91: 10 Ways the Early Church Looks Different from American Churches: Part 2

I'm Eddie Lawrence, and this is the Ready for Eternity podcast, a podcast and blog exploring biblical truths for inquisitive

Bible students. In the last episode, we examined ten striking differences between the first century church that we read about in the

New Testament and modern American Christianity. Some people might respond and say that sure things are different between the modern church and the ancient church, but the ancient practices were just describing how they did things.

It's not saying that's how we have to do them now. We're free to adapt.

It's a compelling defense of the status quo, one that lets us maintain our comfortable church model without feeling a need to improve.

But this argument collapses under the weight of a simple question. If the early church's practices were merely cultural adaptations that we're free to abandon, why have the results of abandoning them been so catastrophic?

The differences aren't just historical curiosities. They're warning signs pointing to what we've lost and what that loss has cost us.

Let's consider seven specific ways these changes have damaged the church.

When churches grow to hundreds or thousands of people, meaningful relationships become very difficult.

You can't practice confess your sins to one another, as James 5 .16 says, or the

Matthew 18 discipline process with people you barely know. Large anonymous congregations allow people to live in hypocrisy with no one noticing or caring.

The first century congregation size enabled mutual accountability that larger churches can't really provide.

The single pastor and senior pastor models concentrate power in ways that enable abuse.

When one charismatic leader controls teaching, vision, and resources without peer accountability, it creates an environment where spiritual abuse, financial scandals, and covered up moral failures can take place.

A plurality of elders is a check and balances system. The celebrity pastor phenomenon we see today, complete with its moral collapses and damaged lives, is a direct result of abandoning this structure.

When ministry becomes something professionals do while everyone else spectates, the body atrophies.

The New Testament pattern assumes every member would exercise gifts given by the

Holy Spirit for the common good. Modern passivity creates spiritually immature

Christians dependent upon being spoon fed. If we've abandoned the idea of each one having a hymn, teaching, or revelation as 1

Corinthians 14 describes, if we've abandoned that just because we think that was a cultural adaptation, we've lost the participatory nature that develops mature believers.

This isn't a minor shift. First century financial priorities were clear.

Support those in need and spread the gospel. When 80 -90 % of church budgets goes to buildings and salaries, something very fundamental has been lost.

The early church supported widows, sent out missionaries, and helped believers in other cities during famine.

In Luke 12 -33, Jesus said sell your possessions and give to the poor, and he also commanded go and make disciples of all nations in Matthew 28 -19.

If we dismiss the early church's economic practices as merely descriptive, we've made peace with spending millions on facilities and staff while the poor remain unhelped and the unreached remain unreached.

We've lost both our compassion and our missionary zeal. The early church never separated faith from baptism.

Every single conversion account in the book of Acts shows immediate baptism by immersion for the forgiveness of sins,

Acts 2 -38. This wasn't incidental. It was the moment of dying to self and rising with Christ, as Romans 6 describes.

For 15 centuries, no Christian questioned baptism's essential role in salvation, even though the mode unbiblically shifted to sprinkling and the recipients expanded to infants.

It was the Protestant Reformation that divorced baptism from salvation.

When we say baptism has nothing to do with salvation, we break with 15 centuries of universal

Christian understanding. Church history shows that baptism was universally understood as the moment

God saves. Deeply ingrained community wasn't incidental to first century church life.

It's how they embodied Jesus' command to love one another. When we reduce church to a weekly event you attend as a spectator, we've made

Christianity compatible with radical individualism and consumerism.

The one -another commands, such as love, serve, bear burdens with, confess to, encourage, and admonish, become impossible in a once -a -week auditorium setting.

Here's the deepest risk. Form and content aren't as separable as we assume.

When church becomes a performance you attend rather than a community you belong to, when baptism becomes purely symbolic rather than essential, and when grace means no accountability, the gospel itself morphs into something different.

It becomes believe the right things, pray a prayer, attend services, and you're good.

The radical discipleship, mutual submission, and economic sharing that characterized first century

Christianity disappears. Consider this. The New Testament gives us very little detail about some things, such as music style, building size, or meeting times.

But it's remarkably consistent and detailed about other things. Multiple elders per congregation, believers' baptism by immersion, weekly

Lord's Supper, church discipline, economic sharing, participatory and house -based gatherings.

Maybe the things repeated across multiple books and contexts, the patterns we see everywhere in the

New Testament, aren't accidental. Maybe there's wisdom in these patterns that protect against predictable dangers.

So what have we gained and lost? The do -what -works approach has given us impressive facilities, professional music and production, efficient organization, ability to reach large numbers, and institutional legitimacy.

But what we've lost is meaningful accountability, participatory assemblies, financial focus on the needy and unreached, authentic community life, mutual submission and shared leadership, and the subversive, counter -cultural witness of the early church.

So here's the real question. The deeper question isn't, were those practices prescriptive?

In other words, are these practices that we are supposed to imitate? But rather, has what we've substituted actually worked?

Let's look at the fruit. We have widespread biblical illiteracy among church members.

There is an epidemic of pastoral burnout and moral failure. Christians divorce at the same rate as non -Christians.

Churches split over politics, personalities, and preferences. Declining church attendance and a massive exodus of young people.

Christianity is seen as hypocritical, judgmental, and power -hungry.

And so -called Christians who live identically to unbelievers.

If our modern approach was working, we'd expect to see different results.

But there's a third way, a middle way. The early church wasn't perfect.

Paul's letters are full of corrections for divisions, immorality, false teachings, and disorder.

There's no magic bullet that will solve every problem. But when their structures failed, they failed in ways that could be addressed through teaching and discipline.

Our structures often fail in ways that make biblical correction virtually impossible.

For example, you can't practice church discipline with people you don't know. And you can't hold accountable a leader who has no peers.

The answer isn't slavish imitation of every detail of the New Testament, but humble recognition that first century patterns emerged from apostolic teaching and protected against real dangers.

When we abandon them, we should at least ask, What safeguards are we losing?

What temptations are we making easier? And what aspects of Christian life are we making impossible?

Some adaptations to culture are necessary. Our mission never changes, but our methods do.

But we've changed nearly everything about how Christians gather, lead, share resources, and relate to one another.

Maybe we should consider that we haven't just adapted the gospel to our culture, but we have allowed our culture to domesticate the gospel.

The first century church was persecuted. It grew explosively.

And it turned the world upside down while meeting in homes with no professional clergy or big budgets.

The modern western church has every resource imaginable and is in numerical and cultural decline.

That comparison should at least make us wonder if our dismissal of first century patterns as just descriptive might be dangerously convenient.