Why the Early Church Didn't Have Worship Services - 7 videos in 1

all right very good uh welcome everyone and thanks for joining us today my name is Tom Wadsworth uh pleased to be your guest speaker today at your Gathering and I hope that this information is helpful to you I hope that's uh maybe perhaps enough of an introduction um been a Christian for 50 years um uh spent several years in seminary my first three years in seminary were back in the 70s then I spent another six years in seminary just in the last 10 years and I finished with a PhD in New Testament largely on this

very topic so so let's talk about the topic um why the early church didn't have worship Services I know that sounds strange to uh virtually anybody because virtually every church that I've ever heard of or been to has work ship services so the very idea that the early church didn't have them what does that mean well that's where my doctoral dissertation went and that's where I hope to take you today to explain why that is uh the case in my case the story goes back to October 30th of 1977 uh I was preaching in my

first year as a full-time minister at a church in Flint Michigan I was preaching through First Corinthians and I came to 1 Corinthians chapter 14 and uh I don't know if you remember what church environment was like in the late 70s but speaking in tongues was a highly controversial topic and if you were even to talk about it it was very dangerous and potentially divisive and I was tempted to skip over 1 Corinthians 14 because it talks extensively about speaking in tongues but I thought there must be something of value in this chapter so I

did a deep dive into the chapter reading through it in Greek to try to figure out what is there for our our people to learn from today and I was surprised when reading this chapter that talks extensively about what Christians do when they get together that the word worship was never applied to what Christians did in their assemblies that was radically different for me I mean in our experience our worship talk we talk about hours of worship houses of worship we open and close our meetings with worship or open close our worship with a with

a prayer or in some sort of way we ask people where do you worship where did you worship last week we have an order of worship we have worship teams worship leaders worship pastors sometimes of course worship Services we talk about acts of worship we talk about acceptable worship as if this is something that applies to what we do and we gather together that's our language but I was surprised in doing a deep dive into the New Testament on this topic that all of this language is not New Testament Christian language that alone is mind-boggling

and I thought there must be some reason for this uh but there isn't or there is several reasons for this and that's where where my study has gone for the last 50 years I think my screen has just duplicated itself there automatically but let's uh proceed onward what that this ultimately LED for me to do in the year 2016 I went to uh to Seminary again to go back and get a PhD on this very topic and my PhD dissertation was approved and and uh pished in 2022 just two years ago and it was titled

a worship service or an assembly an investigation of the terminology used to describe Church meetings in the New Testament uh and so I did a very very deep dive into this topic to figure out what's going on in the New Testament so that they're not describing their assemblies as worship and ultimately my presentation comes down to two undeniable facts and not opinions and not guesses they're actually facts number one is that the New Testament does not use Greek worship terminology to refer to the Christian Assembly or to its activities let that soak in for just

a minute now here's undeniable number two wait before I go to undeniable two I've come to refer to this first fact as the worship anomaly this strange odd situation where the New Testament does not call uh Christian Gatherings as worship Services that's the anomaly uh so keep that in mind as we go on I'll refer to that again but then undeniable fact number two is this Paul expressly directed when you come together let all things be done for edification now those two corn Stone facts is where everything else goes from here and I can almost

let you go where you want to but based on these two undeniable biblical facts what are we to conclude about what we're supposed to be doing when we gathered together uh as Christians on a weekly or regular basis no matter what it is but this this command by Paul in 1 Corinthians 14 ver 26 is talking specifically about when you come together and then his language there is in command form let all things not some things not a couple things that you like but all things be done for edification for the building up of one

another in the assembly so those are the two undeniable facts keep those in mind for the next hour as we proceed through uh my research on this topic but as we go on there's a couple of cautions I need to add as I've been teaching on this topic for 50 years I uh for almost 50 years I uh have learned that there's some barriers to understanding going on here and the key barrier for all of us in understanding these simple plain New Testament truths is a anachronism is the first one anachronism is the enemy of

understanding first century assemblies now what's anachronism it's not a word that we use very often but in terms of biblical study anachronism should be uh ve very much in front of mine as a problem and what it means is it's a it's a problem in time you see the word Kronos or Chronicle in the middle of that word anachronism it's when like we presume for example that there are McDonald's restaurants on every street corner in uh in Jerusalem in the first century this is a mistake in time where we take future or today's terminology or

today's Concepts and assume that they are there in another culture at another time anachronism particularly is a problem when dealing with the issue of church meetings because we all have our church meetings and we've all come to accept them as normative and as in our mind they right why are they right well because that's the way we do them therefore they must be right and so we just assume that it's the the right way to do things but anachronism is the enemy of understanding first century Christian assemblies uh da Carson a well-known New Testament scholar

made this statement he says we unwittingly read our ideas and experiences of worship back into scripture so that we end up finding there what with exquisite confidence we know Jolly well ought to be there and this problem of anacronismo Scholars who should know better uh the more and more I got into this topic the more I was aware that anachronism is a real barrier to understanding there's a second barrier that needs to be understood is that in order to understand New Testament assemblies it's helpful for us to think of house gatherings not Church buildings now

we know this don't we we know this from our new testament that house churches were all the rage in the first century here are five different passages that specifically refer to churches assemblies Christian Gatherings that met in houses we know I think most Christians know that there were no church buildings in the first century or even in the second century Christians met in homes and that Gathering you have right now in your home is more typical of what they were doing in the first century now they didn't there's no apparent opposition to having a building

