The Home as Little Church

The New Testament already knows the church that meets in a house: St. Paul greets "the church that is in their house" (Romans 16:5), and the first Christians broke bread "from house to house" (Acts 2:46). St. John Chrysostom drew the conclusion bluntly in his preaching on Ephesians: order your household well, he told his people, and you will be fit to help govern the Church, "for indeed a house is a little Church." The home is not a lesser or merely private version of Christian life; it is where most of that life is actually lived.

This gives the ordinary furniture of family life a weight it might not seem to have. The parents' task is the one Moses gave Israel — to keep God's words in the heart and "teach them diligently unto thy children," speaking of them at home and on the road, lying down and rising up (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). Joshua's "as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD" (Joshua 24:15) is not a slogan but a household rule of life. The faith is meant to be handed on less by lecture than by sharing a way of living.

A home becomes a little church chiefly through prayer that recurs. Most Orthodox households keep an icon corner — a wall or shelf with icons of Christ, the Theotokos, and the family's patron saints, often with a vigil lamp — where the family gathers for morning and evening prayers and where a member can stand alone before God. Meals are begun and ended with set prayers, so that the table itself confesses that the food is a gift. None of this needs to be long; it needs to be steady. A short rule kept daily forms a family more than an ambitious one abandoned in a week (see the prayer rule).

The home also keeps the Church's calendar. The family fasts together on Wednesdays and Fridays and through the fasting seasons, and it feasts together when the fast is over (why we fast). It marks each member's name day rather than treating the birthday alone, keeps the annual house blessing, and in some traditions honors a household patron with special customs such as the Serbian Slava. Through these repeated seasons the great mysteries of the faith soak, year by year, into the memory of children.

The little church is not mainly about religious objects; it is about how the members treat one another. A home where prayer is said but resentment is nursed has missed the point, for the family is the first and hardest place to practice the mercy, patience, and forgiveness the Gospel asks. Marriage and parenthood are, in the Orthodox view, an ascetic path in their own right — a daily dying to self-will for the sake of another — and the raising of children is its central work. The aim is modest and enormous at once: that the home be a place where it is natural to pray, easy to forgive, and normal to think of God — so that when its members come to the parish for the Liturgy, they are not visiting a foreign country but coming to the fullness of what they already live.