Cheryl Schatz

Mark,
You said:

Paul in writing those letters was addressing a church and a pastor of a church. Both the immediate contexts of the passages refer to the ‘formal’ if i can call it that assembly of believers.

As I said in a previous comment, 1 Timothy was not addressed to a church at all. It was a private letter to Timothy and Timothy was not the pastor of this church. He represented Paul in ministry where Paul needed him and he was temporarily in Ephesus to correct a problem, not to pastor a church. While 1 Timothy is what tradition calls the “pastoral” letters, it doesn’t mean that the recipients were “pastors” but that Paul was writing letters in a pastoral way – letters of encouragement and instruction to individuals.

Each of Paul’s letters is explicit regarding the audience to whom it is written. In Corinthians, Paul is writing to the body of believers. In 1 Timothy, Paul is not writing to the body of believers. He could have written to them all if he wanted. But instead of writing to the entire body, Paul writes to one person alone with individual instruction.

The term “formal” regarding the meeting of the body is not in the scriptures. There are no meetings of the body that are called “informal”. In fact as Dave has pointed out, wherever two or three believers gather together is a gathering of the church and the Lord Jesus promised to be in each gather of believers even if the gathering is as small as two.

Tradition has taught us that there must be men (elders) leading the gathering of believers or else it really isn’t church. This is the same thought that the Jewish oral law provided for the synagogue. They were disallowed by their own law (not God’s law!) from having an official synagogue unless there were at least 10 men present. This is why the women gathered outside the gate.

Act 16:13 And on the Sabbath day we went outside the gate to a riverside, where we were supposing that there would be a place of prayer; and we sat down and began speaking to the women who had assembled.

With an understanding of Jewish history, we can clearly understand why these women were not in the synagogue. They were outside by the river because there was not enough men to qualify for a “formal” assembly. But God has no such restrictions. An all women assembly is indeed considered as a “place” of prayer by Paul and the other apostles.