there but it's very clear that the F in the first century Christians met in homes I found this image on the internet of what a house Church might have been like in the first century and this is a total guess of somebody's painting of what a house Church might look like but I thought it was actually somewhat helpful so when we talk about what they did when they gathered together in the first century think of this image of just people hanging around some sitting some standing moms and dads brothers and sisters and kids just gathered

around there's no holy Furniture here there's no big crosses on the wall or stained glass windows or spires on top of the building it's it's just folks and they're they're building up one another so if if you picture this in your mind as what's going on in the first century when we read passages in the New Testament about Christian Gatherings think of that image so what I've said so far might uh produce several questions in your mind and one question is have Scholars missed this simple fact that uh Church meetings were never described as Worship

in the first century certainly Tom Wadsworth this this guy in 1977 is the first guy to discover this no no no not possible and it isn't possible certainly other Scholars have indeed noticed this worship anomaly the fact that worship terminology is not used to describe what Christians did in their assemblies and so for my doctoral dissertation one thing you have to do if you're to do a doctorate is have an entire investigation of uh literature on your topic so that you're totally investigating what others have written on this topic uh in a responsible Manner and

I did a deep dive into 25 different Scholars who have written on this topic over the last hundred years and U certainly I did find that there are several schols that have no noticed the worship anomaly and let me just mention a couple of them for you one of the first to recognize the worship anomaly was Peter Bruner a Lutheran uh scholar in Germany writing in 1953 and he say this made this statement the New Testament does not permit us simply to use the word worship to designate the subject of our investigation and as you

can see in the corner I think the uh the title of his book was nonetheless Worship in the name of Jesus he went ahead and used That Word Worship to designate the subject of the investigation which was what Christians did when they gathered together in the first century but uh but the New Testament doesn't allow us to do that but he did it anyway and as it turns out virtually every single New Testament scholar who studied this topic does the exact same thing they use the term worship to apply to what they're doing in the

assembly a few years later Edward schwitzer who I think was a a Dutch reformed scholar uh living I think largely in Switzerland at the time he wrote this article in uh in 1959 and in it he said it's very significant that nowhere in the New Testament the usual terms of the cult such as sacrifice offering even worship are applied to the assembling of the church for its services this is mindblowing uh this changes a ton of things but he noticed and he noticed it's very significant and yet his article was titled the wor the service

of worship and yet he knows that even the word worship is not used to describe the assembling of the church for its meetings as he called them services and ironically even the word service is not used to refer to what Christians did in their assembly so again all these anachronisms are applying to these guys even though they're understanding and seeing the worship anomaly still they can't make their way out of uh modern thinking and get their head into first century thinking a bit later in 1985 I Howard Marshall who was a leading Evangelical scholar uh

at that time he made this statement the remarkable fact is that Christian meetings are not said in the New Testament are not said to take place specifically in in order to worship God and the language of worship is not used as a means of referring to them or describing them that's what Marshall said in 1985 ironically his the title of his article was far did the early Christians worship God and he put Worship in italics there he knows that something goofy is going on here with regard to the New Testament and its approach to Christian

meetings and the word worship those two don't mix and Marshall was dead on right by the way in this and uh he he had been the editor of Evangelical quarterly for 25 years a highly respected New Testament scholar that people didn't know what to do with this article and still to this day do not he continues with this statement in that article he says it's my thesis that this use of worship language incorporates a fundamental misunderstanding of what ought to be at the center of Christian meetings and that it leads to a serious shift in

practice from what ought to be happening when we get gathered together uh I say right oh Howard Marshall you nailed it right there but what hasn't been done is people haven't been following through on the implications of this basic worship anomaly a guy named Robert Banks whom you may have heard of he's written extensively house churches uh in his book in 1994 the Paul's idea of community he made the statement that Paul never said never said that a person went to church primarily to worship not once in all his writings does he even suggest that

this is the case now Robert Banks has an interesting story he he got his PhD from Cambridge is one of the world's finest and most revered for New Testament Scholars uh and he came in there as an Anglican scholar and priest but he eventually uh left the Anglican fellowship and got heavily involved in house churches in Australia now Dr B Banks is still involved he's in his later 80s in his mid 80s perhaps now but he's still teaching on this topic and he has some profound things to say uh now an interesting thing happens around

1996 as you're studying the literature of what Scholars have said on this topic for about 20 years after 1996 nobody is recognizing or even acknowledging or mentioning the worship anomaly the very fact that uh the New Testament does not use worship language in reference to Christian meetings and what I have attributed that to was it's in late in the late 1990s when this these wor ship Wars got going when praise and worship music was all the rage and praise and worship bands got to be all the rage when praise and worship worship music got to

be a billion dooll industry and so worship language was just flooding the Christian culture particularly Christian uh Conservative Christian Evangelical Christian culture with worship language so that they no longer even recognize the fact that the New Testament does use that language to refer to what Christians did in assemblies so they just went ahead and used it repeatedly and pervasively throughout what they were doing but finally in 2014 another scholar came out with a recognition of the worship anomaly and that was Andrew McGowen who himself is an uh an Ang priest and professor at Yale Divinity

