House Churches, Restored

Last updated on: March 22, 2020 at 9:05 pm by Dan Peterson

House Churches, Restored 2020-03-22T21:05:41-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Maqueta [Model] Acropolis Piedras Negras, ubicada en el Museo de arqueologia y etnologia de Guatemala
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

For the first three centuries of the Christian era, until Constantine legalized the faith, persecution subsided, and congregations moved into larger buildings and began to build their own, Christian believers typically met in homes.

Several biblical passages specifically mention Christian meetings in apparently private houses. The first “house church” on record, for example, is mentioned in Acts 1:12-14, where the disciples of Jesus are described as having met together in the upper room of a house in Jerusalem. House churches meeting in the homes of Aquila and Prisca — probably located in Rome and in Corinth — are mentioned in Romans 16:3-5 and in 1 Corinthians 16:19, and, according to Colossian 4:15, a similar house church met in the home of Nymphas in Laodicea.

My wife and I enjoyed a brief home sacrament meeting today. We began by listening to a performance, by Gentri, of the late Karen Lynn Davidson’s wonderful lyrics:

O Savior, Thou who wearest
A crown of piercing thorn,
The pain Thou meekly bearest,
Weigh’d down by grief and scorn.
The soldiers mock and flail Thee;
For drink they give Thee gall;
Upon the cross they nail Thee
To die, O King of all.

No creature is so lowly,
No sinner so depraved,
But feels Thy presence holy
And thru Thy love is saved.
Tho craven friends betray Thee,
They feel Thy love’s embrace;
The very foes who slay Thee
Have access to Thy grace.

Thy sacrifice transcended
The mortal law’s demand;
Thy mercy is extended
To ev’ry time and land.
No more can Satan harm us,
Tho long the fight may be,
Nor fear of death alarm us;
We live, O Lord, thru Thee.

What praises can we offer
To thank Thee, Lord Most High?
In our place Thou didst suffer;
In our place Thou didst die,
By heaven’s plan appointed,
To ransom us, our King.
O Jesus, the Anointed,
To Thee our love we bring!

I had never before heard Sally DeFord’s setting of those words to the traditional “Kingsfold” melody. I liked it a lot. But I also love the much more familiar melody by Han Leo Hassler and Johann Sebastian Bach, which can be heard here:

https://josephsowa.com/musical-history-o-savior-thou-who-wearest/

So we listened to that one, as well.

After the sacrament, we exchanged a few thoughts on the significance and even, really, the emotional and spiritual power of partaking of the sacrament on our own, at home. It was, though simple, a remarkable experience.

I was reminded of another very memorable experience from perhaps slightly more than twenty years ago. A small group of us were down at the Maya archaeological site of Piedras Negras, visiting the BYU archaeologists who were working at that location on the north bank of the Usumacinta River, in the Petén department of northeastern Guatemala. On Sunday, we had a sacrament meeting there in our jungle encampment. There wasn’t a white shirt to be seen. (Any shirt that had been white would have been muddy by that point.) We had no organ, no pulpit, no church. It was as simple as it could be, with two men kneeling successively in their boots and levis, blessing the sacrament, and the rest of us passing and receiving it. But I’ve never forgotten that little moment. It brought everything down to the basics.

As, in its own way, did today’s tiny sacrament service.

I hope that other Latter-day Saints are having memorable and meaningful Sabbaths. It seems to me that, while we hope that the need will be of short duration, this can be a rich teaching moment for all of us.

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