I am overwhelmed by the huge amount of emails, comments and encouragement from readers of the first part of ‘An idol called the church’. Thank you. It is not easy making a stand against an entrenched stronghold – but I have been encouraged by all the ‘fellow warriors’ on the same page.

Part two – what the Church is not

In order to see what the church is not we need to establish firstly a foundation of what the Church is. Future articles will go into this more in depth but the foundation will suffice at this stage.

Question: "What is the church?"

That seems like an easy question, the sort of question you may answer in a simple sentence or two.

Many people today understand the church as a building, an organization or a denomination. But this is not a true biblical understanding of the church. The word “church” comes from the Greek word ekklesia which is defined as “an assembly”.  The root meaning of “church” is not that of a building, but of people. It is ironic that when you ask people what church they attend; they usually identify a building, organization or denomination.

The ‘church’ is the body of Christ, of which He is the head. Ephesians 1:22-23 says, “And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the assembly, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.”  The body of Christ is made up of all believers from the book of Acts to Christ’s return.

The true ‘Church’ is “The gathered assembly of believers in Jesus Christ,"

All believers would agree with the above statement so where is the problem? If we agree with that statement and yet there is still an Idol present someone is deceived somewhere.

I want to talk about the nature of the church from a scriptural perspective to expose the ‘Idol called the church’.

It is very important to pay attention to how Christians throughout the world interpret Scripture when it comes to the nature of the church. We all tend to read the Bible in light of our own experience and culture. We have our own ‘coloured glasses’ with which we view everything so that we all project our preconceived meanings into the text. Careful interpretation of Scripture can help us see what is really there and not be tricked into thinking our preconceived ideas are God's revealed Word.

While experience can be good, Scripture stands authoritatively above the experience of all believers.

Scripture has the final word when it comes to all matters of faith and how we live a Christian life, including the question of what the church is. Therefore, the best way to discover what the church is should be by careful study of Scripture.

In nearly 30 years of being a Christian I've probably heard a hundred sermons on the church. I've given a few of my own too without really realizing what I was saying because I just followed the ‘trend’. In practically every one of these sermons the same point is made: "The church is not a building. It's the people of God." Now we may say the place where Christians gather is a church – and it sounds correct But - this has nothing to do with biblical theology, and runs the risk of fostering a detrimental misunderstanding and therefore error.

Nowhere in the Bible is the place where Christians meet referred to as a "church."

Depending on the translation, the word ‘church’ appears around 75 times in our Bibles, (110 times if you include the plural). In almost every instance "church" is a translation of the Greek word ekklesia.

Never does ekklesia refer to a building in which people gathered, for worship or for any other purpose. (In fact, the early Christians in the New Testament didn't even have special buildings in which to meet during the period in which the New Testament was written. This came much later. For the most part, the first Christians met in private homes.)

Now before you say “I know all this” and stop reading, it’s time for me to argue that the use of the word "ekklesia” translated “church" in many translations causes problems at best, and in actual fact is wrong.

Yes I am saying the word church should not appear in our translations. (note: many translations are correct in not translating the word to church but rather use the word ‘assembly’ instead eg  Youngs, World English, Darby, to name just a few).

No matter what connotation for the word "church" you use, a church is either a building used for religious purposes, or it is a group of people who have gathered for religious purposes, or it is a larger configuration of people who have been organized for religious purposes (i.e. the Roman Catholic Church). Say the word "church" and anyone who understands English will think "religious entity."

This was not the case for ekklesia in first-century Greek parlance. If, for example, a Christian traveller showed up on the streets of Corinth in the first-century A.D. and asked for the location of the ekklesia, nobody outside of the tiny Christian community there would direct him to a religious building or gathering. Nobody would think he was asking about anything that had to do with the gods or with religious practices. An ekklesia wasn't anything like a church. Greek had words for religious gatherings, words such as thiasos (cultic society) or synagoge (Jewish gathering). But ekkelsia wasn't one of these words.

Ironically, one might say the same thing for the use of the word ekklesia in the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint). This word appears about 100 times in the Septuagint, almost always translating the Hebrew term qahal to the basic meaning of "assembly" or "gathering." They (qahal & ekklesia) can be used to describe a gathering for religious purposes, but the words themselves are also used for non religious connotations. They need something like "of the Lord" to make the religious setting clear.

So, if "church" in English always suggests something religious, whether buildings or gatherings of people or organizations, and ekklesia does not have this meaning in the time when the New Testament was written, then translating ekklesia with "church" almost certainly leads to some level of misunderstanding on the part of the reader. When it comes to the vocabulary of the New Testament, truly "a church is not a church."

So, then, what is the New Testament understanding of ekklesia? If this word isn't equivalent to "church," what other English word or words might better render the sense of ekklesia?

The Ordinary Meaning of Ekklesia

Almost all New Testament uses of ekklesia are distinctive in comparison to secular Greek, since ekklesia is almost always used to denote an usual gathering, that is, of believers in Jesus. In Acts of the Apostles, however, this term is used three times in a more or less ordinary sense, though perhaps ironically.

The context for this usage is Paul's ministry in Ephesus. For two years he preached the gospel, with considerable success. Many residents of Ephesus put their faith in Jesus and rejected their pagan practices. This led to a sharp decrease in the sales of little silver trinkets of one of the most popular pagan gods, Artemis. Those who made their living by making and selling these souvenir idols became enraged, fearing the loss of their livelihood. So they stirred up their fellow Ephesians, who all rushed together to the theatre at the centre of town, dragging a couple of Paul's companions with them. Acts tells us that the assembly in the theatre was in great confusion. The Greek word translated as "assembly" is ekklesia (Acts 19:32).

