Anyone who bothers to read the history of the Christian faith will quickly notice that the historic practices and beliefs are right there in the earliest strata of Christian history--with the apostles and earliest Christian communities.
When modern folk decide to reinvent the wheel and decide they are going to try and recreate the "New Testament Church" they are merely creating a form of Christianity in their own likeness and then forcing their own opinions and views upon the ancient Church.
If you want to know what Christian faith and practiced looked like in the earliest days of our religion, then look at what the historical Christian communions do, and what they all have in common. Because it is precisely the same things we see at any point in Christian history, from the 1st century to the 21st century.
If you ignore history and try and force your own ideas onto the New Testament, then you can make the "New Testament Church" look like literally anything you want it to--because it will always look like what you want it to, instead of what it actually was.
And, no, no modern church is identical to how things were in the 1st century, and that's because you can't recreate historical circumstances. The earliest Christians lived in a very particular historical context--namely the Roman Empire of the 1st century, and they were forced by circumstances to do certain things a certain way. For example, no you won't find any basilicas in the 1st century because Christians were by and large seen by the Romans as an illegal cult, and so Christians gathered in the homes of the wealthiest members of the community, or found other places to gather as they were able. New Testament evidence suggests that many of the early meeting places were the homes of wealthy women (probably widows), as suggested by Paul in Romans 16 and in the Third Epistle of John. By the third century, however, we can see that Christian meeting places, such as in Dura-Europos, were specifically outfitted for Christian use. The Dura-Europos church is a modified Roman villa, with a dedicated baptistery, and space for Christian worship. You can't recreate the historical circumstances of when Christianity was a marginalized often illegal minority religion in the Roman Empire and surrounding territories of the Mediterranean and Middle East. Those conditions no longer exist. What we can see, however, is how in spite of changing conditions--time and place--there has been a resolute insistence on the faith and practices of Christians since the very beginning. The New Testament and Apostolic faith has been retained for two thousand years, and we can see that throughout the historical record, all the way from the earliest times to our times.
Reinventing the wheel does not get us back to apostolic faith, it is only a reinvention of the wheel, making it emphatically non-apostolic, and many times, utterly contrary and antithetical to what the apostles taught and did.
-CryptoLutheran
