The Early Church's Movement From Private Space to Public Sphere
Or, The Marginalization of Women’s Leadership in the Church
NOTE: I have long been curious about how the church’s movement from gathering mainly in homes to a more public area may have altered how the church organizes itself. I admit that I quite sympathetic to the Anabaptist critique of Christendom. It seemed a reasonable hypothesis that as the church aligned with the political powers of the world, it would move to public spaces. And this move could alter who and what would be considered church leadership. What follows is the result of some research about how the movement to acceptability, and thus out of the shadows of the home and the public spaces of acceptable society, altered the church’s leadership. I would say for the worse. I humbly submit this to you for consideration.
Introduction
An early critic of the Christian church, Celsus, said, “Christianity is for hysterical women, children and idiots.”[1] His harsh critique unwittingly provides us with a valuable observation: women and children filled the early Christian church. Historical evidence shows that women found authority to lead the church in the early part of Christianity despite their apparent weakness in society. The people—especially the women—who Celsus saw as the condemnation of Christianity, were in fact those whose leadership in the early church continued the revolution that began at the cross of Jesus. The cross, where apparent weakness is the demonstration of the most extraordinary power, is the pattern the women followed in leading the early church. Not a power to dominate and control, but in their apparent weakness in society, women found authority to lead the church in the early part of Christianity.
What would Celsus have said if he observed a Christian worship gathering just a couple of hundred years later? He probably would not have found a woman presiding over the Eucharist after the third century. He may have found them in the congregation, but they probably would have been seated separately from the men, which is also where he would have found the children if they were present at all. And what would he observe today? While some ordained female clergy exist, male clergy still vastly outnumber women in the leadership roles within the Christian worship gathering. While women typically make up a higher percentage of the congregation, they still do not have equity in leadership positions. The children? They would be downstairs in a separate room so Celsus would not have seen them. Consequently it is doubtful that Celsus would call today’s Christianity a religion of women and children. Instead, he may have said, “Christianity is a religion of men leading and women watching.”
What could explain this shift in the role of women from the early church to our present moment? This essay posits that the movement of the church out of private households and into public spaces of society led to the decline of women’s positions of leadership in the church. To investigate this claim, we will trace a history of Christian gathering from the Greco-Roman context to Constantine to better understand how women led the household and the house church. This process will allow us to locate the decline of women’s leadership in the church as the moment in which Christianity entered the public sphere. As a result, the Body of Christ has suffered. The one body, with many members, has suppressed the expression of the female members’ gifting. How do we restore the unity of the Body of Christ? To do so, we must locate the site of the fracture as well as identify the power that created it.
Women Leading the Household
First we need to contextualize the nature of Greco-Roman households before the arrival of Christianity as modern readers often need to expand their imagination of the household to fully grasp what it meant for women to lead these in spaces. Today, we look at the household as a place for the nuclear family to gather, rest, and perform chores. However, the household in ancient times included people beyond the family unit. The household was a factory, school, communal space, and birthing center and extended into aspects of life that most twenty-first century people would not consider part of the household.[2]
While the breadth of management that would fall under the domain of a woman's household responsibilities in antiquity was extensive, this does not imply equality between women and men in the Greco-Roman world. Even though the household was the woman's domain, the public square was the man's domain.[3] Men customarily held power and authority to lead in politics and other more public endeavors outside of the household. While not unheard of, it was not common to have a woman hold political office in the Greco-Roman world.[4]
It is essential to recognize the apparent freedom that women were given to lead within the household did not translate to the equality to lead in all environments and spaces. This distinction between space and power is vital to the thesis of this essay. While women were less likely to hold political office and had a narrower range of options than men, they nevertheless performed vital work during this time, including work exclusive to women, such as midwifery and wet-nursing.[5] Most women of this time primarily focused on the nurture and education of children as their primary responsibility.[6] However, men and women also shared similar jobs engaging in trade and commerce, cooking and baking, textiles and industry, and even fighting as gladiators.[7]
Women's involvement in patron-client relationships was significant also. As patrons, women would serve in the overseeing of slaves, provide meeting places for others to gather, and give general authority within the household. Patron-client relationships were prevalent in the Greco-Roman world.[8] Both men and women functioned as patrons. As Carolyn Osiek states, "In the Roman world, status was always more important than gender; that is higher social status always took preeminence over the sex of the persons involved. Thus in the highly developed system of patronage and benefaction, women were actively engaged at every level."[9] The patronage of women acted as fertile soil in which the early church took root.
