Evan Lee

We were talking about the church year, somewhere in the middle of July. I'd been writing about the liturgical seasons, and he asked how the series was going.

Sometime I came across a line that stopped me mid-page. It was in a history of early Christian worship, and the author mentioned — almost in passing — that for the first three centuries of the church, Christians had no purpose-built church buildings. None. For most of that time, no dedicated worship spaces at all — just houses, courtyards, whatever space someone could offer.

It's a short manual — some kind of handbook for new Christian communities — written somewhere around the end of the first century. Maybe earlier.

I grew up going to church on Sunday the same way I grew up speaking English — as if it were simply the natural order of things, not a choice anyone had made. Sunday was when Christians gathered. Self-evident, like the sky being blue.

I was in my late twenties, on a research trip through Rome, more interested in the acoustics than the architecture.

It wasn't ancient history. It was my mid-twenties, traveling in a country where I didn't speak the language.

You're working through a new song with the worship team — one that's genuinely beautiful, technically demanding, harmonically interesting. The musicians are locked in. The vocalists are tight. And then you step back and realize:

Twelve voices, perfectly blended, singing an arrangement so intricate and polished that I sat completely still for the entire service. I didn't sing a word. I couldn't. The music was too good, too complete. There was no gap in it for me to enter.

Genuinely. The kind of voice that makes you stop mid-conversation. She grew up in a church that didn't allow instruments — no piano, no organ, no guitar. Just voices. When she first visited a service with a full band, she stood there looking slightly overwhelmed, like someone who'd walked into a room with too much furniture.

At some point, the congregation spoke together in words I didn't recognize. I found the page and read along.