On Gathering

2 Corinthians 12:9  
“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’”

As I lay awake one night after a particularly difficult night with our toddler, I was searching for verses to strengthen me. I was tired. My searches online while laying in bed went along the lines of “Exhausted parent.” I was upset that we still weren't getting full nights. Upset that I was always tired. Upset that this parenting thing was so hard. Upset over many things and wondering why God wasn't giving me the strength I kept asking for.

So naturally 2 Corinthians 12:9 popped up: “My grace is sufficient for you...” I read it. Well, consider me reprimanded.

But this write-up isn't about strength. No, it's about something else entirely.

I bring up how I got here because sometimes things that teach us don't come from answers to the question we ask. I was awake, so I decided to read the full chapter anyway since I was there. And that's how I read 2 Corinthians 12:13:

2 Corinthians 12:13  
“How were you inferior to the other churches, except that I was never a burden to you? Forgive me this wrong!”

Paul, apologizing? For not being a burden?

Hold on. What is happening here?

Why would he apologize? When you look at these two verses so close together, it's hard to see a connection. Are they different thoughts? Part of the same argument? How?

Well, digging deeper, I discovered that part of the culture in the Roman world revolved around the idea of patrons.

In Roman society, patronage was a normal part of life. A wealthy and influential person could provide financial support, protection, introductions, or other forms of help to someone of lower social standing. But this was not simply charity. It created relationships and obligations. The person receiving the help owed loyalty, gratitude, public honour, and often social allegiance in return.

That matters when you look at Corinth.

Paul had a right to receive material support for his ministry, and he talks about that elsewhere. Yet in Corinth, he deliberately chose not to make use of that right. Instead, he worked with his own hands and preached the gospel without charging them.

Why?

Part of the answer seems to be that Paul understood the culture around him. Accepting support could create relationships of obligation that were completely at odds with the kind of community he was trying to build.

The gospel was not supposed to create another social ladder.

Paul wasn't interested in becoming the religious employee of the wealthy. He wasn't going to let the person who paid the most become the person who had the most influence. The church was supposed to be a family, not another Roman patronage network with Christian language attached to it.

And the Corinthians didn't necessarily understand his refusal that way.

They were used to a world where status mattered. Wealth mattered. Public reputation mattered. A speaker's ability to impress people mattered. So when Paul refused their money, some apparently didn't see that as a sign of integrity. They saw it as evidence that he wasn't impressive enough.

The other teachers were charging them. They looked the part. They spoke confidently. They had the sort of credentials and presentation that fit the culture around them.

Paul worked with his hands.

So Paul says: “How were you inferior to the other churches, except that I was never a burden to you? Forgive me this wrong!”

He's being sarcastic.

He's essentially saying, “I'm sorry. I suppose my terrible mistake was treating you like people I loved instead of taking advantage of you.” And that little sarcastic sentence sent me further down the rabbit hole. Because if Paul was deliberately resisting the status system around him, what did the community he was trying to protect actually look like?

We tend to picture church through the lens of what we know. A building. A service. Rows of seats. A worship set. Someone at the front teaching. People arrive, participate in the scheduled parts, listen to the sermon, and go home.

But the early Christians didn't have that structure yet. Acts gives us a very different picture.

Acts 2:46  
“Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.”

And again:

Acts 5:42  
“Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah.”

They met in public spaces, including the temple courts, but they also met in homes. Their homes. There weren't purpose-built Christian church buildings for them to gather in. They had places where large groups could gather, but much of Christian life happened in ordinary homes. And they ate together.

This is where something else caught my attention.

The “breaking of bread” wasn't simply the modern communion service that we might be familiar with. The early Christian meal and the Lord's Supper were closely connected. Communion existed within the context of an actual shared meal. You can see this particularly clearly in 1 Corinthians 11, and Paul's problem wasn't that they were having a meal, his problem was how they were treating one another while having it.

1 Corinthians 11: 20 - 22

[20] When you come together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat. [21] For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. [22] What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not.

Some people were eating well while others went hungry. Some were getting drunk while others had little or nothing. The meal that was supposed to demonstrate their unity had become another place where the social divisions of their culture were showing up. That is a striking detail when you put it beside everything else Paul says to Corinth because the church was supposed to be different from the world around it. Yet the world's status system had followed them right through the door and sat down at the table. Paul wasn't having it.

The table was supposed to be where those distinctions disappeared, not where they were reinforced, and this is where I think we've potentially lost something. Sunday church is valuable. I don't think the answer is to get rid of it. Churches need teaching. They need leaders. They need organisation. They need people who are called and equipped to teach and shepherd others. The early church had leaders too. Apostles, elders, deacons and teachers were not absent from the picture.

But leadership did not mean that everyone else became an audience. There is a fascinating passage in 1 Corinthians 14 where Paul describes what happens when the church gathered:

“When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation.”