While there are several instances of women's patronage within the New Testament, one prominent example is Phoebe in Romans 16:1-2. Paul refers to Phoebe as not only a servant of the church but also a "benefactor of many and of myself as well." Phoebe was a patron who looked after the interest of her clients, including Paul himself. Women’s patronage, particularly in providing spaces and provision for early Christian gatherings in their homes, shows how their leadership was essential for the early church's founding.
Early Christian House Church Gatherings
Christians began to hold gatherings within the first century, no later than twenty years after the death of Jesus.[10] During this same period, clubs, and associations had gatherings of various kinds to help members find the community they could not find elsewhere. Among these various groups, including voluntary associations and pagan cult associations, there was a shared pattern to their gatherings' shape and function. The meetings had a bipartite structure consisting first of a shared meal followed by a symposium.[11] The meal, often at the host or patron's expense, would provide food not ordinarily afforded by the members and wine would be served during the meal to increase the celebratory environment.[12]
The second portion of the meeting, known as the symposium, would include open conversations around current events, philosophy, politics, and literature. The symposium would also involve increased drinking of wine and entertainment for the voluntary associations, often ending in debauchery with prostitutes and drunkenness.[13]
Ancient Christian church gatherings took place primarily in homes. Up until Constantine's edict of Milan in 313 CE, house church gatherings were the norm.[14] These gatherings followed a similar format that parallels the meetings of voluntary associations, cults, and societies of the Greco-Roman world. These similarities in shape and form may have been intentional to avoid unwanted attention from the Roman Empire. As a fledgling group following the Jewish Messiah, whom the Empire had crucified, remaining inconspicuous was essential for the movement's survival at that time.
In 1 Corinthians 11:17-14:40, we have the earliest description of a Christian house church.[15] The gathering includes a common meal followed by a less formal time of socializing. Within this section of 1 Corinthians, Paul critiques abuses within the gathering, such as participants getting drunk or the wealthier participants eating all the food neglecting others who would have left hungry. From Paul's letter, we see a basic pattern for how the church gathered in homes. According to Paul, the house church gatherings had mainly two parts. First, a shared meal followed by a second part after the meal, including prayer, singing, and teaching.[16] This two-part structure corresponds with the bipartite routine of gatherings among other associates in the Hellenistic world. Whereas the second part of the meetings of associations and cults would transition toward excessive drinking and sexual promiscuity, it seems the Christians substituted the Lord's Supper for the drinking and sought to refrain from the debauchery altogether.[17]
These similarities provoke the question: why follow the same pattern? Did the Apostle Paul's unique task to see the church grow inform the pattern of house gatherings that he prescribed? By mimicking common and accepted patterns of bringing people together, the house church gatherings avoided drawing attention and suspicion of the day's ruling authorities. Paul seems to have advocated for a contextualization of the early church's form of gathering that offered it protection and allowed it to grow and flourish.
First Corinthians gives us a clear look at how a house church gathered but it is not the only New Testament reference to churches gathering in homes.[18] Other examples include Mary, John Mark's mother, who hosted a gathering of the church in her home in Jerusalem.[19] Nympha's house was the gathering location for the church in Laodicea.[20] Philemon also hosted a house church in his home.[21] Priscilla and Aquila hosted house churches in their homes in Ephesus and later in Rome.[22] Lydia, the businesswoman, hosted a house church and opened her home to Paul in Philippi.[23]
Church worship in homes brings the church into the domain of women. Patronage afforded these gatherings to take place and provides insight into how women's leadership was integral to early house churches.
How Women Lead in the House Churches
Functioning as patrons of the church, women would lead the church by hosting and providing for the gathering and the meal.
Linda Belleville suggests that the New Testament records six churches meeting in the homes under the house's patronage.[24] Of these six references (mentioned above, in the previous section), Belleville states women led five of these house churches.[25] The one exception being Philemon as the male patron of the church in his home.[26] However, further research may indicate that all six house churches have women leaders.
Apphia, whom Paul refers to as "our sister," was probably Philemon's wife or sister.[27] As such, she would provide leadership to the household and could be considered a patron of the church meeting in their home. Even if Apphia is not the materfamilias of Philemon's home, the reference to her being "our sister," indicates that she is at the very least a church leader.[28] Therefore, it seems likely that all six of the New Testament references to house churches involve women's leadership through patronage or some other recognized form. Moreover, even if Belleville is correct or the evidence is inconclusive, then still five of the six house churches mentioned name women as leaders through patronage. Either way, this is firm evidence that women provided leadership in early Christian house churches.
