ChosenRebel's Blog

Indisputable 21st Century Facts:

Relationships in our neighborhoods with our neighbors are characterized by three things,

1. They are not natural

2. They are not normal

3. They are not necessary

The first two items are a product of the third. Because our relationships with our neighbors are not necessary to our lives or our neighbors, almost all interaction seems unnatural and out of the norm. If you went to work, came home, and got up the next day for a year, the change or impact in your neighborhood would be negligible. Because of refrigeration and transportation, we can go and get food that we don’t grow, catch, or butcher from places and people once a week or sometimes once a month and go back to our nondescript lives in our single family homes or apartments.

No real relationship with other people is really necessary which make any interaction with people on a more than superficial basis feel odd–not normal or natural. In the first century, it was different.

Indisputable First Century Facts: 

Relationships in the ancient world of Jesus day were characterized by three things:

1. They were necessary

2. They were natural

3. And they were normal

Without refrigeration and transportation, most people lived the main part of their lives with their extended family and neighbors. The fish merchant, the baker, the seller of lamb, the dyer of clothes (the baptizer), the blacksmith, the leatherer, etc.–these were necessary relationships. The first-century neighborhood was composed of natural contacts and normal relationships that were necessary to one another’s lives.  In such an environment, when a person came to know Christ and experienced the life transformation that the gospel brings to our motivations and interactions with others–everyone in the neighborhood knew it and knew it pretty quickly.

Not so today.  Today, if someone comes to believe in Christ, it often times occurs in a location apart from where they spend the bulk of their lives, among people they only see once a week (if that), and when they get back to their neighborhoods, there is very little interaction with anyone.

This much I have written about before but here is another issue to add into the mix. In the first three centuries of the church, with little to no public buildings for the church to meet in, the church assembled in homes. And the homes they assembled in were not separated by gardens, driveways and lawns. They often shared common walls with one another. Families lived close, much closer than we do even in our apartment buildings. As such, in the first three centuries of the church, neighbors were exposed on a regular basis to the “liturgies of life” the habitus (the habits of the redeemed community shaped by a gospel-formed fellowship). People saw how they lived. They saw them pray. They heard them pray. They heard their joy. They saw their patient hope. They saw how they loved one another.  How does anyone outside of our church buildings see, hear or experience any of these things today?

This is what the modern church needs to overcome.

For some help in understanding the dynamic of the early church, check out The Patient Ferment of the Early Church:  

For some help in developing a few of the early church’s habitus, I offer my newest book, Litturgies for Life: A Companion to a Life of Prayer: