works.
Verse 25 says:
KJV: Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together…
NASB: Not forsaking our own assembling together…
ESV: Not neglecting to meet together…
In verse 24 the writer gives the purpose of assembling - that we may stimulate and encourage one another.
Of course none of us suggest that we forsake, or abandon, the practice of assembling ourselves together. However, this passage is sometimes quoted in support of an argument that every Christian must be present on every occasion when the church assembles, and that any person who fails in that duty “forsook the assembly” on that occasion. But such is a distortion of both the meaning of both the words “forsaking” which means to abandon or cease, and “assembling” which is used in reference not to some particular occasion, but assembling as an on-going practice. So I believe the intended meaning of the passage is that Christians should spend time assembled with one another and that, so assembled, the time should be employed in stimulating and encouraging one another.
I fear that time has assigned a meaning relating the passage only to each formal, regularly scheduled “church service,” rather than the broader perspective of the church’s on-going practice.
I pray that this series of sermons on the church of the New Testament has been informative and instructive. It has touched on several subjects where Christians differ in their understanding of what the Lord wants the church he built to look and act like. My purpose has not been to fan flames of controversy or to stake out “positions;” but to offer the fruits of my study over an ever-lengthening lifetime for the consideration of any and all who are interested in knowing and doing God’s will.
