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Church (Ekklesia) - Wordsmatter Series
119 Plays1 year ago
The Bible has some extraordinary things to say about Christian community and the body of Christ. What we think about church should have a major impact on the way we think and live. We take a look at the language behind English translations of church, connections to the Old Testament that get lost in translation, and the politically loaded history of its translation. Lastly, we consider the question, “Is church a good translation?”
Resources Referenced: Septuagint Word Search by Reparadigmed Podcast, The Myth of a Christian Nation & The Myth of a Christian Religion by Greg Boyd
Interlude Music: The Light From Within by Howard Harper-Barnes
Theme Song: Believe by Posthumorous
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Transcript
Introduction to Ekklesia
00:00:00
Speaker
It's the Re-Paradigm'd podcast, and today is another Words Matter episode on the Greek word ekklesia. This is usually translated as church, and we wonder if there's possibly a better way to understand this word. Enjoy the conversation.
00:00:27
Speaker
Let's chat about Ecclesia. Ecclesia. This is a topic that's probably had more direct practical impact on the way I try to live out Christianity than any other. My family's weekly schedule actually looks different now because of how we think about the importance of Ecclesia in our lives and in God's plans. So we're going to take a look at what Ecclesia means. We're going to look at why it matters and whether the typical translation church is actually a good choice. So hopefully someone listening to this will come away with a better appreciation of why Ecclesia matters. So let's get into
Ekklesia: Definition and Context
00:00:57
Speaker
it. Yeah, so I closely see is basically it's an assembly or a gathering anywhere that a group of people have been called together for a purpose. So if I'm at work, and I walk into the office, and I need to have a discussion with some co workers, I go grab Lucas, I grab Jonathan and Marcus, I go teach at their offices and say, Hey, do you have a couple minutes come meet with me in one of our conference rooms, all the conference rooms at our office have these like cheesy business names. They're like optimization or efficiency or momentum. So maybe i say, hey guys, come meet with me in efficiency for a few minutes. We got something we need to work out. So that group of people who've been called together to work on something is an ecclesia, right? It's a meeting. And the word ecclesia gets used for all sorts of gatherings, all sorts of meetings. Yeah, this is Greek too, we should say. This is a Greek word. So the word that we'd see in the New Testament and the Septuagint.
00:01:42
Speaker
It gets used for military and for court assemblies, for political and business gatherings. Like I said, basically anywhere that people are gathered together for some sort of purpose. So religious gatherings can be ecclesias too, but there's nothing specifically religious about the word. got you So it's a broader word that the church then started to use for their gatherings. Exactly. In fact, in Acts 19, there's these craftsmen who make idols for Artemis in the city of Ephesus.
Historical Examples of Ekklesia
00:02:07
Speaker
yeah And they're pretty upset about the spread of Christianity because it's bad for their business. So the craftsmen start a chanting crowd who are all shouting, great is Artemis of the Ephesians. And this crowd that's gathered in support of Artemis is called an ecclesia. It's a church gathered. Yeah, it's like a mob of people worshipping Artemis, but it's just, yeah, that's what you call an ecclesia, I guess. Exactly. but There's even this figure, Orpheus in Greek mythology, who can call wildlife to gather together when he plays music, and this assembly of wild animals that he calls is an ecclesia.
00:02:39
Speaker
Oh, wow. Yeah. So this is a really broad, just basic word in the Koine Greek vocabulary. Exactly. It's a word that you would expect to see used in lots of contexts. So if we look in the Old Testament, right? If we're looking at the the Septuagint, the Greek translation here, when the people of Israel are assembled for worship or for an announcement, that assembly is called an ecclesia. So in Deuteronomy 4, Moses, speaking to Israel, tells them to remember the day you stood as an ecclesia before God, the day God commanded, assemble the people to me, literally, ecclesia them to me, and let them hear my words, so that they may learn to fear me all the days, as long as they live on the earth and may teach their sons.
00:03:15
Speaker
In 1 Chronicles 13, when David addresses an assembly of the people to tell them his plan to bring the ark back to Jerusalem and to assemble the people from throughout the land, says, He then said to the whole Ecclesia of Israel, If it seems good to you, and if it is the will of the Lord our God, let us send word far and wide to the rest of our people throughout the territories of Israel, and also to the priests and Levites who are with them in their towns and pasture lands to come and join us. Let us bring the ark of our God back to us, for we did not inquire of it during the reign of Saul, The whole ecclesia assembled agreed to do this because it seemed right to all the people. In the Psalms, we see the ecclesia, this gathering of people worshipping together. So Psalm 107.32 says, "...let them exalt him in the ecclesia of the people, and praise him in the counsel of the elders." OK, so this is used a bunch in the Septuagint. Yeah, actually shows up almost a hundred times. And if you're interested in being able to search these yourself, we have a Septuagint word search video on our YouTube channel. We sure do. We'll link it in the show notes. here's our Here's our plug for that. Yeah. When you move into the New Testament, these connections back to the Old Testament are one of the places that New Testament authors use the word ecclesia.
