Earlier I said that the average church in the UK was about 24 active adults. I have also mentioned that Croydon with a population of well over 360,000 people has over 240 churches which is one church for every 1,500 people. However, most of our churches are so small that they overwhelmed by trying to keep going. There is no way that Christians in Croydon, or anywhere else for that matter, can be the ekklesia Jesus founded if we continue to build this way. Some churches have reasoned that the way to go is to build very large congregations which draw their people from far afield, but having large central churches or congregations hampers the living stones being built up in their local area, using their gifts in the part of the community where they live.
These mega churches are few and far between and even then don’t release city wide elders or apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastor and teachers. What’s more, the large churches are less likely to engage in genuine unity because they feel that they can just forge ahead and are fully occupied in the life of their own fellowship. The philosophy of some of these churches seems to be that of the market place, build big and destroy the opposition. I have heard it said that “Its not our fault people join us from smaller churches, we don’t poach, we just grow greener grass”, come to think of it it was me that said it ... ouch!
Allow me to hypothesise about the church in Ephesus at the time Paul wrote to Timothy there in his first letter to him. As I said earlier the church was possibly one third of the city ie 100,000 believers. We are pretty sure that no church buildings were built for at least another 150 years. So where did the church meet? Well, of course the answer is simple, it didn't, or at least it didn't as we understand it today. The people congregated all over the place in all kinds of ways obviously the size being governed by the available location. Perhaps 30 met in a large room or 60 in a garden, may be a civic open air place could see a gathering of 200, but gathering anymore people would mean that hearing the leaders would be very difficult. Perhaps the only reason that we have mega churches today is because we have mega rooms with mega PA systems!
Nevertheless, the church in Ephesus had apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers and clearly elders too, and from the New Testament we can see that they endeavoured to employ the servanthood model of Christ in these ministries as the whole church ministered with its various gifts and callings as a priesthood of all believers and living stones.
The other thing which is so obvious that we can miss it, is that it was one church in a clearly defined city and that church very definitely challenged and changed the culture of that city. It would have been impossible for the other two thirds of the city’s population to miss the church. It was the single biggest thing in Ephesus by miles. The church was by no means perfect or else Paul would not have written his letter to them or his later letters to Timothy, and Jesus would not have had to single them out in the third chapter of the book of Revelation. Nevertheless its the closest we have to a model of what could be.
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