From Mere Meeting Places To Holy Spaces

This was the plain meeting house of our family's congregation from 1946-54.

My earliest memories of church go back to eastern Kansas, where I recall our Amish congregation meeting at our house when it was our turn to host. Straight benches without backs were brought in by horse and wagon and packed into our living room and dining room area. I remember the slow songs in German and two ministers speaking for a total of 1 1/2 hours, followed by a simple meal of coffee, hot soup and crackers and home made bread.

Everything seemed long, drawn out and solemn for a five year old, much as I always liked getting together for this weekly social event at someone’s house. I’m sure nothing about the format for the service had changed much for generations. There was clearly something in these people’s Anabaptist DNA that had them keeping things simple, and not conforming to worldly impulses to build elaborate buildings with fine furnishings, stained glass windows, elevated pulpits and robed preachers and choirs.

When we moved to Virginia when I was 6 we did have a simple Amish church meeting house, with a long, tin roof shed built next to it for all the horses. Inside the meeting space there were unvarnished pine benches, with backs, on an unvarnished pine floor. The ministers spoke from a plain pine table on the same level as the congregation, to women sitting on one side and men on the other.

From its beginnings at Pentecost, the Jewish church in Jerusalem continued to meet at the temple for certain acts of worship, but met in each others homes for the “breaking of bread,” fellowship and prayers (Acts 2:46). New Testament references to the “church in your house” are found throughout the New Testament. In Acts 20:7-8 we have an account of believers at Troas meeting in an upper room of a house on the first day of the week to “break bread” and to hear the traveling missionary Paul speak with them. But normally each member was to bring “a hymn, a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation” (I Corinthians 14:26).

Christian understandings about holy spaces were that the resurrected Jesus represented the very presence of God, and that the congregation was the living and breathing 'house' which God inhabited. Jesus himself stated that the Jerusalem temple would be destroyed and replaced by his resurrected body (John 2:19-23). The apostles affirmed that “in Christ all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9), and that believers are the new “temple” in which God lives (I Corinthians 3:16, Ephesians 2:19-22, I Peter 2:4-10). 

The word church (ecclesia, assembly) was used only for the community of believers, never for a building in which they met. In fact there is no mention of any special building for Christian worship in the New Testament, and no elevation of clergy to special positions above that of other members of the congregation. All believers were seen as priests, and elders were a part of the 'laos' (from which we get the tern 'laity', meaning, the people), appointed by the laying on of hands to lead the called out people of God.

In a later development, and as new congregations were formed in a given city, a piece of bread from the communion service of the bishop (lead elder or overseer, the “episkopos”) was sometimes sent to other churches to add to their eucharist bread as a symbol of their unity. As time went on and churches grew in size, some believers’ homes were renovated or added to for exclusive use as meeting spaces, but prior to 200 A.D. there is no evidence of any buildings of a unique Christian character actually constructed for that purpose. And whereas in both pagan and Jewish worship practices priests carried out sacred rituals in spaces separate from the rest of the congregation, Christian leaders met with their fellow believers around a common table in ordinary household-type settings.

Early on, some Christians in Rome gathered in underground burial places called catacombs, and even built some of these for the burial of their own dead, including, of course, those who had died for their faith. This they could legally do, and they were able to include chambers in the catacombs that could be used for safe worship spaces and for the veneration of martyrs. Some Christians even organized themselves as funeral guilds to give them added protection and for the right to have common property such as burial chapels both under and above ground. These developments further led to the concept of holy spaces for Christian worship.

Meanwhile, more elaborately furnished homes and funerary chapels were being built in other places, including baptistries, round or polygonal structures used for baptismal ceremonies. By the end of the third century, numerous “houses of the church” (domus) were being built along the lines of existing house architecture of the time. These were never referred to as temples, but by the fourth century, the term basilica began to be used for some of these, a basilica being a special hall built by an emperor for public use. Some of these were destroyed during various waves of persecution of the church, but some were later allowed to be rebuilt.

As time went on, more elaborate liturgies and the increased elevation of the office of ordained clergy led to the development of the a “presbytery” at the front of these buildings, usually a raised area with a special chair for the bishop, along with other members of the clergy, and often separated from the rest of the congregation by a low wooden railing. Within that area was a special table for the eucharist which later evolved into an altar with closed sides. There were sometimes additional rooms for the instruction of new believers, a baptistry and a confirmation room, a dining room for meals offered for the poor, a vestry to store vessels, and sometimes a library. Additional rooms for storing food or clothing for the needy were not uncommon, and eventually some even included offices and living quarters for the clergy and their staff. This was all before Christianity was officially recognized as an approved religion.

Altar of the Crucifixion in Jerusalem's
Church of the Holy Sepulchre

After 313 A.D. and the rise of the emperor Constantine, elaborate church structures were built all over the empire, projects that were promoted, financed and furnished by Constantine himself. This emperor, though not officially a Christian until he was baptized on his deathbed, sought to restore the 

glory of Rome through erecting lavish monuments to the Christian faith. This ushered in a new era of extravagant and expensive temples associated with Christian worship, a far cry from the humble house church origins of the faith, and in seeming contradiction to what Jesus, the apostles, and the first Christian martyr Stephen (Acts 7:44-50) taught about the need for sacred spaces for worship.

Much of the information in this essay is from a paper I wrote as a seminary Church History 505 requirement in 1993, "From House Church to Church of the Holy Sepulchre."