00:04:22
Speaker
This is one of these sort of strange things that happens with English translations, where we don't use the word church for any other context except in the New Testament. When we read through our Bible in English, we see the word church suddenly start showing up only in the New Testament. Right, yeah. Whereas for the New Testament authors, they're using language intentionally to connect back to the Old Testament, but we miss that. particularly like the apostles, or let's just say Paul, when he is reading his Old Testament in Greek, I mean, he's seeing church all over, or the equivalent of church all over. He's seeing ecclesia, ecclesia, ecclesia, and then he continues to use that word in the documents that now have become the New Testament.
00:04:58
Speaker
Exactly.
Ekklesia in Early Christian Communities
00:04:59
Speaker
So in Acts 7, in Stephen's defense against the Sanhedrin, he recalls the events of Moses at Sinai, and he says, He was in the Ecclesia in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him on Mount Sinai and with our ancestors, and he received living words to pass on to us. So Stephen is recalling the Ecclesia of the ancient Israelites at Sinai. Yeah. In Hebrews 2.12, the author quotes Psalm 22.22 and he says, I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters. In the ecclesia, I will sing your praises. So the New Testament authors are making this connection back to the ecclesia of the Old Testament as well, although as English readers, it's very easy to lose that. We take church specifically to mean a gathering in a Christian context. okay So like a post Jesus context.
00:05:42
Speaker
This happens with language all the time, right? We've got a word specifically that means, oh, ekklesia in a Christian context. So when we see ekklesia in the Bible, if it's not in a Christian context, we'll use other language. If it isn't a Christian context, we'll use church. even though in Greek it's the same word being used. Yeah, and that sort of thing happens all the time. Sure. You can't just go one for one translation. It's just not how translation works. But it is unfortunate. It's one of those things that just gets lost for English readers. Yeah, sure does. So this connection that the New Testament authors are making back to the Old Testament is kind of interesting. There is a theological position, some hold, that the New Testament church is a mystery in the Old Testament, that it is unknown to the prophets.
00:06:20
Speaker
I don't want to get into the details of this discussion, I just want to note that while English translations distinguish between these two, the New Testament translators are actually reflecting the language used of Israel in the Old Testament by selecting ecclesial language. Right, yep, yep, as you've demonstrated with all these readings. Exactly. So obviously, the New Testament writers use ecclesia for more than just referencing the Old Testament. Most commonly, they use ecclesia to refer to these small gatherings of Jesus followers, where Christians come together for prayer, to sing worship together, to discuss needs, confess sins, share letters, to teach and to take the Lord's Supper together, proclaiming his death until he returns. These are basically what we would call local or house churches. Paul in 1 Corinthians refers to these gatherings and he says, when you all come together in ecclesia,
00:07:04
Speaker
And this is in a letter to the Corinthians, so he's got some problems to address regarding what's been going on at these ecclesia gatherings. And these New Testament ecclesia assemblies were probably pretty small gatherings. So if you've ever been reading through a New Testament letter and thought, wow, that seems like a weirdly specific thing for the author to address, you're right. It's probably because the letter was written for a very specific purpose to a pretty small group of Christians. So most early ecclesia gatherings were probably 10 to 20 people. Yeah, that's why you have like greetings by name to particular people and then like very specific problems that are going on. Like this guy slept with his mother-in-law. It is almost feels like gossipy a little bit because it's not addressed to us. As some theologians have said, we're reading other people's mail when we read the letters in particular.
00:07:52
Speaker
The letters, especially in the New Testament, seem so contextually specified to like the particular people that are being written to you. It's a little different maybe for like wisdom literature or even the gospels where it seems like, well, this is a communication about the story of Jesus for all the people that it's written to, which maybe is a little bit of a broader context. But the letters, yeah, it's a great point. They're so specific to like particular people he's addressing in these house churches that are very small and probably just several people in there, are several families involved. And these gatherings had to be pretty small. It wasn't actually until the third century that we have any evidence of any sort of buildings or structures dedicated to Christian worship. Right. and And I'm sure they did meet in the wealthier people's homes who had the ability to host. But I think like modern houses, at least in the United States, are probably quite a bit bigger than your average, even wealthier family's home back in first century Rome.