School and he said this at the beginning of his book on Ancient Christian worship he says we must admit something difficult at the outset in the ancient world what we now call worship did not quite exist think about that we commonly talk about oh the early Christians in their worship Services they did this we talk about Jewish worship we talk about pagan worship but our concept of what wor ship is didn't even exist on the planet in the first century mwan is right here but he goes ahead and calls his entire book ancient Christian worship

as if that word applies to what Christians did when they got together uh because what it's a great word to use if you want to sell a book by the way worship is a Hot Topic but people are not recognizing some of the basic problems with this and then just this year earlier this year another New Testament scholar nij Gupta came out with a book called strange religion in which he's talking about how strange first century Christianity was to the uh surrounding culture and he says this in his book Scholars of early Christian worship had

a major methological law think of that Scholars having a major methodological flaw that's not something they're used to being guil of but they did they were and their flaw was this they were using modern categories of Christian worship and then trying to trace them back to the earliest layers of the Christian experience uh he's recognizing there is a flaw and let me just quickly run through some of those books of the last 70 so or so years here's Worship in the New Testament by Gart G delling another German scholar he's calling a study of first

first century Christian assemblies as Worship in the New Testament there's a fundamental methological flaw he's using the wrong word to describe what they were doing here's another guy this is Peter Bruner we just mentioned him he's also using the word worship to refer to early Christian meetings Oscar kulman a well-known German scholar from back then also using it there in 1953 1961 cfd Mo another big name in New Testament Scholars uh using the word Worship in the New Testament when he's describing what they did in their assemblies but he doesn't even mention the fact that

uh they don't even use worship terminology to to describe what they're doing uh Ralph P Martin a well-known more conservative scholar writing from England at the time has a great book called Worship in the early church that I bought many many years ago I found it very helpful but a major methodological flaw in his study is assuming that what they were doing was worshiping uh this goes on I Ferdinand hans's work in the 19 1967 a German scholar John Burkhart who was a lurgical scholar in 1982 using the making the same mistake rph P Mar

he comes out with another book 20 years later makes the same mistake uh da Carson who edited a major work on this in 1993 doesn't even acknowledge the uh worship anomaly in this book worship adoration and action again a major methodological flaw in an understanding what Christian meetings are all about uh Robert Weber was a major writer back in the late 90s on this wrote prolifically on the topic of worship but again a methodological flaw assuming that what Christians are doing when they're gathering together should be called worship Elmer towns in 1997 talking about worship

Wars again everybody thinks when you talk about worship Wars well you're talking about the assembly so therefore the first century assemblies would have been called worship not true another flaw uh Larry herado who's written on this another flaw there 2002 da Carson writes another book worship by the book in the New Testament another person making the flaw of this Daniel block from uh Wheaton College an Old Testament Professor uh writing a Biblical Theology of worship focusing in on what they do in their assemblies and yet another flaw there and then even just a couple years

ago this major work uh Ed by three different well-known Evangelical Scholars entitled biblical worship talking again about what Christians do and yet the flaw is they got the wrong word and then just a two years ago husta Gonzalez a well-known historical Theologian who wrote on this topic again there's a problem here the word he's using to refer to what he's writing about is the wrong word and to assume that Christians of that era of the first century were considered themselves as worshiping God when they gather together is also a huge mistake it is a major

methodological flaw so that's what I'm talking about the problem so Scholars have recognized the problem but what they haven't done is trace it down to figure out why the New Testament does not use worship terminology and that's question number two why doesn't the New Testament use worship terminology in reference to Christian meetings well my guess is already some of you listening have already thought well how are you defining worship I dealt with this question some 40 years ago it all comes down to a definition of how Worship Is defined well where I've come to on

this particular issue is it doesn't make a difference how you define the English word worship the real question is how do you define the Greek words that are train translated worship because when the New Testament came out in Greek nobody was using the English word worship to describe things they were using Greek terms so our challenge becomes what do these Greek words mean and do they actually mean this English word worship and as it turns out to cut to the quick it does not as my dissertation also did a very deep dive into all the

Greek words that are translated as worship and there are five of them at least depending on the English translation that you use and so this gets even more complicated but let's let's look at this the primary Greek word that is translated as Worship in the New Testament is this word pran that's the Greek word you see on your screen um it's translated as worship more often than any other word and it is the primary word that is commonly translated as worship thought to be something that we do in our assemblies uh it is mentioned this

word is found 204 times in the sepagan see that lxx refers to the the 70 uh translators of the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek and somewhere around maybe the 2 Century um there 204 times this Greek word is found there in the Old Testament and 61 times it's found in the New Testament what that means is we've got 265 occurrences of this word pral to help us understand what does this word mean and just a quick note on how do you determine what a first century Greek word means there's no just dictionary you could dig

up from the first century that tells you what these words mean in English in a language that's going to be spoke a couple thousand years later in short you determine what these words mean by understanding the context in which they are used context determines meaning and so when we have 265 references we can study and I studied the context of all 265 of them to try to figure out what the word means and if you quickly come to a summary you study these 265 occurrences they give no indication that the word prano canotes singing doesn't

connote praying or preaching or reading scripture or liturgy it it never does and you study the 265 I don't care who studies them you're going to come away saying it doesn't refer to any of that it doesn't rather PR Cano in the old and the New Testament refers to a greeting a form of greeting whether it's a greeting of another human or a greeting to a God and it always refers to prostration bowing yourself not just bowing yourself at the waist and kneeling you know bowing down that way but all the way down on your

