What Was The First Church Building And What Can We Learn From It?

One wonderful aspect about churches is that they come in all shapes and sizes, designed to fit the wants and needs of the congregation that seeks salvation from them.

This means that a golden rule of designing and managing the construction and renovation of a church building is that the voices of everyone who is going to use it matter most.

Besides the preservation of historic churches with the help of the Church Buildings Council, consulting on new churches, reordering and closing buildings is absolutely vital and most work should not (and in some cases cannot) be undertaken without it.

This focus on the people who make a church a house of worship is found in the earliest known church building in Dura-Europus in what is now Syria.

Founded in 233 AD, the Dura-Europos church was originally a private house in a town then occupied by the Roman Empire during a time before Christianity became the official state religion.

The building was slightly larger than a typical house in Dura-Europus and happened to be close to the city wall. A dividing wall was smashed in order to convert two smaller rooms into an assembly room, which itself was a symbol of change in Christian worship at the time.

Rather than being simply a house where Christianity was practised, it was a church house, designed to be a dedicated place of worship but without the ornamentation that could arouse suspicion before the Little Peace of the Church in 260 AD.

It was accepted or at least tolerated by the Roman Army that had based themselves there, and likely would have expanded in size, scope and ornamentation had the whole town not been abandoned in 256 AD following a siege by the Sasanian Empire.

Despite damage to the town over the centuries, it was excavated in 1933, with several of the retrieved frescoes shedding light on some of the earliest depictions of Biblical scenes ever.