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Christian House Church
House churches were already part of the practice of the earliest Jerusalem Christians, including one pre-Pentecost assembly of 120 people, and also of the earthly ministry of Jesus. (See Upper Room in Jerusalem at right). With such precedents they quickly became an established practice in early Christianity, and they give important insights into the ordered form and numerical impact of the ministry of Paul and of the Diaspora Christian mission generally. A house church might involve a small gathering of twenty or so, but in the peristyle of a larger house it could easily accommodate a congregation of between one and two hundred.1
Christian Community
When particular house churches are specified in Colossae,2 Corinth (2 or 4), Ephesus (1 or 2), and Rome (4 or 5), the implication is that they were not the whole of the local church in that place. At the time of Paul's letters, the Christian community in each of these cities probably numbered from a few hundred to over a thousand. It provoked a riot of the silversmiths' club of Ephesus, (see ancient ruins in Ephesus at right) which was hardly caused by a ten percent decline in sales and presupposes that the initial Christian mission had a telling effect, an effect that within fifty years had emptied the pagan temples in the cities of the neighboring province of Bithynia.
1"Pauline Theology - Ministry and Society" by E. Earl Ellis. 2Acts 2:46; 5:42; cf. Acts 1:13,15-16; 20:7-8
"The Christian House Church."
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