As the patrons of the house churches, women would not have been merely playing the role of a hostess, nor would their role be merely honorary. It is reasonable to conclude they would have been seen and received as leaders with the same respect and reverence found in other patronage relationships.[29]
While the patron is more than a host, it would still be natural for the patron to act as host presiding over the common meal. As Carolyn Osiek explains, "The host of the meal would have been the ordinary leader of any toasts that took place and, in Christian groups, of the special blessing and sharing of bread and cup with ritual words toward the end of the eating portion of the meal."[30] With this, Osiek offers us an extraordinary insight into the leadership of women in the early Christian church. The blessing of the cup and bread is akin to leading the church in the Lord’s Supper -- a protoEucharist. This means women provided leadership, without repudiation, to what arguably became the most significant portion of the church gathering. The site of our communal embodiment of the gospel, the meal Jesus gave us, was under the leadership of women from the beginning.
In addition to functioning as leaders over the meal, women within house churches led through patronage to provide for others' needs and significantly contribute to the growth of the church's mission. These women-led house churches offered support to women and children in otherwise dire situations. This care for women and children probably contributed to gaining more female church members.[31] Furthermore, Stark contends that “with a surplus of Christian women and a surplus of pagan men,” numerous marriages occurred, providing the church with new members.[32]
Women who led the early church followed the Greco-Roman model of patronage: which involved funding and providing for collective meal gatherings, leading the proto-Eucharist, leading the conversation of the symposium, providing financial support to those in need, and leading evangelicalistic efforts through the care for widows and children as well as marriage.
The Church Goes Public:
The Marginalization of Women's Leadership
That women were leading house churches is without dispute. Nevertheless, women as leaders in the church gathering diminished as the gathering location moved from homes to more public settings. In the second century, when the Eucharist replaced the shared meal, the church gathering's bipartite order changed. Whereas the house church would begin with a shared meal, followed by teaching, singing, prayer, and other fellowship activities, the order of the service was reversed. The church would then celebrate the Lord's Table after the teaching. It appears that as this change occurred, the Eucharist became a ritual observed in a public hall rather than a shared meal in a private home.[33]
With the legalization of Christianity in 313 CE, church gatherings would become more institutionalized. Christianity, now legal, began to attract members of the ruling class. As the Christian community welcomed these men who had experience in public life and political office into the church, their experience in public life moved them rapidly into leadership positions.[34] These elite men's influence and leadership styles slowly shifted church leadership from shared ministry in homes to governance by the powerful.[35]
In time, the office of the bishop would replace the previous patronage that women household leaders offered. Now the patron of the church would be the bishop.[36] No longer threatened by the Roman Empire but instead aligned with it, Christian worship gatherings could occur in more public spaces without fear of persecution. Along with the church's movement into public spaces, men continued to fill leadership positions. Women, who previously presided over the meal, offering a prayer for the cup and bread, were no longer involved. The preparation for and service of the Eucharist became a position of power no longer afforded to women.[37]
The public space being the domain of men, appears to have assumed that men retain the authority and leadership of any worship gathering within this space. If men did not merely assume power in that space, clearly, they quickly obtained and retained the power in the public sphere. Whether this was just a cultural assumption or norm is difficult to determine. However, it stands to reason based on what we know about leadership in public spaces when public worship outside of homes moved leadership in the church out of women's purview. The shift in social-location of the church meeting left women subject to the power dynamics in the public space.
In the early part of the third century, Apostolic Tradition was written by the Roman presbyter Hippolytus. Apostolic Tradition was to serve as a prescriptive text for church order practice. Hippolytus claimed to provide "the Tradition which is [proper for] the churches."[38] Within this text, Hippolytus prescribes that only ordained clergy can preside over the Eucharist and that one must be a man to be ordained. The requirements of maleness and ordination for leadership further solidified the marginalization of women and diminishing their scope of leadership in the church.[39]
The church gathering's movement outside the home restricted who could preside over the shared meal. Eventually, the meal became a mass. The welcoming of all people to a common union over a common meal was altered into a ceremonial breaking of bread and drinking of wine.[40] The institutionalization of the Lord's Supper and the church gathering made the church more of an event people observed than a life within which they participated.
This movement out of the home into a public institution, disempowered women, and the church has undoubtedly suffered for it. So many women were withheld from the expression of their God-given gifts to build up the Body of Christ. The marginalization of women from leadership in the church has caused generations of untold breakdown for the Body of Christ, the Church herself.
Conclusion
How then do we return women to their rightful place of leadership for the building up of the whole Body of Christ? The answer to this question will require a look at the power dynamics both within the Church and our culture. While that work is beyond this paper's scope, documenting the effects of the power of cultural spaces on the make-up of church leadership is a start.
