Carl Sommer, author of We Look for a Kingdom: The Everyday Lives of the Early Christians, answers a few questions on the early church.

The most common misconceptions about the early Christians are that they were egalitarian, and that they were anti or non-liturgical in their worship. The notion of egalitarianism is easy to dispel. If one honestly looks at the New Testament data, one quickly realizes that the Twelve had more authority than the body of believers, and that they routinely passed a share of their authority on to others. . . .

It is, admittedly, harder to demonstrate the liturgical nature of early Christian worship, because there is no direct description of the Liturgy in the New Testament, but shortly afterward, in the Didache and in Justin Martyr’s First Apology, we find descriptions of Liturgies that look a lot like what we do today. We can’t simply assume that the first century Church worshipped as Justin did, but it seems reasonable to suppose that very early on, the Christians took existing Synagogue rituals and modified them for Christian usage, all the while with Jesus’ command, “Do this in remembrance of me” foremost in their minds.

(via Blogwatch)