There was clearly a need for order. Paul spends the rest of the passage explaining how these contributions should be handled properly. But notice the basic premise that Paul explains: When they came together, people participated and it wasn't simply one person doing everything while everyone else watched. Maybe someone had a song, someone else had something to teach, someone had a testimony or revelation and someone else contributed something useful to the group.

That doesn't mean every early Christian meeting was perfectly democratic or that everyone had an equal role in every gathering. They didn't. There were leaders, teachers and people with particular responsibilities. But the ordinary Christian wasn't merely a consumer.

And I think that's worth thinking about.

When a church becomes large, there are very good reasons for introducing structure. You can't fit five hundred people around someone's dining room table so you do need somewhere everyone can meet. But solving the logistical problem of gathering a large number of people can create another problem, which is that you can accidentally turn a family into an audience.

People sit facing the same direction. One person speaks. Everyone else listens. Then everyone goes home.

Now don't get me wrong. There's nothing inherently wrong with going somewhere for a dedicated teaching where you learn. Teaching, and learning is important and we should keep doing that. But it doesn't do everything that Christian community is supposed to do.

You can't know someone deeply by sitting beside them for an hour on Sunday. You don't necessarily know who is lonely. You don't know who is struggling. You don't know who hasn't eaten properly all week. You don't know who has something they desperately need to talk about. You don't know who has a gift that never gets used because there isn't really anywhere for them to use it.

You can attend church every week and still feel like you're watching Christianity from the outside rather than living it. That can be incredibly lonely and demoralising. In my own journey I often feel that I am not doing enough (and the that's not healthy because our salvation is not about works)

I think that's what the early house gatherings gave them: A place to be part of the whole. A table changes things.

When people sit around a table together, there isn't a stage separating the people who lead from the people who listen. You eat together, you talk, you hear people's stories, you notice when someone isn't there and social hierarchical barriers break down.

The wealthy person sits beside the poor person. The person who teaches on Sunday might spend the evening washing dishes. The person who struggles to get to the main service can still sit at the table. The lonely person gets invited in. The person who knows Scripture well can teach someone who doesn't. The person who knows very little about Scripture might still have an experience or testimony that encourages everyone else.

Everyone has something to give, and everyone has something they need to receive. That's a very different picture of church than I think most of us know. What most of us know is "Only the preacher preaches and they do so from the front"

And perhaps this brings me back to where I started. I was lying awake as an exhausted parent asking God for more strength. The verse I found told me that His grace is sufficient and that His power is made perfect in weakness. I initially took that as a lesson that God will not always fix our problems for us but that we must simply know that what He does provide is enough.

However, maybe it's more that weakness isn't something God always intends to remove, but rather maybe sometimes weakness is part of the reason we need one another and encouraged to meet.

The early church didn't respond to human weakness by telling everyone to become strong enough to manage life alone. They built a community where people could carry one another.

The exhausted person could be fed. The lonely person could be included. The person who struggles to travel could still be given a meaningful place within the community. The person with knowledge could teach. The person with a gift could contribute. The wealthy person couldn't simply buy influence. The vulnerable person couldn't simply be pushed to the edge. And everyone could come to the table.

Hebrews 10:25 says: “not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

Meeting together wasn't presented as a box to tick. It was connected directly to encouraging one another. So I wonder what it would look like to bring some of this back, not to replace Sunday church or abandon teaching through structured leadership. We can't pretend that the first century was perfect and everything modern is wrong. But maybe we need to add back something that we've allowed to disappear: Actual gatherings in homes. Not Bible studies but real meals. Breaking bread together. Sharing the cup. Talking about Scripture. Praying for one another. Giving people room to share what God has been teaching them. Letting people contribute instead of simply consuming.

A large church could have dozens of these gatherings. A smaller church could have one or two. People who struggle to travel could host in whatever ways are practical. People who are lonely could have somewhere to go. Families could bring their children. People could actually know one another.

Would things go wrong? Of course they would because people are involved.

But Paul's answer to problems in the early church wasn't to stop meeting, rather It was to teach them how to meet properly and that's what I find most interesting about all of this.

The early church wasn't perfect. Corinth certainly wasn't perfect. They argued. They misunderstood things. They brought their old cultural habits into the church. They messed up meals that were supposed to demonstrate their unity.

But Paul didn't respond by saying, “Fine. Stop meeting in homes and let the professionals handle it.” He corrected them and he called them back to what they were supposed to be: A family.

Perhaps that's what we need to recover, not an older style of church for the sake of being older, not a rejection of everything we've built but just a recognition that something can be gained when Christians stop being an audience for a few hours each week and start becoming a family around a table again.

And maybe that's why the verse I found while searching for strength ended up leading me somewhere else entirely.

“My grace is sufficient for you.”

Perhaps part of that grace is not always God giving us the strength to endure our weakness.

Perhaps it is God giving us one another.