House Church and Mission: The Importance of Household Structures in Early Christianity. By ROGER W. GEHRING.

Abstract

It is well known that the first-century Christians met in houses, and generally agreed that in our literature oikos refers not just to the physical structure whose ground plan archaeologists can occasionally uncover but to the extended family that lived in it and formed a small community that was in turn seen as the basic unit of which the city itself was composed. House churches might therefore better be termed ‘household churches’. Building on the extensive work done in this area by many scholars, especially in the last twenty-five years, Gehring sets out to provide the most comprehensive review yet of the evidence for household churches and to argue that the patterns of authority inherent in the household determined the organizational and leadership structures of the churches and that this contributed greatly to their success. A unique feature of this study is that it focuses not only on the churches of the Pauline mission but that it attributes the origin of the household church to Jesus himself and traces its development through the churches at Jerusalem and Antioch. Gehring argues first that Jesus himself was at least some of the time resident at, and based his itinerant mission on, the house of Peter in Capernaum, for which archaeology provides evidence that it was an early house church. The same thing appears to have happened in Bethany, suggesting to Gehring that similar house churches came into existence wherever Jesus preached and formed a network of communities in and around Capernaum and the surrounding villages, where the disciples of Jesus lived at the family of God. Secondly, he argues that the disciples were instructed to find a house from which to carry out their mission, as evidenced by the mission discourse, especially as found in Luke 10. It is argued that this does not simply reflect the practice of Christians in their post-Easter mission but goes back to Jesus. These households became centres for mission to their towns, offering a family of faith to those who had left home for the sake of the gospel, since while some were called to itinerant evangelism, others stayed at home and supported them.