This is an interesting example of back-reading meaning into Bible passages. Many Christians today presume things about New Testament Christianity that we just don’t know much about. Because people are used to weekly or thrice-weekly church services with certain traditions of worship, they often presume that people who lived during the time Hebrews was written practiced something similar.

But we don’t know that. In fact, scholars say different traditions of worship arose very slowly in the couple of hundred years after Jesus died, and organized church services like exist today were very rare for a long time, and when they did exist they varied widely from region to region in terms of what actually went on.

One thing we know is that at least in Alexandria in about 100 AD, a group of Jews and Christians shared a small building for worship. The room that was the center of the place could probably fit between 35 and 50 people. We know this because archaeologists have dug it up and noted both Jewish and Christian ritual symbols and objects.

One leading theory is that the two groups used the building on different days, cooperating because real estate then as now was pretty expensive.

An equally compelling theory is that the two groups had not yet differentiated themselves sufficiently to consider themselves members of different religions. They may have worshiped together in the same room at the same time. This was only roughly 30 years after the destruction of the second temple, so ritual worship practices of rabbinic Judaism were still getting off the ground and were not yet well established.

But however it worked, one thing we know is that this little building could not have been enough for everyone to worship in. Alexandria had large populations of Jews and self-identified Christians at that time. So if this little building was a church building in effect, it could not have been used in the way that modern church buildings are used. It just wasn’t large enough for entire families to fit in once a week. It’s more likely that men who were leaders of the movements came together sometimes for prayer and rituals.

So if Christians were assembling en masse, and we can probably safely presume that they were, they likely weren’t doing it in "church."

And that’s just one large city in the eastern Mediterranean. We don’t have any reason to believe that people in different cities would have done things the same way. Whatever was going on at that time is probably always going to be fuzzy and somewhat unknown.