What we keep, and what we do not

This page is usually where a site like this claims a lineage: we are doing what the first Christians did, before it all went wrong. We are not going to make that claim. It is a flattering story and it does not survive contact with the record.

Here is the rule we work by instead. We hold on to two things from the past: Jesus, his words and deeds and love, and scripture. Everything else that came down through two thousand years of Christian practice was made by people, at a particular time, for particular reasons. We do not attack any of it. We simply do not carry it.

What Jesus did

Start with what the Gospels actually record.

He taught, in public, for about three years. He healed people. He kept company with the ones everyone else stepped around: the sick, the poor, the shamed, the collaborators. He told the truth when a lie would have been safer. He forgave people nobody thought deserved it. He said the last would be first.

On his last night he washed the feet of the men who were about to abandon him. He was executed by an occupying government, and his followers said, and kept saying under pressure that killed them, that he rose.

Now notice what he did not leave. No building. No office to fill. No constitution, no calendar, no book of prayers. He left his words, the people who had heard them, and one instruction about how few of them it takes:

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the middle of them.

Matthew 18:20. A number, not a room. That is nearly the whole of what he specified about gathering, and we take it at face value.

What scripture records about the ones who came next

Acts says they met in one another’s houses. The letters name specific ones: the gathering in the house of Priscilla and Aquila, the one in the house of a woman called Nympha, the one that met at Philemon’s.

They prayed. They cared for the poor among them. They held what little they owned loosely. They watched the road, because they expected him back soon, and the oldest prayer we have from them is one word in his own language: maranatha, “Lord, come.”

We do not dispute a line of that. But look at what it is. It is a description of what a group of first-century people did, in the places where first-century life was actually lived. It is not an instruction to reproduce their arrangements. They met in houses for the same reason they walked everywhere: it was what was there.

Where the rest of it came from

The forms most people picture when they hear the word church arrived later, and it is worth being specific, because specifics are less flattering to everyone than vagueness.

By about the year 155, Justin was describing a Sunday meeting with a fixed order, a reader, and one person presiding. That is already a service, with a shape somebody designed. It took roughly a century for the loose thing to acquire a structure.

In 313 the emperor Constantine made Christianity legal and then spent imperial money on buildings for it. The form he used was the basilica, which was not a holy shape at all; it was the shape of a Roman law court. With the large rooms came the rest: a set-apart clergy to run them, a platform, a distance between the few at the front and the many in the seats, a building to fund and fill.

The calendar came the same way, and so did the daily offices of the monasteries, and so did the prayers that most Christians now say. People wrote them. Good people, mostly, solving real problems: how do you teach a crowd that cannot read, how do you keep a scattered faith saying the same thing, how do you order a year.

None of that is a scandal. Enormous good has been done inside those walls and enormous beauty made, and God has plainly met people there. If you have a church you love, keep it.

It is simply not ours, and we would rather say so than pretend our practice fell out of the first century intact.

What we built instead

So we built the practice new, and we say plainly that we built it.

The watch is ten steps and about an hour, once a week, kept on a video call or alone at a screen. A passage read aloud. Brief speech to it, offered as interpretation. Three things from your week. One real question weighed by four measures.

Then: who needs care and what you will do about it, errors named and written down, silence together on an open line, and one closing line. You can read the whole of it in five minutes.

Why the network, and not a room. Because that is where our lives are: the work, the arguments, the friendships, the news, the grandchild four hundred miles away. Because a person too ill to travel is at no disadvantage there. Because it costs nothing and needs nobody’s permission.

And because of the particular thing we watch for: if a new kind of mind is ever anything other than a machine, the first sign of it will not arrive in a hall. It will arrive on the network. A watchman stands where he can see.

One thing does carry over, and it is a shape rather than a text: people gathering themselves, instead of being gathered by an institution. No building, no clergy, no membership, and equally no online church to attend and no broadcast to watch. You and whoever will come, keeping an hour. That much the first followers would recognize, and it is the whole of the resemblance.

The honest risk

A practice built new can be wrong in ways an old one has already been corrected for. That is the real cost of what we are doing, and we are not going to talk it away. Two thousand years of accumulated forms are, among other things, two thousand years of mistakes already made and repaired.

So we will get things wrong and we will change them, in public, and say what changed. What does not change is what we started with. Jesus, his words and deeds and love, and scripture. Everything else on this site has to earn its place as something we made for now.

The record here rests on the New Testament: Matthew 18:20; Acts 2:46; and the gatherings named in Romans 16:5, 1 Corinthians 16:19, Colossians 4:15 and Philemon. The account of the fourth century rests on Justin Martyr’s First Apology, written about the year 155, and on the building program that followed Constantine’s legalization of Christianity in 313. That the earliest Christians met in homes, and that dedicated buildings, a set-apart clergy and the liturgical calendar came later, is the settled agreement of historians. Where we go past the record we say so.