face this is PR Kinesis which is a word sometimes applied to What preno refers to it's prostrating yourself before the person to whom you're are doing this is a human being or to a deity uh preno itself is directional you see that P Ros at the be of the or Pi row Omron Sigma uh prefix of this word now we have Pro as the beginning of a lot of English words or Pro is a prefix to a lot of English word but in Greek it means toward Pro Cano is something you do toward somebody with

a direction toward them uh it is inherently directional and Greek Scholars understand this as well it is often accompanied with prostration indicators in other words if you study all the contexts of all these 200 265 times the word is found frequently in the contexts in in which it is used other words are used that give help you get some Clues as to what the word means and it's used often with the word fall down it's used often with the word Neel and PR Cano you PR Cano on your face you PR Cano on the ground

on the knees at the feet of the person you are doing this to you're doing it before the person in their presence right in front of them or to them all these prostration indicators are used very very frequently in the Old and New Testament now here's the deal you've probably heard of Greek lexicons and I have on my shelf back here I don't know at least five or six Greek lexicons some are uh 10 volumes long and some are just one big volume but generally what they'll say prano means one of two things they'll say

prano means to bow down to prostrate yourself they all admit that but they'll also say that sometimes the word pran should be translated as worship my study led me to the conclusion that number two is not an option it never means the English word worship what they are doing in both English translation ations of the Bible as well as in Greek lexans they're saying that when proo appears before humans when it's done before humans it means to bow down they won't translate it as worshiping another human it's got to be bowing down they say but

when it appears before a deity whether it's the god of Abraham Isaac and Jacob or a an idol in a temple that's when it should be translated as worship but they wrong and why are they wrong they're wrong because prostration indicators appear with prano in both settings when it happens before people and before deity and I could go through dozens of examples on this but let me save you the time and just show and just State the fact here it means frustration when people went to the temple to Ros Cano which is usually translated to

worship the going there to prostrate themselves why is and there's a good image here of of what prostration looks like this is a cartoon from maybe one of those P picture Bibles for kids of uh Joseph's brothers bowing down before Joseph in Egypt they're performing PR Kinesis preno but this verse when found this verse Deuteronomy 1616 this helped make everything clear to me about what's going on when proano appears in a temple context the verse says three times a year all your males your Jewish males shall appear before the Lord your God in the place

which he chooses which is the temple at the Feast of unleavened bread Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Boos these three primary feasts should bring all Jews Jewish males uh to Jerusalem to the temple and that's when they appear before the Lord they to present themselves before the Lord and there's only one way to do that it's prostration it's proano the verse goes on though and says and they shall not appear before the Lord empty-handed which is of reference to the fact they're supposed to bring an offering or a sacrifice when they come to

the temple so when you hear the idea of Jewish temple worship we think of maybe all these Jews filing into to the temple maybe sitting in pews and maybe singing songs together and praying together well no what they are doing they're coming three times a year not every week uh this is anacronismo they're coming three times a year and Performing prostration to appear before the Lord and they're not coming empty-handed they're bringing a sacrifice uh it's interesting that the word proo and L tro refers to prostration and sacrificing and these were the Jews two fundamental

Temple obligations when they came to the temple they had to be doing these two things uh prostrating presenting themselves before the Lord and presenting an offering or a sacrifice it's interesting that these two words appear 27 times together in both the sepagan and the New Testament you see all the references there on your screen I would encourage you to look them up because this becomes very interesting once you start to see this pattern developing throughout uh scripture interestingly enough it is the word prano does appear in A New Testament context in an assembly context and

this is what the verse says 1 Corinthians 14:24 and5 it's this hypothetical situation of a Christian meeting he says if all prophesy all the Christians prophesy in that meeting and then an unbeliever or Outsider enters the meeting he is convicted by all and so falling there's one of those prostration indicators on his face another prostration indicator he will prostrate to God and declare that God is really among you now none of the English translations say he will prostrate to God they'll all say he will worship God now what what we think when we see That

Word Worship oh he's raising his hands he's praising God he's doing something like this proo never means that never in all those 265 occurrences and yet this is what the English translations somehow feel comfortable in saying but no he falls prostration indicator number one on his face indicator number two prostrating to God it's directional here and declaring that God is truly among you because remember in first century culture when you are prostrating to a deity you're in their presence and since he's in the presence of God Among the people the only thing he thinks he

can do is prostrate before these people assuming that God is with them now as I've been teaching on this topic for decades one common misunderstanding I run into is people start to assume well then we should be bowing down in our assemblies no no no you're misunderstanding because remember prano was never used in an assembly context as something that Christians do in their assemblies that one example is an example of a non-Christian doing it in a Christian Gathering so why don't Christians perform PR skinesis well in the New Testament we never find a case where

