This episode of is titled, “How Close?”One of the things modern Christians want to know is how close their church is to the primitive church of the 1^st & 2^nd Cs. Congregations and entire movements claim their particular expression of the Faith is closest to the original. So, what were early church services like? Where did they meet and what did they do?Until the end of the 2^nd C, Christians met for services in private homes, deserted buildings, caves, near graves of martyrs, & in catacombs. Catacombs were a common feature of many cities of the Empire. Besides their primary use as burial places, they were frequent hiding places for refugees, smugglers, and groups that wanted to meet away from the watchful eye of authorities. Rome’s catacombs were a massive subterranean tunnel system.Jesus’ Followers used these places to meet because during these first centuries they were mostly drawn from the poorer classes of society & couldn’t afford a unique place devoted solely to worship. Their meetings were often banned, requiring they meet in secret. Another reason they tended to meet in locations away from the busy streets was because of the prevalence of lewd graffiti, ubiquitous in Roman cities. Graffiti isn’t a recent phenomenon; it has a long & storied history. Much of the graffiti encountered in Rome’s streets was political cartoons & commentary. But it was also bawdy and offensive to the sensitive morality of many Christians. So they looked for places outside the city to meet where pornography wasn’t scrawled on nearby walls.One of the points made by the Church Fathers knowns as the Apologists, who answered the attacks of pagan critics was that Christians had neither temples nor altars because their religion was fundamentally spiritual and needed no place for ritual. Their critics jumped on this lack of religious place as evidence of the silliness of the Faith. After all, if God was worthy of worship, they reasoned, wouldn’t He require a building? Origin replied eloquently to this attack by saying Christians were living statues of the Holy Spirit – and that each human being was immensely more glorious than any temple made of mere stone. In a significant remark from Justin Martyr to a Roman governor, he wrote that “Christians assemble wherever it’s convenient, because their God is not like the gods of the heathen, enclosed in space, but is invisibly present everywhere.”The homes early Christian met in had to have been large enough to accommodate a congregation. Based on what we now know about Roman architecture, such a home had a dining hall providing the best place to assemble. In the center of the long wall an elevated chair was set where the leader of the service led the assembled. Near him was a simple table upon which the elements of the Lord’s Supper were set. If they met in catacombs, a similar arrangement was made.The Early Church Father Tertullian was one of the first to speak of “going to church;” using the word “church” for the place where a congregation met. Clement of Alexandria who lived about the same time, makes reference in his writings to how the word “church” meant both the people & the place they met.About AD 230, the Roman Emperor Alexander Severus granted the followers of Jesus the right to have a building in Rome dedicated exclusively to worship. What’s interesting about this is that the loudest hew & cry against the church using its own building came from the tavern-keepers. The church was going to be located in a place rife with taverns and it meant some of them would have to be relocated to build the church. They also didn’t like the moral influence a church would bring.This Imperial permission to build a church greatly encouraged other cities around the Empire to allow the fast-growing Christian sect to build more facilities dedicated exclusively to holding services. The persecutions of Decius & Diocletian at the end of the 3^rd  & beginning of the 4^th C put a hold on such construction, and saw many of the buildings that had been built either torn down or converted to pagan use. Diocletian began his persecution in 303 by tearing down the huge church in his capital at Nicomedia. Yet by the beginning of the 4^th C, Rome had some 40 churches!While we know the building of churches took place in the last half of the 3^rd C, we have little idea of what they looked like. That changes with the acceptance of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine. It’s reasonable to assume the earlier churches were in some way similar to the basilicas Constantine built for both civil & religious use.They were rectangular with a proportion of 3 by 4. A semi-circular niche lay at the narrow end opposite the main door. The niche was the place where the elevated seat was set for the lead pastor, AKA the bishop. Ranging down the aisles of the main hall was a colonnade where people gathered in smaller groups, or if the central floor of the nave was full, they could spill into during the service.Christians met to hold their weekly service on Sunday, which they called “The Lord’s Day” because it’s the day of the week Jesus rose. The first Christians were Jews, who zealously observed the Sabbath on Saturday, but also gathered on Sunday, the first day of the week, so a work-day, early in the morning before work began. As the Church grew in the Gentile world, the church gathered only on Sunday. This is confirmed by ample evidence in the writings of Ignatius, Justin Martyr & the Didache.Those first Gentile Believers didn’t celebrate Sunday as a kind of Christian Sabbath, ceasing from work as they did later. That would have been impossible for the slaves of heathen masters who made up a large proportion of the Church in the early decades. It wasn’t until the time of Constantine that engaging in labor on The Lord’s Day was frowned on.  What also was put under the ban was theatrical entertainments. Greek & Roman theaters were more often than not, places of grotesque lewdness, not fitting for the moral sensitivity of believers.In light of the often contentious debates marking modern believers, it’s instructive that the Church Fathers never saw the Christian observance of Sunday as a continuation of the Jewish Sabbath. Sunday wasn’t regarded as a Christian version of obeying the 4^th Commandment’s call to “Keep the Sabbath Day.” The Fathers DO however recognize as implicit in the teaching of Scripture the call to regular worship, and that meant specifying a day each week for gathering to worship. Ignatius, who we’ve already seen as one of the most important of the Church Fathers, specifically contrasts the Jewish Sabbath with the Christian Sunday – saying that the prior is replaced by the later. But he makes pains to point out that making Sunday the Lord’s Day is not a fulfillment of the 4^th Commandment. Rather, Ignatius sees the 4^th Commandment as fulfilled in the perpetual rest believers have in the death & resurrection of ChristThese weren’t the only days of the week Christians practiced specific actions as evidence of their faith. While Sunday celebrated the resurrection, Wednesdays & Fridays commemorated Jesus’ suffering & death. This was memorialized by partial fasts, till 3 PM.When Christians gathered on Sunday, there were certain things they did that constituted a service. This order of service evolved over time but became a fairly uniform practice by the 4^th C throughout the churches. In the earliest years, a portion of the OT Scripture was read and someone with skill at public speaking would explain & apply the passage. Several short such passages & homilies could be given, depending on how may skilled speakers there were. It didn’t take long before one of the elders was recognized as the God-ordained teacher & leader of the congregation and was designated as their pastor-bishop.Soon the documents of the NT & writings of the Apostolic Fathers were also read & studied.With the emergence of the bishop as the leader of a local church, the sermon became one of the primary elements in the service. We have the record of an ancient sermon