What happened here?

What happened? I would say that, in most cases, the funds eventually ran out. Funds which were primarily used for payment to a full-time religious professional.

Interestingly, the most formal and descriptive passage in the NT about church meetings, found in 1 Corinthians 14, allows for multiple participants. And also, we notice team leadership to be normative in the churches of earliest times, rather than the dependency upon a single leader.