Christians PR rate themselves in their assemblies even though today you will see uh Christians sometimes going into um a cathedral where they will kneel down sometimes maybe cross themselves this you might see this more in a Catholic environment or Orthodox environment and feel that when they get before the cross of Jesus or a statue of Jesus they've got to kneel or prostrate in some way but no one is doing that in the first Cy and I suspect to you that's not a surprise also you got to remember that in the firsty Christians had no buildings

where the deity lived where you would go to that building where the deity resided and that's where you bow down now that was the first century concept of Jews and pagans pagans would go to a pagan Temple to prostrate before their God but Christians didn't have sacred buildings where the deity lived God is now with us remember what Emmanuel means in in Matthew 1:23 Thou shalt call his name Emanuel which means god with us and he is now in US Christ in you the hope of glory God lives with us through the Holy Spirit Holiness

is not out there in some building somewhere Holiness is right here and it's within your brothers and sisters in Christ uh not in some building somewhere uh Jesus talked about this in John chapter 4 but let me not get distracted here prostration to God in the Christian system becomes obsolete until we appear in person before the Throne of God which is an image you appear that you read about frequently in the Book of Revelation this image of the Heavenly Jerusalem and the elders and so and others gathered around the Throne of God and what are

they doing well unfortunately the Bible say they're worshiping God night and day they're prostrating to God night and day because even in the Book of Revelation you see these prostration indicators being used to refer to what's going on they're falling on their face and Performing prenis before God just a quick sidelight note here you may have heard the concept for years that uh uh we need to get used to uh worshiping God because that's all we're going to be doing when we get to heaven okay where does that idea come from well it comes from

Revelation and only Revelation but it's a bad translation of the word worship when you are in the presence of God at the Throne of God yes there is only one thing you should be thinking and let's get down on your face you're before the almighty Majesty of God you must go down this was commonly known throughout the middle middle east in the first century although in our American culture or where we bow to no one uh we don't even think about that I think we need to get used to that idea if you want to

know what you're supposed to do when you appear before the Throne of God get down on your face that's a Biblical idea furthermore there's a second word here that's used on uh as translated to Worship in the New Testament frano is one of them which means to prostrate yourself and the second word is this one lrua which is the verb form or lraa which is the uh the noun form what does this word mean sometimes not always but sometimes it's translated as worship it's found 107 times in the septu agent 26 times in the New

Testament still again a giant database of verses to study which I did for my dissertation study the context of everyone and find out what this word means well it means to serve deity with sacrifice it could even be used as synonymous with sacrificing that's what the word means throughout the old NE Old Testament as well as the new I'll discuss here in a minute Pro Cano and l l truo even though English translations will translate both of them with the English word worship they are not synonyms even though the Bible versions would make you think

that they are they're not synonymous each one of them refers to something different PR Cano refers to prostrating l trol refers to sacrificing two different actions and when I talk about sacrificing I'm talking about physical sacrifice offering a a cow a a pigeon a sheep a goat as a Sac a blood sacrifice in the temple lraa does not connote a religious meeting in any of its uses in the Old Testament or the new and yet we've come to use that term in the that way some new testament writers will use this phrase in a metaphorical

sense which was not at all found in any of its occurrences in the Old Testament and I think uh well first of all let me understand what let you understand and get a visual image of what literal latrea is it's offering sacrifices like this um illustration taken from some something I found on the internet where you're burning a sacrifice on the altar uh to God this is literal lraa offering of a sacrifice but in the New Testament six times latrea is used in a metaphorical sense where we're not offering animal sacrifices of course that's actually

almost a heretical idea because Jesus is the sacrifice the ultimate sacrifice the once for all sacrifice but Paul does say like in Romans chap 12 and verse one therefore I urge you Brethren by the mercies of God to offer your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice pleasing to God which is your spiritual the Greek word is lraa there now it's often translated as worship sometimes as service but lraa means sacrifice notice the words I've underlined here on your screen offering this is this is sacrificial terminology you offer sacrifices he actually uses the word sacrifice

he uses the word holy because sacrifices needed to be holy back then in the Old Testament and they had to be pleasing to God all these words helped to support the idea that lraa when Paul uses the word latrea he understood that his audience understood that he's talking about um sacrificing but not in a literal sense but it's spiritual latrea it's this Greek word logane there uh but it's a different word try to figure out what it means but he has to qualify the kind of latrea here the people would know this is not we

don't do literal sacrificing but we metaphorically Sacrifice by offering our bodies as this Living Sacrifice to God by the by the transforming of our mind you know the rest of the verse and I won't go into it here let me continue so why is worship terminology not used in the new Testament to refer to what they did in Christian assemblies well PR Cano and lru the two primary words that are translated as worship they both refer to Temple activities sacrificing and bowing down prostrating yourself and we don't do either of those anymore neither do we

have temples anymore the once forall sacrifice of Jesus made Temple activities Obsolete and who was it that predicted that the temple would be utterly destroyed not one stone left upon another you're right it was Jesus in Mark chapter 13 Matthew 24 the entire chapter a lengthy discussion about the destruction of Jerusalem coming from the the mouth of Jesus at that time uh Christians yes they praised God and they prayed in their assemblies but these activities were not viewed as prano or as l truo in the New Testament that's helps to explain why we don't see

this worship terminology to apply to what Christians did in their assemblies which brings us to question number three well what does the new teach regarding Christian meetings we sort of ruled out what it doesn't mean it doesn't mean Worship in the biblical sense and the word worship should never even really enter the discussion just a quick thought think about this for a second let's suppose you know nothing about Christianity you know nothing about Christian meetings and yet you know that these Christians use this thing called the B to refer to what to to as their

basis for everything they believe and do so let's say you crack open a Bible crack open the New Testament because you know that's applied to the to the New Testament uh Christian experience and you want to find out what Christians did when they got together in the first century as you surface all the passages that talk about Christian meetings you would actually never even worry about studying the word worship because it doesn't apply to what they did now I spent months no no I spent years trying to understand all these Greek words and there's five

