Today, the class session was spent learning about the first century church and how they developed their ideologies. It was pretty interesting to hear some more realistic views on how the first century church grew in the different areas associated with Christianity, like the sacraments, community, etc. It was interesting to note the way the church used the Household model and how churches grew from that. Because of that, there was no straight pattern of Leadership within the church, it was more individual to what worked within each house church. The funniest part of the day was at the end when Bolger asked how people thought the church had grown numerically by the end of the first century. The majority of the class believed it to be around one million (which I thought was a bit ridiculous considering the emphasize was the smallness of the household church) but the real number was around 10,000.
That is an interesting concept, especially in leadership type roles. If you look at the house churches (small but numerous groups) and compare to churches in America, or at least the the ones we strive for (Big, big building, big leadership team/board), they are quite different. So the real question is what is our focus?