Customer Reviews

House Church and Mission: The Importance of Household Structures in Early Christianity

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Gehring's work will be recognized as foundational for many who plant and encourage house church expression. His survey of the literature to date revealed a gaping hole in scholarly treatment of the early context of worship. I found the work thorough, as any scholarly treatment of the subject should be, and insightful. It is a resource to keep.

In his book "House Church and Mission: The Importance of Household Structures in Early Christianity" professor Roger Gehring provides a milestone in scholarly research on the issue of the household church in the New Testament era. There are several strengths to this work. First, it is written by a biblical scholar and is based on the author's doctoral dissertation. Therefore, there is plenty of attention given to Greek parsing and socio-historical analysis to keep the detail-oriented among us happy. Second, it thoroughly addresses the household structures prevalent both at the time of Jesus and the early Christians and shows how these patterns would naturally be the place and context for early believers to meet and function. Third, there is a nice overview at the start of the book bringing the reader up to date on the scholarly research into first-century household patterns that has been done in the past. Although there have been a few relatively recent scholarly attempts at providing a foundation for grassroots, non-hierarchical, house-based Christianity (such as Robert Banks' "Paul's Idea of Community" and Del Birkey's "The House Church"), I found Gehring's work to be the most in depth at analyzing the biblical text and first-century social context. My main criticism of this work is that its scholarly detail and length (about 320 pages, excluding back matter) will turn many readers away. I highly recommend this work for those who like to dig into the details of scripture and first-century history, but I hope Gehring gives some thought to writing a smaller more popular level book for those not so inclined, but who nonetheless would benefit from his findings. Overall, absolutely a must book to have!

RAD ZDERO, author of LETTERS TO THE HOUSE CHURCH MOVEMENT and THE GLOBAL HOUSE CHURCH MOVEMENT