This past summer, my wife and I led a tour that traced Paul’s journeys (recorded in Acts 13–28) through the Mediterranean region.

The tour ended where Paul’s travels did: Rome. Paul might have recognized a handful of extant sites, such as the Appian Way, Forum, and Mamertine Prison, where tradition says he was incarcerated prior to his execution.

What Paul would not have recognized — what would have astonished him, in fact — was the proliferation of Roman churches.

In Paul’s day, a pagan shrine or temple lurked around every corner.

Today, Rome has more churches than any other city in the world, with 930 actively in use, most of them Catholic.

Our group concluded its tour at St. Peter’s Basilica, the largest and arguably most beautiful church in the city, if not all of Christendom.

Good Protestant that I am, I reminded the tour group that the sale of indulgences helped finance St. Peter’s construction, which became a flash point for the Protestant Reformation.

More importantly, however, I reminded myself that the Church is not a building, no matter how reflexively we conflate the two.

People are the only church the New Testament knows. The Greek word we translate as “church” is ekklēsia, which denotes a “gathering” or “assembly.”

That is why our Fellowship is called the Assemblies of God, by the way. The name is a literal rendering of the Greek phrase, ekklēsia theou (Acts 20:28; 1 Corinthians 1:2; 2 Corinthians 1:1; Galatians 1:13; 1 Timothy 3:5).

Biblically, a church consists of the people who gather as disciples of Jesus Christ, not the gathering place.

In Rome, no church gathering places from Paul’s day are still standing. They were probably ordinary houses (Romans 16:5; 1 Corinthians 16:19), none of which survived the architectural churn of two millennia.

What remains are the names of people who gathered. In Romans 16:1–23, Paul mentions more than 30 people by name. Most were at Rome, though some were with Paul in Corinth, where he wrote the letter.

Paul didn’t merely list names, however. He described relationships. Those descriptions are important, highlighting five kinds of people we meet in church.

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