A very good friend of mine asked recently about the origin of steeples on church buildings. It was an innocent and inquiring question that arose because he had heard a speaker make some rather daring and unchallenged claims about the origins of both church buildings and steeples. Now the question was something along the lines of “since the Bible does not require steeples on church buildings, why do so many church buildings have them?”
We should note from the beginning that the word we translate “church” from the Greek New Testament has a fundamental or basic meaning of “assembly.” Thus we should understand that the church consists of people and not of architecture. However, an assembly presupposes a place to assemble. And that place of assembly must be an agreed-upon place. Otherwise if we had 250 people assembling in 250 different places, well…there would not be an assembly!
There is an assumption by many people, especially those in the “home church” movement, that the first century churches did not meet in buildings but in homes. They get this from the fact that the Scripture refers to those early churches as “houses.” Ah, but this is why you need a Rabbi. The word “house” was attached at that time to the idea of a synagogue. Thus a synagogue may be known as a “beth tefillah” (house of prayer), a “beth knesset” (house of assembly), a ‘”beth din” (house of judgment), etc. You get the idea.
In the book of Acts this same idea is transferred over into Greek. Thus the idea of the temple, as the “beth tefillah” in 1 Kings 8:29, 38, etc. is mentioned by Christ in the Greek NT as “oikos proseukes” or “house of prayer.” The Greek means precisely the same thing as the Hebrew, as the English. But should that designation be placed upon synagogues as well as the first or second temple? Yes, based on the understanding we have from Leviticus 23:3.
In the Leviticus passage we see that from weekly Sabbath to weekly Sabbath there should be a holy convocation (miqra) in every “dwelling” (moshabh). The word that the KJV translates as dwelling is a place for assembling. This is the original idea of the synagogue. The fact that synagogues continued to exist throughout the Old Testament period is attested by 2 Kings 4:23. When the woman began to ride to see the man of God, her husband pointed out that it was neither new moon nor Sabbath. This indicates that it was customary to go hear the man of God on those days. But if the people assembled to hear the man of God on the Sabbath day and if they did it in accordance with the holy convocation mentioned in Leviticus 23:3, then they must have done it at a synagogue (place for gathering together).
When we come to the New Testament book of Acts this will help us to understand what is meant by the people of God eating their bread at various “houses.” This was not simply a visitation program or progressive dinner. Rather it was the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the several Christian synagogues. We must remember that the Christians did not become a group altogether distinct from other Jewish people until much later. They broke bread “kat’ oikon” or per each house (Acts 2:46). This is a rather wooden translation in the English, but it does not necessarily mean “at home” as both ESV and NIV indicate. Such a translation would simply indicate that they went to the temple to worship and then went home to eat. A rather mundane idea and almost certainly a wrong translation.
But if we understand the preposition “kata” to have a distributive sense here, as the KJV does, then the idea would be that they were breaking bread together in each house just as they were praying and worshiping in the temple. But what would we understand “house” to mean in this context if we had not been conditioned by our culture? We would understand the “house” to be a house of assembly (beth knesset) or a house of prayer (beth tefillah) or even a house of judgment (beth din) as 1 Peter 4:17.
Notice also in the book of Acts where Paul was hauling men and women into prison and causing them to be convicted as blasphemers of the name. Acts 8:3 states plainly that Paul entered into every house in order to make havoc of the church. However, later on when explaining what he had been doing, Paul just as plainly stated that he was actually entering into the synagogues in order to take these men and women prisoner and have them beaten (Acts 22:19; 26:11). From this comparison of the two accounts of the same acts, we can justly conclude that the term “synagogue” and the term “house” were equivalent in Paul and Luke’s minds – Luke being the author of the Acts of the Apostles.
This is not to say that a church must meet in a church building in order to be a church. As stated clearly above, the term “church” refers to the assembly itself. The synagogue or house refers simply to the place where that assemblage takes place. But while it does not require that the church own a building, there is surely a presumption that the church has every right to own a building as far as Scripture precedent is concerned. Granted, we have said nothing thus far about steeples or spires, but we shall save that for a second entry: Bell Towers, Steeples, and Spires Part Two.