In order to establish what were these first-century structures, it is a commonplace that passages that make reference to church order and practice in the book of Acts and the epistles are often juxtaposed and what, in effect, is a composite New Testament model is thereby constructed. This approach has two significant, but questionable, assumptions. First, a consistent, or at least a dominant, blueprint of church order exists within the pages of the New Testament. In other words, the structures of