The question is important because the closer you can get to those original Biblical patterns of a participatory church, the closer you'll be to having a happy, lively fellowship of believers. Unfortunately, I have to tell you that we don't have a lot of direct descriptions of church life in that period. They're rare. But we do have some things. Most notably, we have a vast array of random letters.
*Counting all types of written documents and correspondence, archeologists have about 500,000 specimens from this era, with about 25,000 of them categorized as "Christian" or "probably Christian." That means these documents make reference to church events, Christian concepts, etc. And here's the mind-blowing discovery they've made:
*Not one of these 25,000 pieces of papyrus, etc., makes any reference to a clergyman. There is absolutely no mention of a "minister" or "priest " or "pastor" or any other term for any office or any kind of leadership. The leaders did exist, but their role certainly didn't fill up any space in the brains of the believers who wrote the letters! Or their lives!
*To the early Christian, his church elder (bishop) was a "regular guy " who was an integral "part of the family," not a member of a special class that was ever, ever referred to by a title!
After that date, they are replete with references to titles! But there's one big difference: Most of the surviving literature after 330 was penned by pagan philosophers-turned-Christian. Although their hearts had latched onto Jesus Christ, their minds made a slower transition. Nonetheless, they took it upon themselves to write philosophical and theological treatises on just about everything imaginable, and they tell us very little that is useful-and even less that's reliable about church life.
What church life looked like after 330 virtually never comes up as a subject. Most everything left to us seems to be literature by ex-pagan philosophers dueling with pagan philosophers! A study of many such writers will give you a very mistaken impression of what church life was like. Their half-pagan, neo-Christian descent into philosophical nothingism is mind-boggling. Unfortunately, when you read these volumes (and almost nothing else has survived), you come away with the impression that all Christians were caught up in a philosophical, theological, and intellectual study in abstract tedium!
That is not so, of course. If today all Christian writings on earth burned in an atomic holocaust except for one library full of scholarly theology, a thousand years from now, people might think that today's Sunday schools and church socials consisted of normal families sitting around and philosophizing about millennial eschatology, process theology, situation ethics, infralapsarianism, and other academic chewing gum.
It looked for awhile like we would forever have to live with the distorted perspective that the church of that era was made up 100% of erudite theologians! Make no mistake, those men's writings are held in highest esteem, despite the fact that every one of them wrote from a solidly Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian perspective.
So what did early Christianity actually look like after you peel off the accumulated layers of Ambrose, Gregory, Augustine, Tertullian, Jerome, Origen, and a few hundred others? Until 1989, you couldn't have known (unless you spoke French and happened to know about the one and only book on the subject).
*Hold on to your hat. Modern archeology has very recently come up with a whole potful of fascinating, if not downright unbelievable, discoveries. To understand just how astonishing these findings are, and how contrary to all past interpretations of this era they are, we need to note a fact or two about Christian archeology itself.
