Defacto ANE Family

The original first churches under the leadership of Jesus’ disciples were defacto Hebrew families.

Consider the historical cultural context. The Hebrew people lived under ANE feudalism. Their immediate government was their family, and any higher political power was obliged to work through whomever was head of the extended family household, up through clan chiefs, etc. Over centuries the tightly knit structure suffered a bit of dislocation, and by the time of the Exile, they realized they needed to replace the natural system based on DNA and intermarriage. So they came up with the synagogue, partly to fill the ritual needs for worship and study of the Law of Moses, but also to give that clan structure back to the people. This was their normal, not something imposed on them; they felt lost without it. There was a sense in which, lacking a genuine kinsman to whom you could give your allegiance, you could shift your allegiance by covenant to someone else as your kinsman-in-effect. They would all adopt each other under a covenant according to ancient rituals and customs going back too far to trace.

In the Nation of Israel, your elders were heads of various levels of this family organization, whereas your priests were always members of the priestly tribe. Priests were distant kin, but not family like your elder. Get the feel for this in your mind.

Christ came and in His teaching showed it was the end of the Covenant. The Priests had long since become secularized (see how the Sadducees tended to act), and Christ taught how that old order was dissolved. However, the basic structure of daily life did not die on the Cross. So you can imagine that the first churches that organized after the Pentecost simply followed the pattern of synagogue realignment into new extended family households, a clan in effect. The priestly function was taken up by pastors; in this case the Apostles were senior “priests” of this new world with their new small-scale political loyalties following that ancient pattern.

These “priests” had a cultural obligation to withdraw from too much of the family politics and allow the elders to run the show. The priests focused on full-time study, prayer and ritual stuff. This new covenant under Christ called for an awful lot of work to ensure they knew how to proceed.

We come to Acts 6 where the Hebraic Jews were the old home folks in Jerusalem already interconnected by a mass of common habits and political structures that Rome didn’t mess with. A lot of Jews born outside Palestine came for the annual Passover celebration and stayed around a month or so (if they could afford it) and many of these were also converted to Christ. Many felt obliged to do their best to join in the local social and political structure of these churches, but they were clearly outsiders without the proper reflexes. The locals already had their habits of mind tuned to this, while the Hellenistic Jews (Diaspora) were completely out of place. So while a few individuals and small households did okay, the business of taking care of the widows was not so simple.

Local Hebraic widows knew how to use the system and get themselves adopted under some elder’s care. The Diaspora widows were isolated and no one picked up the responsibility for them. “She ain’t in my household.” So the Apostles said that their time was already consumed with priestly stuff and these Diaspora folks needed to learn from the old synagogue system and just pull themselves together into households. If there’s one thing they had in common, it was their common alienation from the clannish local culture. So they formed seven households (“synagogues”) and selected elders to represent their interests. Don’t call those seven men “deacons” (attendants) — they were elders. They were the new first-echelon government for these Diaspora Jewish Christians.

I’m not going to suggest we have to ape this in every detail, but this shows the basic moral structure of how God made us to live together in churches.