31+
August 31st, 2017

That’s the number I have counted so far of congregations of the church noted in the New Testament.

Some congregations are specifically mentioned while in other places there would simply be mention of some disciples in a particular locale.  Paul seems to refer to multiple congregations in Galatia and on the island of Crete (Galatians 1:1-2 & Titus 1:5) but does not identify how many there are, hence the “+” after the number “31”.

Certainly, someone else has made observations similar to the ones I will note here, about the churches mentioned in the New Testament.  My observations are as follows:

#1) The size of congregations never seems to be emphasized even though some numbers are either reported or indicated by these examples:

  • The “church” in Jerusalem began with 3,000 (Acts 2:41) and soon grew to 5,000 (Acts 4:4), but these thousands were quickly scattered due to persecution (Acts 8:1-4) and we hear no more about the size of the church in Jerusalem.  We do know that it was large enough to have men qualified to serve as overseers by Acts 11:30, which is also the first time overseers/elders/shepherds in the church are mentioned.
  • Paul also left Titus in Crete “to appoint elders in every city” (Titus 1:5), therefore indicating a healthy number of disciples in a plurality of congregations while again providing no specific count of either disciples or congregations.
  • The church in Philippi began with Two families of unknown size or maturity (Acts 16:14-40) but grew to the point of having both overseers and deacons (Philippians 1:1).  
  • Ephesus got its start with about twelve men (Acts 19:1-7) but also matured to a point where they had a number of overseers (Acts 20:17).  There is probably more revealed in the New Testament about the church in Ephesus than any other congregation. 

#2)  Though there are many examples of churches being either commended or reprimanded for their behavior, no congregation is labeled as “liberal”, “conservative”, “sound”, “anti”, “progressive”, “traditional”, “Jewish”, “Gentile”, etc.

#3)  As far as I have been able to determine, all of the congregations mentioned in the New Testament ceased to exist.  That is not to say that there are no congregations of the church in some of the same places, but rather that the original churches at some point ceased to be and therefore the church had to be reestablished in these places. 

#4)  These congregations thrived and the gospel continued to spread in spite of the lack of a complete, compact, handily bound New Testament conveniently divided into chapters and verses.