When one man tried to address the gathering, he was shouted down because the pagan Ephesians were biased against him owing to his being Jewish. Finally one of the civic leaders of Ephesus managed to quiet the people down. He told them not to worry about the worship of Artemis, and to follow appropriate legal actions if they had been wronged by Paul and his retinue. The leader concluded by saying, "If there is anything further you want to know, it must be settled in the regular assembly [ennomoi ekklesiai, literally, the lawful ekklesia or assembly]" (19:39). Then, Acts tells us, the official "dismissed the assembly [ekklesian]" (19:40).

From this story in Acts we can learn several things about the word ekklesia. Most simply, it meant "assembly" or "gathering." It referred to some sort of meeting of people who had come together for a particular purpose. In Greek society, the ekklesia was the assembly of full citizens in a particular city. (Most residents were not full citizens at that time.) Thus the ekklesia was rather like the city council in a modern American city in terms of its authority.

Etymologically, the word ekklesia was derived from the verb ek-kaleo, which meant "to call people together" or "to summon" them. This does not mean, however, that ekklesia really meant "the called-out people," as is sometimes claimed by preachers. Those who wrote the New Testament and those who read what they had written would not have thought of ekklesia in light of its etymological roots. For them, the word meant "assembly" without a hint of whether those who gathered had been called out or not. It's like when you hear the word "microwave." This word denotes a certain kind of oven. You and I don't think of the fact that "microwave" was derived from the combination of "micro" and "wave," and uses high-frequency electromagnetic waves. Rather, "microwave" means "that white oven over there in which I warm up my leftover pizza."

Ekklesia was a common Greek word for a gathering of people -period. It came to have a special meaning in reference to the assembly of the voting citizens of a city. In this sense it was the "regular assembly" referred to in Acts 19:39. But, as we saw in Acts 19:32 and 40, ekklesia could also be used to describe an unplanned and unruly crowd of people.

As I mentioned, ekklesia was not used specifically for religious convocations, nor did it have religious overtones. The first-century Greek speaker would not have thought of the gods or of a religious gathering when hearing the word ekklesia. Thus if I were a Bible translator, I'd opt for "assembly" or "gathering" rather than church for most New Testament instances of ekklesia. What gives the Christian ekklesia its distinctiveness is not the fact that it is an ekkelesia, but the fact that it is an ekklesia in God.

All of this raises some fascinating questions about the meaning of ekklesia in early Christianity, and why the early Christians chose this particular word to describe their meetings. I'll try to answer these.

The Earliest Usage of Ekklesia in the New Testament

Unquestionably, the earliest written use of ekklesia in the New Testament comes from the letters of Paul. When Paul wrote his first letter to the Christians in Thessalonica (in Macedonia, an area of northern Greece), he began in this way:

Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, To the ekklesia of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Thes 1:1)

Presumably, of course, he had taught the Thessalonian Christians to think of themselves as an ekklesia, so they would know what he was referring to when he used this word.

The phrase "ekklesia of the Thessalonians" would have had an established, commonly-understood meaning in this city. It denoted the gathering of citizens to govern the city. But Paul qualified his use of this phrase and therefore limited misunderstanding by adding "in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." The Christians gathered in Thessalonica were not equivalent to the civic ekklesia. Rather, they were an alternative assembly, one that met "in God" and "in Christ." "In" means something like "by the work of" or "under the authority of" or "for the sake of."

Paul was addressing a real assembly, an actual gathering of people. These were the ekklesia.

Support for this understanding of church comes also from Paul's letter to Galatians. He addresses this letter to: "The churches [ekklesiais] of Galatia" (1:2). The use of the plural is telling here. When Paul writes a letter to the Christians in the region of Galatia (in the centre of modern Turkey), he does not think of them as some sort of spiritual group that could be called a single ekklesia, even though it never gathered together in the same place. Rather, they were a bunch of ekklesiai, "assemblies" in the plural.

Paul wouldn't know what you meant if you said, "The Thessalonian ekklesia didn't meet today." From his point of view, there would still have been a few dozen Christians in Thessalonica, and they would still have had many ties together in Christ and in the Spirit, but they wouldn't have been an ekklesia if they didn't actually meet.

The assembly is not the assembly when it isn't assembled. Now I certainly believe there's a sense in which we can be the ekklesia when we're scattered in the world. But, it's important to note that there's something extremely important, and, indeed, essential about the actual gathering of Christians.  Jesus even said where two or three gather together there He is in the midst Mt 18:20

So to wrap up this study on ekklesia I believe one thing to do is we need to change our language and interpretation of ‘church’. In fact it may even be good to help correct the error to stop using the word ‘church’ and use the correct term ‘assembly’. An assembly takes the emphasis off the building or organization and onto the actual gathering (wherever that is). The actual building is just that, a building used as a meeting hall –exactly the same as a school hall or a home

Some groups had a revelation of this years ago eg  the Assemblies of God, but they unfortunately now are avid promoters in many quarters of the Idol called the church. The brethren, I believe, don’t call their buildings ‘churches’ but Assembly halls.

Some call themselves a ‘Christian Centre’ or fellowship which would probably be more scriptural than “such & such church”

I am not playing on words but rather believe that the way to de-throne the idol is to break the stronghold (the mindsets of people) by actively preaching correct doctrine.

In the next part I will start sharing what the ‘church is not’

Remember:-
Churchianty is not Christianity – churchianity is all about the church, Christianity is all about Christ. I can define either by one statement – who gets the glory of what is done – the Church or Christ. Who is promoted the church or Christ.

**Much of the teaching on ekklesia is derived from the writings of Rev. Dr. Mark D. Roberts.