I found this PDF online, anonymously written called Church Life As Taught In Scripture. The first edition was published in 2008 and then revised in 2024. It’s 118 pages, has lots of scripture, is interesting but hard to get through. You can get a taste of what I mean from this one paragraph excerpt. I also included access to the PDF file below. The only identifier I found was “simple by Design“.
This practice of meeting in homes was continued long after the Apostles had passed away. This was not because of persecution (nor because of a lack of other informal social venues such as coffee shops) but simply because it was the way believers functioned properly as churches. We see for instance in Acts 2:46-47 that while they were meeting in houses, they were also “having favour with all the people.” In fact, there was no empire-wide persecution of the church until the Roman emperor Decius in 250 AD (followed by Gallus, 251-253 AD, then Valentine, 257-259 AD, and finally Diocletian, 303-311 AD). The Roman officials themselves often intervened to protect Christians from persecution, even by unbelieving Jews (Acts 16:35; 17:6-9; 18:12-16; 19:37-38; 23:29; 25:18-20, 24-27; 26:31-32). So persecution wasn’t always an issue, and even when it did break out, meeting in houses did not keep Saul from knowing where to go to arrest believers (Acts 8:3). Where Christians did at times in history have to respond to persecution by literally meeting underground, this, too, happened in smaller, home-sized congregations. So where the Jews had synagogues and the Gentiles had their temples, Christianity did not need any special building for the church to meet in. But when the Roman emperor Constantine became a ‘Christian’ and made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, he ordered the construction of 19 Christian buildings in 327 AD, known as basilicas, which were the most popular style of the time (basilica literally means ‘royal hall’). Until then religious buildings were seen as shrines. These were constructed in three places, namely one in Bethlehem and two in Jerusalem (for Christ’s birth, crucifixion and resurrection), nine in the city of Constantinople, and seven in the city of Rome, and initially had no pews. In Constantinople, the new capital built on the site of the old Byzantium, these buildings were primarily built for this brand new city in the east. This city also had many pagan temples, each named after a god or a goddess. Constantine similarly ordered that each one of these nine Christian buildings be named after first century saints. (He also gave Greek pagan names such as Eirene, meaning ‘Peace,’ and Sophia, meaning ‘Wisdom,’ to some of the other ‘church buildings’ there, although pagan worship was not recorded in the new city of Constantinople.). One of the seven Christian buildings constructed in Rome that year was a shrine placed on the side of a hill just outside the city walls of which the slope of the hill was called Vaticanus…(Saint Peter’s basilica in Rome was established as the seat of the ‘bishop’ of Rome, who later became the ‘pope’ of what is today known as the Roman Catholic Church, or Western Church. The structure’s basilican form, rebuilt in the sixteenth century, became important as a model for later ‘church buildings.’ Many of the features in Constantine’s ‘Christian basilicas’ were copied from pagan basilicas.) These buildings later came to be known as ‘churches,’ and were constructed throughout the empire, with no new pagan temples being built or repaired. Existing pagan temples were also later transformed into cathedrals, and in addition to those built, were handed over to the ‘bishops’ who by now had developed into powerful church leaders. This happened by government decree, and believers were driven out of their house meetings into these large basilicas. Even then many still
met in homes, especially since that was what they knew church to be. Then, just over half a century later, in 380 AD, ‘bishops’ Theodosius and Gratian ordered that there should be only one state-recognised orthodox church, and one set of faith the orthodox dogma. Each Roman citizen was, to put it lightly, forced to be a member and was made to believe in the ‘lex fidei,’ the law of faith. Other groups and movements-including those meeting in homes were forbidden. This led to many Christians over time wrongly believing that God dwells in a special way in ‘church buildings’ (similar to the Jews who considered God to physically dwell in the temple before it was destroyed in 70 AD). This later even led to the church proudly establishing graveyards close by the ‘holy church buildings,’ where people felt their mortal remains would be safe from the monsters and dragons of the deep. So historically we see that there is no evidence of meeting places larger than homes before Constantine, nor is there any literary or archaeological indication that any such homes were converted into church buildings. The reality is that everything in the New Testament was written for a home-sized church, where ideal church life and church meetings take place in a smaller, family-like setting in the homes of church members conducive to the kind of intimate table fellowship demanded by the Lord’s Supper.