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There were many differences that I discovered between my church and the early church in watching these sessions. The first is in architectural features. The early church seemed to have many different rooms that served different purposes such as the courtyard, assembly hall, and the baptistery. My church consists of only an entrance, sanctuary (which may be compared to the assembly hall) and a common area in the basement. There are also a lot more interior design elements to the early church that are not present in my church. Our Sunday service also looks a lot different than it did in the early church. We have a specific Scriptural reading that is preached from each week, however, we do not take Scripture from each section of the Bible for every service. Our service is not typically entered around the Eucharist, we do not have a kiss of peace, nor do we pray to the east (our church faces North) and those who are not baptized are allowed to stay and participate in the service. My church’s guidelines for partaking in the Eucharist is having surrendered your life to Christ and having a mature and firm understanding of what this means rather than being baptized. Differences in baptism between my church and the early church are that those involved are not required to fast prior to the baptism, it is all adult baptism (post conversion), and it is not specifically done at Easter.
These differences are very similar to those in my home church. It is very interesting comparing churches today to those many years ago. I am grateful for many of the practices that have been modernized but there are some practices that would be fun to revisit.
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