When persecution against the House Churches eased early early in the 4th century under Constantine, Christians found ways to form larger assemblies, encouraged, no doubt, by Constantine’s aggressive church-building programs. It is not surprising that these larger assemblies formed hierarchies. This very human tendency is so common that one has to wonder why Moses needed his father-in-law’s advice in Exodus 18:19-26.
The hierarchical structures that emerged prompted men of authority to begin creating offices like the “bishop,” who ruled that the his presence was essential to any meeting of the “church,” a notion probably originated with Ignatius of Antioch in the late first or early second century, who said that
all are to respect the deacons as Jesus Christ and the bishop as a copy of the Father and the presbyters as the council of God and the band of the apostles. For apart from these no group can be called a church.
Power struggles in the early church centered around a number of disputes–initially related to whether those who had “lapsed” during the persecutions could be re-admitted, and then dealing with the many heresies that sprang up among the Patristic period.
Compare all of this with the “two or three gathered together” of Mt. 18:20. The notion of one person being greater than another belongs to the World system, not to the kingdom of God. Offices in the church are to better facilitate the doing of the good works that were prepared for the church to do; not to become martinets that displaced the personal relationship each believer had with God.
Even the apostles had trouble with this (see Mk. 10:35-45 and the many “first will be last and last will be first” passages in the gospels). The foot washing of Jn. 13 is especially revealing, as Jesus puts on the servant role immediately after the text tells us that he had authority over “all things.” What does this say to the house church? Simply that the definition of a “leader” is one who leads in suffering and serving love.
While early believers understood the need to have teachers, elders, and overseers to replace the apostles, church organizations gradually grew so big that, by the time of Martin Luther, people began to realize that hierarchies designed to maintaining order began to take on more sinister human motives where authorities coveted the right and duty to insert themselves between the individual and God.
Del Birkey says it well in his book The House Church (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1988), 89:
There resides in no one an inherent right to control another in Christ’s church. Nowhere in the New Testament are church leaders instructed to exercise authority over the people of God. Any ecclesial authority is always the authority of the whole (Acts15). Ecclesial authority is never prepackaged according to sex or status, nor is it ever given to any one clergy or federation….
Eldership is always a matter of ministering, not administering. The authority of elders is therefore functional-relational rather than positional-institutional.
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