John Wylie, a frequent commenter here, is from Springer, OK.
There is a dual definition to the term church. One is the corporate body of Christ and the other is the local assembly. Those local assemblies were organized. There is a move away from what some call the “organized church” in our day, they say that the local church in the scriptures was only a loose fellowship of believers meeting in houses with no leadership and no organization. Is that what N.T. churches looked like in the Bible?
1)They had officers that had to meet specific qualifications. (Eph. 4:11;Phil. 1:1; 1 Tim. 3:1-13)
2) They had a prescribed mission. (Matthew 28:19, 20; Acts 1:8)
3) They had ordinances given to them to observe with instructions on how they were to be observed. (Matthew 28:19, 20; 1 Cor. 11:23-34)
4) There was a prescribed procedure for judging matters and disciplining errant believers. (Matt. 18:15-17; 1 Cor. 5:1-15; 1 Cor. 6:1-8)
Were there churches meeting in houses? Certainly (Rom. 16:5; 1 Cor. 16:19; Col. 4:15; Philemon 1:2) But that was not to the exclusion of larger assemblies. 120 believers were meeting in the upper room in Acts 1. A number of believers were meeting in an upper room in Troas in Acts 20. My point is that it seems that the model in the book of Acts was that believers would meet in homes throughout the week, then on Sunday they would meet corporately. So the idea that the sum total of the NT church experience were small, informal house assemblies is simply not the whole story.