7Y. Christian Clubs and Associations

One additional form of social relationship was very important in the Greek and Roman cities: the voluntary association. A great variety of groups of friends, relatives, neighbours, or working associates, draw up a constitution, find a meeting place, and declare themselves the Association of N. The group was usually not large: most often it contained from a dozen to thirty or forty, rarely more than a hundred members. (4)

Unregulated Clubs

Before the Christian era, private clubs of various sorts thrived unregulated in the West and in the East. While information about them is relatively sparse and mainly confined to inscriptions, it provides a reasonably intelligible if only a general picture. The clubs were formed for various purposes and various groups, trades (bakers, shoemakers), professions (musicians, actors), civic functions (firemen, veterans, sports), and were directed more to the social and religious than to the professional or economic interest of their members. They held regular meetings, usually with religious ceremonies, elected officers and sometimes a patron, and exercised a certain discipline over their members. They could also hold property. For a monthly subscription to a common treasury, they provided their membership with banquets and other festive and leisurely activities and, at the end, an honourable burial. The associations that were classified as clubs for the poor including males and females, slaves and freedmen, apparently emphasized dining and funeral benefits, and by underwriting the necessary burial proprieties they served a public interest as well(1.)

Trade and Professional Associations

Trade and professional associations were especially important in Rome. Before the Roman Empire they had not been common in the East, apart from the special case of the "Dionysiac artists," a guild of actors, scene painters, and other specialists associated with theatre. In the period we are concerned with, however, the organization of other artisans and of merchants spread through the Greek cities as well. Although it is now common to call these groups guilds, their purpose is not to be confused with those of medieval guilds, much less with those of modern trade unions. "So far as the evidence of the inscriptions goes the guilds seem to have been purely social bodies, unconcerned with the business activities of their members." Only in the later empire did the government sometimes intervene and manipulate the trade associations in attempts to regulate some aspects of commerce. (4)

Patchwork Rug Makers

Earlier, the Builders and Carpenters, the Patchwork Rug makers, the Porters, the Purple dyers of Eighteenth Street (in Thessalonica) met, as did their counterparts of many other names, to eat a meal perhaps a bit better than the usual, to drink some rather good wine supplied by the member whose turn it was, to celebrate the birthday of the founder or patron or the feast of Poseidon or Hermes or Isis or Silvanus, and to draw up rules to ensure that all members would have a decent burial when their times came. The house church that gathered with the tent makers Prisca, Aquila, and Paul in Corinth or Ephesus might well have seemed to the neighbors a club of the same sort. (4)

Banned Clubs

During the closing days of the Roman republic the clubs in Rome became a cover for political demonstrations and criminal acts and were successively banned, restored, and banned. For similar reasons they were dissolved on subsequent occasions by Julius Caesar (144 B.C.) and the emperor Augustus (31 B.C. - A.D.14), and recognized clubs were required to follow special licensing procedures. From time to time various clubs continued to get involved in riots and political disturbances, for which the silversmiths at Ephesus (Acts 19:23-41) and the (sports?) clubs at Pompeii provide well known examples, and sometimes they were dissolved for a season. But it probably goes too far to characterize such disturbances as "genuine attempts at social revolution."(1.)

Unlicensed Clubs

The clubs never suffered a blanket prohibition and, as the incident at Pompeii indicates, even unlicensed ones appear to have been dissolved only when they caused problems. But they then usually received only minor penalties. According to the historian Suetonius certain clubs were exempt from the bans, for example "those of ancient foundation" or "the old and legitimate ones."

Club Terminology

In the past, certain terminology common to both Christian congregations and private religious clubs has been given considerable significance. For example, the names "assembly" and "synagogue" and the terms "overseer" "elder" "leader" and "patron" are occasionally used to designate, respectively, a club and officers of a club. Since the same words also occur for the church and ministries of the church, it has been suggested that they were taken over by the church from the clubs.(1.)

The Way

Other similarities in terms used for the church and the clubs are sometimes quite interesting. For example, in Acts 24:14 the church is spoken of by believers as "the Way", a term whose cognate is used of clubs, and it is tagged by its detractors as "a sect", a term employed for subgroups within a club. Such similarities are not really sufficient to show that the church viewed itself as a club or derived its vocabulary from them, but neither do differences in terminology prove that the church did not so regard itself. It goes beyond the evidence to say either that the church avoided club terminology or that it imitated such terminology.(1.)

Club Constitutions

Certain practices of Pauline congregations favour viewing the constitution of his churches along the lines of a religious club. Essentially they are elements that reflect practices of the synagogue, which, as we have argued above, had the status of a club and from which the churches were originally drawn. They include particularly a church order that manifested activities suggestive of a synagogue type religious club and an organization of congregations in the homes of members or patrons that corresponded to the usage of some synagogues and other clubs.(1.)

Bibliography

"You are fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household." Ephesians 2.19

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