The Assembly

The heritage that most of us grew up in followed a patternistic methodology whereby we believed that if we could simply discover the "pattern" of the 1st century church we could recreate that church in the modern age. In spite of this viewpoint I never remember 1 Corinthians 12-14 being taken seriously as a way to discover that pattern. In other words, we never taught that the pattern of early church worship could be found by following the correctives that Paul gives here, especially in the last part of chapter 14.

I have long since abandoned the quest to discover the pattern of worship followed by the churches of the New Testament believing instead that, aside from having some things in common such as the Lord's Supper and public reading of scripture, the assemblies of the New Testament churches were very different from one another. God did not give us a pattern to imitate but a Lord and Savior to follow. Such is the gist of Paul's teachings about the assembly. It's not enough to get all the right actions to be done in the right order. What is of critical importance is that we recognize one another in the spirit of Christ's love, and do all we can to edify, encourage, and build up one another in the faith. When we allow this to guide us in our decisions about what should or should not happen in our assemblies we are moving in the right direction.