Reshaping power is not a call to return to the house church format, nor is it a call to "break the glass ceiling" for women to enter male-shaped power structures. As Mary Beard observed, "You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. That means thinking about power differently."[41] This means decoupling power from authority for a fuller expression of the priesthood of all believers instead of a priesthood of the powerful men. It is a call to rethink power within the church altogether. A call to the kenotic power of Christ. Power, not as authority over and restricting others, but the of God power used for others. All of us under God’s power for the benefits of all.
The need for change is not just for the equality of women but for the benefit of all. A fuller expression of the Spirit's gifting in the whole Church benefits the whole church, both men and women. May we learn how to reshape the church for the fuller expression of women and their gifts for the building of the Body and the glory of Christ.
[1] R. Joseph Hoffmann, Celsus On The True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) - page number uncertain due to pandemic and being able access to copy.
[2] Perhaps this experience shifted in 2020 with the Coronavirus pandemic. As more people moved to working and schooling from home, their experience of the household is slightly more analogous to the ancient household. In pandemic life, the household is the location for more than just resting from the world but the site of work, schooling, social life, as well as all of the "typical" household experiences.
[3] Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y. MacDonald, A Woman's Place: House Churches in the Earliest Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 145.
[4] Susan E. Hylen, Women in the New Testament World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 26.
[5] Lynn H. Cohick, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Group, 2009), 374.
[6] Hylen, Women in the New Testament World, 114.
[7] Cohick, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians, 374.
[8] Hylen, Women in the New Testament World, 100.
[9] Carolyn Osiek, “Family Matters,” in Christian Origins ed. Richard A. Horsley (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 212.
[10] S. R. Llewelyn, “The Use of Sunday for Meetings of Believers in the New Testament.” Novum Testamentum, vol.
43, no. 3, (2001), 205–23.
[11] Ben Witherington, III, Making a Meal of It: Rethinking the Theology of the Lord’s Supper (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007), 35.
[12] Valeriy A. Alikin, The Earliest History of the Christian Gathering: Origin, Development and Content of the Christian Gathering in the First to Third Centuries. (BRILL, 2010), 19.
[13] Valeriy A. Alkin, The Earliest History of the Christian Gathering, 22.
[14] George Thomas Kurian and Mark A. Lamport, Encyclopedia of Christianity in the United States (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 1142.
[15] Alkin, The Earliest History of the Christian Gathering, 31.
[16] Ibid., 31.
[17] Though Paul's needed correction in 1 Corinthians 16 proves that refraining from drunkenness at the Lord's supper was not always the case.
[18] Linda L. Belleville, Women Leaders and the Church: Three Crucial Questions(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000), 52.
[19] Acts 12:12
[20] Colossians 4:15
[21] Philemon 1:2
[22] 1 Corinthians 16:19; Romans 16:3-5
[23] Acts 16:14-15
[24] Linda L. Belleville, Women Leaders and the Church: Three Crucial Questions (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000), 52.
[25] Belleville, Women Leaders and the Church, 52.
[26] Phil. 1:1-2
[27] Michael Bird, Colossians and Philemon: New Covenant Commentary Series (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2009), 223.
[28] Scot McKnight, The Letter to Philemon (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, Co., 2017), 142. In a class lecture at Northern Seminary dated 2/8/2021, Dr. Nijay Gupta contends that Paul’s use of the word “adelphe,” or “sister” is honorific. Paul, Dr. Gupta stated never uses this word to mean “fellow Christian” but rather something more like, “she is like me or on par with me [Paul].” The same word, “adelphe” is used by Paul to refer to Apphia, thus leading me to conclude she was a leader in the house church in Philemon’s home even if she was not Philemon’s wife.
[29] Osiek, A Woman's Place, 214.
[30] Ibid., 161.
[31] Osiek, A Woman's Place, 230.
[32] Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity, (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1997), 128.
[33] Osiek, A Woman's Place, 161.
[34] Karen Jo Torjesen, When Women Were Priests: Women’s Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: Haper Collins, 1995), 155.
[35] Torjesen, When Women Were Priests, 156.
[36] Osiek, A Woman's Place, 219.
[37] Cynthia Long Westfall, Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle’s Vision for Men and Women in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 231.
[38] Francine Cardman, “Women, Ministry, and Church Order in Early Christianity,” in Women & Christian Origins ed. Ross Shepard Kraemer and Mary Rose D'Angelo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 305.
[39] Cardman, “Women, Ministry, and Church Order in Early Christianity,” 306.
[40] Ben Witherington, III, Making a Meal of It: Rethinking the Theology of the Lord’s Supper (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007), 114.
[41] Mary Beard, Women and Power: A Manifesto (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017), 86-87.
This is so well researched and thought out!
Really well done Gino.