This might get me into a corner, but I'll say it anyway. Just because the early church practiced a certain way, or did anything, doesn't necessarily make it the "right" thing to do. Jethro, you're leaning on a few scriptures to support your stance for small home-based churches.
No, not home based churches, but regular churches the way we know them today, but where the meetings are open (but kept in order, of course, just as 1 Corinthians 14 stresses). I attended a church like this many years ago. An ordained Baptist minister had this same burden for effective church meetings and ran a church modeled this way.
It works. But if a person has never experienced it and thinks our present tradition is the express will of God for what a church meeting is supposed to be like then I can see how people would resist it. And worse yet, if a person goes to church for the sole reason 'that's what they're supposed to do' and is fulfilling an empty requirement to do that so God won't be displeased with them, then I can understand how someone might not be interested in what Paul talks about.
Nowadays, we also have mass populations of people who go to church, so it seems to me that large churches are to be expected. There certainly are models shown in the Bible of a single speaker preaching to groups rather than discussion-based studies of scripture. Which one was the Sermon on the Mount?
The interesting part is the interaction with the people that the Bible demonstrates.
Is there a command to gather in worship a certain way?
There are Paul's instructions on what is to be done in a meeting and in what order.
Jethro, you know I have tremendous respect for you, but you've called out people on this board for distancing themselves from the Body of Christ, and rightly so, IMO. When I see people who have separated into home-based churches, right or wrong, I see people who reject what the Church is today. They're off on their own, because they defiantly create a separatist movement.
I appreciate your respect very much and I know it is real, thank you. And please, let me assure you this has nothing to do with home church. We have such a great infrastructure of buildings and denominations and leadership already in place that could be more effective if we identified gifted leaders who can lead and control an open meeting and opened up the meetings we already have, and had people who had the courage and the knowledge to resist tradition, that home church meetings would not be necessary (trust me, I don't want to see the church do that unless absolutely necessary).
Our church has its large gathering where some might accuse us of monologues. But going to that one service doesn't make the member. It's getting involved in matters outside that service, and yes, meeting in small groups in addition to it.
Then why have the large meeting?
It's amazing to me to see people get truly blessed and fed by God, and feed other people in an open meeting, but continue to think the main traditional meeting where that rarely happens, or doesn't happen at all is the will of God for how we are to meet and will abandon the meeting that feeds in favor of the one that doesn't when the two are in conflict. And I think they do it out of fear and lack of knowledge, thinking God will be displeased if they don't go to the main meeting.
For churches that are having these fulfilling meetings outside of the main Sunday service now, all they have to do is add more prayer time and a praise and worship sing to the meeting and they have a Biblical meeting of the saints...and one that effectively builds up the saints, not just one that puts a mark on a score card of church attendance and satisfies an empty requirement to meet with the saints.
So, I hope you can see this is not about breaking away from the church. This is about making the churches we have more effective and fulfilling. Christians can't feed and minister to others effectively if they do not get fed and ministered to effectively themselves. Paul lays out inspired counsel on how to do that. I know for myself that it works...if people are willing to resist tradition and step out in faith and do what the Bible says.
