Today’s Hodge-Podge: Messengers, Large Church Meetings, Archippus, and Apostolic Succession

For those interested, I wrote this in an email in response to questions concerning Colossians 4:14, 16-17:

1. For at least 150 years, perhaps longer, it was perfectly okay that the Sunday morning meetings grew large enough to need big meeting places, at least in the large cities, because the churches were still family. They took care of one another, shared possessions, visited one another house to house, etc. Having a big Sunday morning meeting in that culture is great. The day to day is fellowship is even more important than listening to pastors teach (Heb. 3:13; 10:24-25), so having big meetings on Sunday without the day to day fellowship is terrible, terrible, terrible. I don’t think that happened until pagans started rushing into the church, most unconverted spiritually, under Constantine. Unfortunately, that sort of public church never went away. It has lasted 1700 years.
2. The answer to the question about passing on letters would be obvious if we translated the Greek word angellos. It means “messenger.” The “messengers” of the seven churches in Revelation 1-3 were the men responsible for sending and receiving letters on behalf of the church. It seems that every church had one. The 2nd century book, the Shepherd of Hermas, says that Clement was the messenger for Rome and was responsible for receiving the book and then deciding whether to pass it on to other churches.
3. As for Archippus, we don’t know what his ministry was. We can’t be sure he was an elder, nor even that he was a shepherd in any way. Paul listed a lot of ministries in 1 Corinthians 12.

Apostolic succession: When Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus talked about apostolic succession, they were refuting the gnostics. Apostolic succession is the passing down of the faith–also called the truth and the gospel–from generation to generation. To take that responsibility and turn it into a passing down of jurisdiction is to misuse what they taught. Yes, of course the passing down of the faith was from the elders to the next generation of elders and from a bishop to the bishop who succeeded him, but authority for a Christian is not the same as authority for the world. Christians in authority, our bishops and elders and whoever else, are to maintain the truth and serve the saints, training them to do the work of ministry (service). It is a sin to follow a sinner, so even if a man has apostolic succession, he has no authority except it come from his submission to God.