of them we just dealt with two of them today and realized that the word worship doesn't even apply to what they're doing in their assemblies so here's the other part of the question what does the New Testament then teach regarding Christian meetings what are we supposed to be doing and let's summarize that now my dissertation uh focused on 15 passages throughout the New Testament that are the primary passages that teach content about what should be taking place in a Christian meeting let's s summarize my findings here without going through all the details the assembly is

never described as worship it's not described as a service and certainly not described as a worship service that's one good finding you can find by looking through all the evidence secondly it is described as a gathering the Greek word sunago is often used to describe what Christians did they gathered together or it's also described as an assembly which is the Greek word Ecclesia now you often see this translated as Church in your new testament but even the word church today means something different than the word eklesia church is an assembly it's a gathering um and

when Paul refers to the church at Ephesus or the church at Leota he's talking about the assembly there the Gathering in somebody's home at that location so the meeting itself of a Christian meeting is described as a gathering or as an assembly The Gatherings were dominated by horizontal activities like encouraging one another and this is one of the primary words that is used to describe the kinds of activities that take place in a Christian meeting encouraging parakalo uh strengthening sto strengthening one another edifying one another oo Deo uh these words are the dominant words to

describe the kinds of activities taking place throughout a Christian meeting and if you want to quickly conclude something that's valid our meetings today would be wise to be dominated by horizontal activities of encouraging and strengthening and edifying one another even vertical activities are referred to in Christian meetings in the New Testament such as praying and singing and the Lord's Supper but even those when they're discussed in the New Testament they have a horizontal emphasis we're praying for one another and we're praying in the presence of one another so all of us are joining our voices

together to God in when we are praying singing together we're singing to one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs they have a horizontal effect of building up one another when we do that activity the same thing is true with the Lord's Supper as well which is a communal activity where we're all involved in taking the bread and the the the wine together uh uh as a group as a body of Christ because the bread represents the body of Christ all of us together they're all horizontal and finally another summary of what I found

in the New Testament about what meeting should be uh focused on Paul commands in that verse I mentioned earlier First Corinthians 14:26 that all things must be done for edification he scolds the Corinthians because some people were speaking in tongues without it being translated and why is that wrong no one is edified nobody is built up nobody gains anything from somebody babbling in a foreign tongue but if you are going to do that make sure Paul says that there is somebody to translate to interpret what was just said so that we all are edified and

that's the Paul the word that Paul uses seven times in 1 Corinthians 14 which is the longest passage in the entire Bible to refer to uh what we're supposed to be doing when we gather together again this is the verse 1 Corinthians 14:26 when you come together could Paul be any clearer about what we're supposed to be doing when you come together let all things be done for edification oo do this uh Act of building up one another to be better this week than we were last week that's the idea of edification so now let's

de de with this question okay W let's say you're buying into this so far you're buying into the realization that yeah they didn't use worship terminology to refer to what they did and indeed it didn't even really apply to what they were doing when they gathered together and you're buying into the idea that yeah everything's supposed to be done to build up one another well then how come all churches today have worship services and have hours of worship and they have worship buildings and they have all this worship stuff how did that language developed was

it in the 20th century was it in the 15th when was it well here I did did and did a deep dive this also took me many months to do I went into second century Christian literature third century Christian literature and there's a massive volume of that out there fourth century Christian literature and oh my there's a lot more there way more information than you see in the New Testament or the Old Testament for that matter and ask the question well when did Christians start to use worship terminology to refer to their meetings when and

how did this develop well I started to realize what I didn't realize before that early Christians firmly resisted the idea of having temp and all their trappings and this is related to this question of when worship terminology developed I'll explain that in a minute but Christians resisted this idea notice on your screen here we've got a um a timeline the year 50 ad is on your far left and the year 350s on the far right in Stephen's speech at Jerusalem found in Acts chapter 7 he says this the most high does not dwell in houses

made by human hands why would stepen make this statement before a Jewish audience in Jerusalem at this it's the very first gospel speech after Acts chapter 2 that we find in the entire Bible the most high does not dwell in houses made by human hands so already very early with the very earliest Christian Community they understood that the Temple is insignificant even Paul just a few chapters later in Acts 17 when he's speaking not to a Jewish audience but to a gentile audience in Athens he's standing on Mars Hill and if you've ever been there

it's fabulous there's the Acropolis right next to you up there's Parthenon This Magnificent Temple to Athena he makes this statement while speaking to the Athenian Gentiles he says The God Who made the world and everything in it does not dwell in temples made by hands nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything again very early on in the earliest understanding of what the core of the Gospel is both Stephen and Paul understand the temples are no more they're gone God doesn't dwell there anymore he's not served by human hands which all

those people did this this Army of priests who were serving God with human hands by processing all these Sac these sacrifices that people bought to Temples whether it's a pagan Temple or the Jerusalem Temple uh he's not served by human hands as though he needed anything does God really need stuff that were given given him you know with our entire worship terminology that we use today we will actually make people believe that God needs our praise God needs our worship whatever they mean by that but Paul says God doesn't need anything he doesn't dwell in

