Tom Wadsworth’s Videos on Content of Early Church Gatherings

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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misidentified photos. The correct attributions are now in the captions. We apologize for the confusion.

A United Methodist Insight Exclusive by H. A. "Bud" TillinghastI’ve been waiting for the General Conference to finish before resuming work on my project, the creation of a Digital Resource Library for a Future for the United Methodist Church.

It was so different from what I was used to for the General Conferences in prior years. I found myself glued to my laptop as item after item came up and was passed by a heavy majority vote. No conservative type tried to grab a microphone to bring action to a halt or bring an amendment to put a monkey wrench in the works.

But in the interim, I still thought and researched the library. One conclusion I came to was that any scheme for our future must be the work of more than one person. I can’t do this on my own; I ought not to try it on my own. Doing the imagining of our future needs to be done cooperatively like General Conference operated.

Part of why it needs our working together is that there are lots of resources out there as well as the books that I have been reading. And one person on his or her own cannot find them.

Sometimes you find resources; sometimes resources find you. I’m going to illustrate the latter with this week’s addition to the Resource Library.

I spend a lot of time on YouTube just poking around. One day there popped up a video about worship and the early church. Actually, it turned out to be seven videos where the man on them was trying to make the case that the early gatherings of Jesus’ followers were nothing like the worship services we have today. The first video is titled: “Why the Early Church Did Not have Worship Services.”

The narrator, Tom Wadsworth, tells us that back in 1977 he was a Church of Christ minister in Flint, Michigan and was doing a series of sermons on First Corinthians, a chapter each Sunday. Things went along normally until chapter 14. The topic, coming out of the chapter, was what the followers of Jesus were to do when they assembled. What he did at that point was to change the course of his life from then on. He decided that he would look up the words in the original language of the New Testament, Greek, rather than assuming that the meaning of the English words meant the same as the Greek words meant. That form of Biblical study has been around for a long time: historical literary criticism.

Wadsworth was surprised that Paul never used the word "worship" to describe what Christians did in their assemblies. After all, we are always referring to worship today when we talk about gathering. He gave list of examples.

The absence of the use of "worship" so raised his curiosity that he decided to do a search of the whole Bible to see what was going on when the word "worship" in English was used. What Hebrew word (O.T.) or Greek word (N.T.) was used and what did it mean in the original language? (Many of you likely already know what I’m describing).

The search led him to go back to seminary to get a master's degree in theology and a doctorate. His doctoral dissertation led him to conclude that what we do today when we gather is not what was done in Biblical times.

This makes me think that Tom Wadsworth is like a prophet for our time, like Amos was in his. Speaking for God, Amos proclaims: “I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.” It probably raised lots of questions to those who were listening to Tom’s preaching amid the service of worship like “If he doesn’t believe the early Christians heard sermons in the midst of a worship service, why the heck is he preaching and why should we be here?”

I tried to get in touch with Tom to see if I could share his insights with you. Unfortunately, though he is on Facebook, they wouldn’t let me leave a message for him because I didn’t know him!

Fortunately, we have a United Methodist church in Dixon, Illinois, just as we do in about any town in the United States. I went to their website and got their senior pastor Tim Mitchell’s email address. Within hours of sending the request for help I got back an email from Tom asking how he could be of help.

(In reading Tim Mitchell's bio online I discovered that he was leading his congregation through what he called a "Holistic Visioning Project" for the congregation’s future in mission and ministry. I, of course, asked Tim if he was willing to share that with us, and here's a screenshot of his outline. I was starting my research for the day with a hope for a two-fer!)

The reason Tom Wadworth’s conclusions struck a chord for me is that half of my prior research was the work and writings of the Society for Biblical Literature’s group on the Greco-Roman meals of the first century as the context for the gatherings of Jesus’ followers. I think that one important factor in what the church’s gatherings in the future might look like is to be aware that for at least two-and-a-half centuries of the church, they not only existed but thrived on a gathering that is nothing like what many assume it to be. As Tom points out, one reason we can’t let loose of current "worship" practices is what is called anachronism: the action of attributing something to a period to which it does not belong. Can you really see the Disciples passing out worship bulletins as they usher worshippers to their pews?

This brief description of Tom’s work doesn’t do it justice.

It is well that this project calls itself a "digital resources library," for Tom and I, as well as you, are fortunate to live in this digital age. He makes searches of all the worship words not only in the Old and New Testaments, but in the sixth video he also does a search of the Ante Nicene Fathers (church leaders who wrote before the ecumenical Council of Nicea in AD 340 that produced the Nicene Creed). Before the digital age one would have needed the whole monastery to do in years what he did in hours.

Here is a slide showing the number of Ante Nicene Fathers by century and their works cover 6,448 pages! (I didn’t count the number of pages; I let a Google Search find the number for me.)

Tom Wadsworth's seven videos cover

The Rev. H. A. "Bud" Tillinghast of Oxford, England, is a retired clergy member of the California-Nevada Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. "Preparing a Digital Library for the UMC's Future" is Dr. Tillinghast's joint project with United Methodist Insight.