16-5-3 House Meetings in the First Century

It would be wrong to get the impression from the early days in Jerusalem that most Christian converts in the first century were won by mass meetings and big evangelists like Peter. There is every reason to think that what happened there was unique. It would have been almost impossible to hold such mass meetings in the Roman empire. And there is no archaeological evidence for the existence of any buildings for Christian meetings until well into the 2nd century. It follows that the massive growth of Christianity in the 1st century was mainly through personal witness and small house groups. The Acts record is very abbreviated. Surely we are to see in groups like that based around Lydia an example of typical first century groups of believers. The impression we get from the record is that this was the usual style of Christian meeting. The Gospel was preached from homes, such as Jason’s in Thessalonica (Acts 17:5), that of Titus Justus and Stephanas in Corinth (18:7; 1 Cor. 1:16; 16:15), Philip’s in Caesarea (21:8), Lydia’s and the jailer’s in Philippi (16:15,32-34), the home owned by the mother of John Mark in Jerusalem (1:13; 12:12). The spread of the Gospel from homes is therefore a major theme of the record; and the obvious implication is that the audience was the friends and family of the convert, to whom they had personally witnessed. There are many stories recorded of the gradual infiltration of the middle and upper classes of Roman society by Christianity, on account of the lives and words of slaves. This was quite against the norm of society, where the master of the house controlled the religion of the household, including that of the slaves. But such was the insistent power of personal witness that society was turned on its head.