Paul’s communities were not primarily intended for the practice of religion as one dimension of life; rather, they were groups learning about and practicing a comprehensive way of seeing and living. We must remember that there was not a highly developed liturgical life at that time. The worship of God was made by using the Jewish services and also having a common meal which was eaten in commemoration of the meal that Jesus shared with His disciples.
The Greek word translated church is ekklesia. It means assembly and those called out – a community. Lacking the modern associations with church, the Greek word is a good term for the communities that Paul established.

Another reason church is misleading is that Paul’s communities were small, much smaller than most modern churches. We must recall that by the year 6o the total number of followers of Jesus was about two thousand, half in the homeland and half in the Diaspora. Thus any particular community would have been small. We perhaps should imagine Paul’s communities as small as fifteen or twenty people and perhaps as large as a hundred or two (as in Corinth). And even when there were that many Christ-followers in a given city, they most often probably met in smaller groups. We must also recall that during this period Christianity was still being persecuted. It was until the fourth century that Christians could freely and publicly meet.

One reason is the architecture of the ancient world. The spaces in which communities of Christ-followers could meet were small. It is common to speak of the earliest Christian communities as house-churches. That term correctly makes the point that they did not have church buildings. But it is misleading because it uses the words church and house. “House” implies a private family home large enough for a gathering. Most early Christians, with some exceptions, however, lived in much more modest living accommodations – in four-and five-story tenement buildings. Recall that a good number of the Christ-followers were probably also slaves and among the poor. They would not have had space for a gathering of fifteen or twenty or more.

But some of these tenement buildings and some homes of the wealth on main streets had “shops” on the ground floor. These included retail, manufacturing and repair shops in which artisans like leatherworkers and others worked. These spaces were not large, they averaged about two hundred square feet. But, unlike residential space, they were unused some of the time. In them, small early Christian communities met.

In recent years, some religious groups with large memberships have tried using house-churches in order to encourage greater intimacy among members.