temples made by hands nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything now so let's let's let's go beyond the New Testament now go into the second century literature the epistle Barnabas is found in What's called the um Apostolic fathers writing about 115 Barnabas says I'll speak to you about the temple and about those how those wretched people he's referring to the Jews here set their Hope on the building as though it were God's house he's criticizing the Jews and their use and their regard of a temple as if it's necessary and

needed a little bit later on in in 155 ad uh in a book called The martyrdom of polycarp this is a a Chronicle of when the bishop of Smyrna named polycarp he's a Christian Bishop he's been arrested and he's about to be crucified for his faith in Jesus this records that whole event it says the entire crowd cried out with uncontrollable anger against polycarp and with a loud shout they said this is the teacher of Asia the father of the Christians the destroyer of our Gods who teaches many not to sacrifice or worship now when

he says worship there it's the Greek word prano there as you see there on your screen or to sacrifice that's the Greek word thuan which is a a synonym to l in so this early Christian Bishop is known for telling people not to worship what he mean though meant though by not to bow down not to go to Temples not to sacrifice Christianity was understood to be radically different than all the culture around it including the Jewish culture including the Pagan culture they didn't have buildings they didn't offer sacrifices they didn't prostrate uh that's 150

5 200 ad comment of Alexandria this is down in Egypt uh he's writing he's a bishop also in Alexandria he says the word he's referring to the word of God prohibiting all sacrifices and the building of temples indicates that the almighty is not contained in anything now he's saying that the word of God prohibits offering sacrifices and prohibits the building of temples now I don't know of any biblical passage that prohibits the building of temples it's sort of implied by the fact that Jesus predicted the destruction of the temple in ad70 which absolutely happened but

uh what KET is saying here is indicating the common understanding of Christians we don't build temples we don't offer sacrifices the pagans do that we don't have any part in all of that let's Advance now 30 years later to origin of Alexandria he said we object to building altars statues and temples because we've learned from Jesus Christ the true way of serving God and it has nothing to do with buildings or altars or statues or temples and yet for some reason we no longer object to building altars statues and temples uh we're starting to build

them all over the place in these Church buildings with these magnificent Cathedrals and such but early on in the first 300 years the church objected to it now advancing up to the year 300 ad Arius and another Christian father he says in his writing against the Heathen he says we do not build temples for the ceremonies of worship do we we do not set up statues and images of any God we don't build altars this was their understanding even as late as 300 a now why did Christians oppose this and how did Christians get to

using worship terminology in reference to uh their meetings as I did a deeper dive into this I started to notice a shift taking place in Christian teaching and Christian understanding and it starts to take place actually early in the second century and it begins with this concept that the Lord's Supper was viewed by some very early on in the second century as a sacrifice not as representing Jesus sacrifice for us but rather as our sacrifice that we give to God now if you're a Protestant you're going to sound you're going to say boy that's a

weird idea but uh is still in Catholic circles as well as in Orthodox circles they still strongly believe that the Lord's Supper is our sacrifice for God but this is a shift that takes place in the second century it is not found in the first in the New Testament around 190 ad irenaeus writing from uh the city of Leon in southern France uh in Gaul at the time he says we make an offering to God of the bread and cup of blessing and then when we have perfected the offering we invoke the holy spirit that

the receivers of these antitypes the bread and the Cup May obtain remission of sins and life eternal so ireneaus is buying into this idea that the Lord supper is our sacrifice that is uh meant to result in US receiving remission of sins and eternal I think this is a problem theologically the problem here see after the New Testament period the early church gradually resurrected this literal Temple terminology and applied it to their own assemblies it looks like this in the steps first they started to view the Lord's Supper as our sacrifice for God now if

you're going to do that then the table upon which it sits becomes an altar you follow that because all sacrifices in the first century and the second century or offered on an altar whether it's a pagan temple with a pagan altar or the Jewish temple and a Jewish altar it's an altar of sacrifice so if you're going to have a sacrifice you're going to have an altar and then if you're going to have an altar and a sacrifice the person who presides over that becomes a priest and this was the correct Jewish terminology and Pagan

terminology to refer to somebody who presided over the process of offering sacrifices and sure enough by the middle of the Third century Christian ministers are being called priests extremely common and even still to this day in many Circles of Christendom on the planet they are referred to as priests and many churches still have their Altar and many churches still regard the Lord's Supper as a sacrifice but if you've got all these things together then the building in which this stuff takes place becomes viewed as a temple or a ho place a uh a cathedral uh

a holy church a house of God all those terms do apply to Old Testament stuff to a pagan Temple but this is not New Testament thinking this is not Christian thinking this is a shift away from what CHR Christians were doing in the first century to look at this in one big timeline the New Testament is written there in the first century for the most part early on in the second century this idea that the Lord's Supper is a sacrifice gets to De developing and pretty soon a bit later not initially but later the table

upon which the supper sits the sacrifice becomes viewed as an altar and pretty soon after that by the middle of the third Century ministers are being called priests and after that but not before church buildings that got to be built by around 3 300 ad and certainly after Constantine uh they are starting to be called actual temples uh there is a you may have heard of uus the church father and the church historian writing around 32025 ad uh he's writing about the history of Christianity he records of of a sermon that is preached at the

building of a new building uh after Constantine around 320 ad and he refers to that building as a holy Temple of God see already how far the Christians had shifted from plain old house meetings people gathered together in horizontal one anothering taking place in those meetings and by then if you're going to have all this terminology of sacrifice altar priest and Temple you're basically talking about worship and that's when the word worship starts to be applied to what Christians did it's it's literal worship literal rraa really and when you look at an image of what

