Ep. 4 The Early Church & the Dilemma of Church Spaces
w/ Dan Reneau, faculty professor at Living Faith Bible Institute
Before we ever ask where the church should meet, we have to ask a more basic question: what is the church? In the New Testament, the church is not first a building, a campus, or a permanent location—it is a gathered people, called out by the Word of God and assembled for worship, fellowship, and mission. In this episode of The Postscript, we go back to Scripture to examine what the Bible actually shows us about Christian gathering: how early believers met, the kinds of spaces they used, what mattered about those spaces, and what clearly did not. Rather than importing modern assumptions into the text, this conversation helps us distinguish what is descriptive from what is prescriptive—and why that distinction matters deeply for church planters today.
Our guest is Dan Reneau, a church planting pastor in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, whose congregation has matured to the point that it is now sending out church planters of its own. Dan brings both pastoral experience and biblical clarity to the question of meeting spaces, helping us think carefully about the nature of the church as an assembly, the flexibility of early Christian gatherings, and how Scripture frees us to pursue mission without being bound to unbiblical expectations about buildings. This episode serves as the biblical foundation for the entire series, grounding our practical questions about space in the witness of the New Testament itself.
“The Dilemma of Church Spaces” series explores one of the most underexamined—and most formative—realities of church planting: space. Beginning with the early church’s patterns of gathering and the historic instincts that shaped Baptist meeting spaces, the series traces how theology, mission, and context have always informed where and how God’s people meet. Through conversations with pastors planting in vastly different settings, these episodes examine how meeting places shape discipleship, stewardship, leadership, and public witness. From homes and borrowed rooms to inherited buildings, to outgrowing cherished spaces, to navigating expensive global cities where traditional church buildings are increasingly inaccessible, the series surfaces both the benefits and burdens of buildings without offering simplistic answers. At its heart, the series asks a pastoral and theological question: how can churches steward space as a servant of the mission—without allowing it to become the mission itself?
If this episode challenged or equipped you, consider sharing it with a friend, pastor, or fellow student of the Word. For more resources and biblical training, visit LFBI.org.