Dance in the Apostolic Church.

 (Original article published 01-31-2000 available at the Franklin Road Baptist Church Website )      

With the obvious change of worship "style" between the testaments, it should come as no surprise then that any kind of dance finds no reference in the life of the early church. If as some moderns suggest, dance is a viable expression of worship, then why did not the early Christians introduce it in their gatherings? Could it be because Jewish ceremonial law had become irrelevant to the life of the church? (see Colossians 2:16-17). With the birth of the body of Christ, Christians no longer needed to observe Jewish feast days and celebrations. In other words, the occasions for dance had ceased.

As a religious experience and ritual, sacred dance to the gods occupied a prominent place in the ceremony of ancient religions. If sacred dance was that conspicuous among ancients, then its absence in the New Testament is all the more telling, and for perhaps a number of reasons.

First, the apostolic church did not use dance because it would have been an intrusion upon what was otherwise a simple expression of worship that involved continuance in "the apostles' teaching . . . fellowship . . . the breaking of bread and . . . prayer" (Acts 2:42). In opposition to the surrounding Jewish and pagan culture, the early church distinguished herself by focusing upon the "apostles' teaching."

As to the difference between culture and Christianity, MacMullen defines culture as "the way of doing things." On the other hand, Christianity he describes as belief, and a Christian as someone who has "seized upon a doctrine" by which his life is wholly directed and shaped. To the extent that the Christian faith remains centered in a book, the book then becomes the filter through which the Christian religion may be, and most often is, defined. This understanding MacMullen says, "will screen out, it will simply not allow as 'religion,' dancing and other communal or individual cult acts."[1]

Second, the apostolic church did not use dance because of its association with the old order of things, the ceremonies, feasts and sacred days of Judaism. While Jews comprised the vast majority in the initial Christian church, the practices and emphases were distinct from Judaism (see the book of Hebrews).

And third, the church hesitated to use dance as an expression of its worship because of overtones of paganism. One scholar observed, "The universal importance of dance as part of the induction of new adherents into the mystery cults of the Greco-Roman period . . . made dancing highly suspect for Christian worship."[2] Another wrote, "Dancing as a religious activity was not prominent in early Christianity, probably because of its pagan licentious associations."[3] In contrast to much of modern evangelicalism, the early church discerned and then filtered out from its corporate worship and spiritual life those activities associated with and advocated by surrounding Jewish and pagan cultures, dance being but one activity for which the apostolic church found no room.

Pastor Larry DeBruyn

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[1] Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to the Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 106.

[2] E.B. Johnston, "Dance; Dancer," The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1979) 858.