church buildings many Church buildings look like today you might see an image like this where you see up front you see a uh a altar there in the middle you see your holy guys marrying your special garments and all the the crosses and all the special stained glass windows and all this people sitting reverently and obediently all looking forward uh this is literal lraa that we have resurrected now we're almost back to a a Jewish way of looking at things uh we're supposed to be edifying one another as per Paul's command in 1 Corinthians 14:26

but how can that happen in an environment like that you're all looking forward up to one guy who running a whole show who's saying everything that needs to be done and then he's deiss dismissing you and you go home how do you edify one another in this system that's constantly using worship terminology we're there to worship we're there to worship there to worship we're in a house of worship we have an order of worship we're are worshiping God acceptably are we really so what do we do now now I my video number seven refers to

this and I'll just summarize this quickly and by the way when you talk about what do we do now this is the my own guesses my best guess of what we ought to be doing now and maybe you would come up with different guesses at to what we should be doing now well you figure it out but what do we do now well first first I think we need to adopt biblical terminology to what we're doing um let's call our assemblies assemblies let's call them Gatherings let's not call it a service because that implies something

wrong about what we're doing let's not call it worship because it's also grossly mistaken it leads us in an inappropriate Direction about what we're supposed to be doing there's a whole bunch of terms that we routinely use uh in our assemblies that we need to get back to biblical terminology and that'll help to get our our heads in the right place we talk about the Eucharist okay that's not a biblical term and I think it also starts to lead us in the wrong we talk about priests we talk about pastors even and even there I

think we're starting to use that term in a way that it was not used biblically we start even talk about church chur es and we even use the word Church in the wrong way uh not in a Biblical way but once we get our head around what we're supposed to be doing using biblical terminology will help us get there and maybe the most important thing I think we need to do now is make edifying one another the expressed purpose of assembling expressed is important here how often at the beginning of a of a worship service

in a typical Church somebody will get up and pray God we hope our worship is acceptable in your eyes as we worship together today and now we're about to close our worship well H how if we're going to be expressing that so frequently to remind everybody that we're supposed to be worshiping I think we ought to do the same sort of approach to edifying God when we get together help us to build up one another help me to know what I'm supposed to be saying to the Christians sitting around me right now so that I

can encourage them and build them up um it needs to be the expressed purpose of a need on the signs above the room as you go into the building whatever it is uh uh if you're can to have a signboard outside a special building this is a house of edification how about that a house of worship tends to lead in an inappropriate Direction the third thing I think we ought to do is is break big groups into small groups I really don't know how if you've got a group of a thousand people meeting in a

room how are you supposed to build up one another in that kind of environment if you have a group of a hundred people in a room how you going to build up one another now if you have a group of a dozen like you might have here today um you're G to get there but you don't want to sit and listen to one person talk for an hour and a half like I'm doing you want to talk amongst yourselves here you got to break the big groups into small groups and give everybody the opportunity to

speak and I suggest maybe as an option here we ought to create edification rooms we have created houses of worship that have these tall spires reaching up to the heavens these beautiful stained glass with things pointing heavenward we have uh very elegant sometimes gold Laden Furniture reminding people that were there to worship god well what if we let's erase all that what if you built an edification room or everything that's designed in that room is designed for edification would the chairs be in straight rows all facing forward and not each other or would you be

in a circle where you can encourage one another facing one another what is an ideal architecture for an edification room I just thought out toss out that question for anybody who might be an architect to try to design something like that if you want to build a building uh and go ahead with that so let me come back to Howard Marshall's quote that I read at the beginning he says it's my thesis that this use of worship language incorporates a fundamental misunderstanding of what ought to be at the center of Christian meetings and that it

leads to a serious shift in practice from what to be happening when we gathered together now that's not me saying that that's Howard Marshall one of the the elite New Testament Scholars of his day he died a few years ago still highly regarded among Evangelical Christians at that time I think he was right then nobody was listening then but maybe they'll listen now so I come back to these two undeniable principles if you forget everything I've said remember these two things the new Testament does not use Greek worship terminology to refer to the Christian Assembly

or to its activities and secondly Paul expressly commanded when you come together let all things be done for edification take those two undeniable principles and then take them anywhere you want and you see where you end up I know where I've ended up I may not be totally right in every little thing but figure out for yourself and I think at the end of the day you're going to end up with a body of Believers where every time they meet together they're trying to get better be more mature in Christ be more Christlike in their

behavior they're not just assuming that they're going to be the same scoundrel they were last week but they're actually encouraging one another to get better they're comforting one another building up one another praying for one another forgiving one another all these biblical principles I think at the end of doing that for 10 years every week building up one another consciously I think we're going to get to be much better people than we've ended up being because if you gather together every week to worship God God's sure G to be worshiped by the end of that

oh we got that done but what happened to you oh it had enormous beneficial effects on me well did it really I find that people are pretty much the same people they were 20 years ago even though they spent the last 50 years worshiping God every week um so that's my best guess of why the early church didn't have worship Services I do have seven videos there at my website at Tom Wadsworth domcom it's also at my YouTube page look up uh YouTube at Tom Wadsworth and you'll see them there and you can see all

seven videos and what you got today was all seven videos in one really long presentation