The New Testament has a word for a follower of Jesus, and it isn't student. It is mathetes — disciple — and it appears more than 260 times in the Gospels and Acts. Then, after Acts, it disappears. The epistles never use it. They say brethren, saints, beloved, the church — household words. The disciple has become a family member.
That isn't an accident of vocabulary. It tells you what kind of institution the church was: a household that made disciples. And it tells you what the church lost when, within a few generations, it became something else.
What the household form was
And they continued stedfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers... And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart. (Acts 2:42, 46)
Doctrine, yes — the apostles taught. But look at where and how. House to house. Daily. Breaking bread. Eat their meat. The teaching was embedded in a shared life, delivered around a table, by people who lived together and knew each other. It was a household.
And the New Testament's model of formation is the household's: imitation. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you (John 13:15). Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1). Wherefore I beseech you, be ye followers of me (1 Corinthians 4:16). Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do (Philippians 4:9). Learned, received, heard, seen — four verbs, and only one of them is what happens in a lecture.
The older women are told to teach the younger to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, keepers at home (Titus 2:4-5). That isn't a syllabus. It's an apprenticeship — the kind of teaching that can only be done by someone who lives near enough to be watched.
The oikos was a place where people lived and worked and ate together, and the church took its form. Household. Table. Master and apprentices. Learning by doing, alongside someone who could already do it.
What the school form is
Within a century, the church encountered the most respected institution in the Greek world: the philosophical school. And the school had properties the household didn't.
A school has a teacher who possesses the knowledge and students who receive it. Its currency is competence in the subject; its relationships are defined by it. Entry is by aptitude — the school selects those who can learn the material, and excludes those who can't. Its setting is the lecture hall, with the teacher seated on the cathedra and the students in rows. Its output is graduates who know what the teacher knows.
Every one of those properties is different from the household. A household includes by birth and adoption, not aptitude. It has no graduates. Its currency is love and loyalty, not competence. Its relationships are lifelong and mutual, not hierarchical and temporary. And its setting is a table, where everyone faces everyone.
When the church adopted the school form, it didn't abandon the gospel. It changed the container — and the container changed what happened inside.
The three changes that survived
Three things changed under the school form, and every one is still with us. The center of gravity moved from the table to the lecture: teaching had been one activity among the one-anothers, and it became the activity, with the meal shrunk into a rite and the mutual sharing into a "fellowship time" around the main event. The criteria of competence changed: in a household the honored member loves well and keeps faith; in a school the honored member knows the most, and Paul had warned that knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth (1 Corinthians 8:1). And the test of belonging changed: a household member belongs because he's family; a student belongs because he can follow the curriculum. Once membership was defined by having the right answers rather than living the right life among the right people, the ordinary member's role shrank to assent. Passive Christianity begins with the question at the door.
The speaker changed too: the sophist
The Greek world already had a standard for what a man who stands before a crowd should be, and the church inherited it with the school. The standard was the sophist.
In classical Athens the sophists were travelling professionals who taught persuasion for a fee. By the time the church was spreading, their successors were the celebrities of the Greek-speaking world: touring orators who filled theatres with display speeches, were applauded and paid enormous sums, held endowed chairs of rhetoric, and collected disciples who identified themselves by their master's name. The audience's role was to appraise the performance. Eloquence was the visible form of intelligence, and the eloquent man was, by that fact, the man fit to lead.
Read Corinth. I am of Paul; and I of Apollos (1 Corinthians 1:12) is the language of disciples attaching themselves to rival orators, and Apollos was an eloquent man (Acts 18:24). Paul refused the standard deliberately: I came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom (2:1); my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom... that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men (2:4-5). A faith produced by eloquence rests on the eloquent man.
The Corinthians judged him by the standard he had refused: his speech contemptible (2 Corinthians 10:10). His reply: though I be rude in speech, yet not in knowledge (11:6). Rude in speech is idiotes to logo, a layman in speaking, the same word he uses in 1 Corinthians 14 for the unlearned member of the assembly. The apostle files himself, on the question of oratory, with the laity. And he refused the fee: we are not as many, which corrupt the word of God (2 Corinthians 2:17), where corrupt is the word for a peddler making a margin.
Then the church became a school, and the sophist walked in through the door the school opened. Augustine was a professional teacher of rhetoric before his conversion. Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil trained in rhetoric at Athens. John Chrysostom, golden mouth, studied under Libanius, the most famous sophist of the age, who is reported to have said that John should have succeeded him had the Christians not stolen him. Chrysostom's own sermons repeatedly rebuke his congregation for applauding, for treating the church as a theatre. And Augustine, in On Christian Teaching, adapted Cicero's rules for the orator to the preacher. From then on, to be fit to stand in front of the church was to have been trained in the thing Paul said he had refused.
Trace what that did to the priesthood of all believers. Paul's list for an elder is about character and household, with one word about teaching: apt to teach (1 Timothy 3:2). Under the sophistic standard that one word swallowed the list; the able speaker became the obvious leader. The assembly's purpose, every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine (1 Corinthians 14:26), gave way to the orator's room, which has one contributor and an audience whose part is to attend, appraise, and applaud. The layman was invented in the modern sense: the unqualified person whose role is to receive. The priesthood of all believers requires that speech be distributed, ye may all prophesy one by one, that all may learn (14:31); the sophistic standard concentrates speech in the trained, not by forbidding the untrained to speak but by setting a standard only the trained can meet, so that the untrained fall silent of their own accord. The fee came back, and with it the party spirit: a church whose leaders are performers produces followers of performers.
Paul saw the sophist coming, wrote it down, and called himself a layman in speech to keep the speech in the hands of the laity. The church took the school, took the sophist with it, and made the thing he refused into the qualification for standing where he stood.
What was gained
Two columns, always. The school form gave the church scholarship: the early teachers who mastered Greek philosophy produced theology of astonishing depth, and gave the faith a defense in its critics' own language. It gave the catechumenate, years of structured instruction before baptism, which preserved something of the household's formation even as the school displaced it. That's the honest counter-evidence, and it collapsed under mass conversion, which is the next stage of the story.
What a disciple is
Jesus's commission wasn't make students: Go ye therefore, and teach all nations... teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you (Matthew 28:19-20). Teach in verse 19 is make disciples, and the content in verse 20 is teaching them to observe: to do, to keep, to practice. A disciple is someone learning to live a life by imitating someone who lives it. That can't be done in a lecture hall, which shows you a person's knowledge and hides everything else. It can only be done in a household, where you see how the person handles money, bears loss, and keeps his word. The school form produced Christians who knew a great deal and had never watched anyone live it.
What to recover
Not the abolition of teaching. The recovery of the container.
A congregation can keep its scholarship and put it back inside a household. It can teach from the front and also ensure that every member is in a small unit where imitation is possible — where an older believer is near enough to be watched, where the truth taught on Sunday is practiced on Tuesday, and where belonging is by adoption rather than aptitude.
And it can change the question at the door. Not "do you affirm these propositions?" first, but "will you sit at this table, with these people, and learn to live this way?" That's what the household asked. It's what the Master asked: Follow me.