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah, early gatherings were limited very practically by these home sizes. If you've ever been in a house with multiple families, they can make a home feel full very fast, especially if you've got kids running around. I speak from experience here. So while it's possible that a wealthy homeowner might have been able to host up to like 100 people in a home courtyard, most of these early church ecclesias were probably quite small, like this 10 to 20 size. yep And they're small enough that these assemblies will get referred to by the name of the place they met or by whoever's home they're meeting in. So for example, Colossians 4, 15 to 16, Paul says, give my greetings to the brothers and sisters at Laodicea and to Nympha and the church at the Ekklesia in her house. After this letter has been read to you, see that it is also read to the Ekklesia of the Laodiceans and that you in turn read the letter from Laodicea. So yes, this mail is to you, but make sure that you are sharing your mail and reading other people's mail too. It's all beneficial.
Community and the Kingdom of God
00:09:35
Speaker
So a lot of these New Testament epistles, they open with an address. So it's to the ecclesia in Corinth or in Ephesus or wherever. And these letters would be delivered by a messenger who would then read the letter out loud to the believers assembled there. Now, it seems like the definition here of ecclesia is broadening a little bit here. Even one of the letters written to the ecclesia of a city. Well, you would actually assume that if Christianity has been there for a little while, then there would be definitely multiple ecclesias meeting at different people's homes in that city. Am I right in thinking that you can also broaden it to just mean like, well, all the Jesus community in this city, though they also have their sub ecclesias where they meet regularly for worship and for the Eucharist.
00:10:17
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. That is an interesting thing. We start to see within this Christian context that the definition of ecclesia does get broadened out beyond simply a group of people who are physically gathered for a specific purpose. They use ecclesia to refer to these Jesus communities, like you said, within a city or even within a geographical region, or sometimes even the global church. Right, and that's what theologians will call, like, the holy Catholic Church in the old creeds or the the universal church. I love that the Apostles' Creed has that the belief in the holy Catholic Church. If you're in a Protestant church, when you say that, the pastor's usually quick to note that Catholic there means universal, not capital C, Roman Catholic. Which is true, but yes, it is funny. Lest we give any nod to those papists. Accidentally start worshipping Mary if we're not careful here.
00:11:09
Speaker
All of this is interesting, but it begs the question, why does it matter? One of the questions that I always get from people when they hear about the sort of podcast we do, or maybe they've listened to a couple episodes and they're curious is, you know, what practical purpose does all of this have? And I mentioned at the beginning of this, that this had a huge practical impact on me, the way I think about Christianity and the way I live it out on a day to day, week to week basis. You weren't exaggerating when you said thinking about equaecia has been foundational to your spiritual formation, if you feel like. Oh, it's had a huge impact really on the way that I imagine Christianity is to be lived out day and day. The places that I choose to invest my time and energy have changed significantly as a result of the way that I think about Ecclesia and the importance that it plays in God's plan for redemption of the world.
00:11:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's cool. Theology matters. It really does. I'm blown away by how central the idea of a community of people gathered together is for God's work in humanity, right both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. From the very beginning of the Bible, it's clear that mankind was created to exist in community. God's design for humanity is a corporate design because his design for humanity has a corporate purpose. Image-bearing is a corporate identity. It's a team task. But since community is so critical to God's design for people, we shouldn't be surprised that community plays an important role in his plan for redemption. too Yeah, the restoration of the earth and the restoration and of the community, it's not going to be only about individuals. Individuals take part, of course, but it's about the restoration of the whole thing, of all the humans and then of all creation.
00:12:41
Speaker
Exactly. God isn't just giving up on that corporate plan for humanity and saying, oh, well I'll just save all the individuals. No, he's going to restore that corporate plan he has. That's interesting. Yeah. So you wouldn't actually expect really that God would give us all a secret form of knowledge for ourselves personally. And then we would all in our rooms for four hours a day meditate on these, these words, these phrases, these mantras, and then walk out of our homes and then be like the restored community. That's not the way it was supposed to be. personal piety and prayer, I'm sure all that's part of it. This restored community was supposed to be gathering together and very much doing life together, figuring out what God is saying, how to apply the wisdom of the spirit in their world, in their context, together. It's not like individuals are just making this up as they go and then, oh, I hope I get along with all the other people that are hopefully doing the same. Yeah.
00:13:35
Speaker
This idea of a corporate group of Christians plays a huge role within all of the theology of the New Testament. right In fact, this bizarre claim is made. They're called Jesus' body. They're the means by which Jesus' body is made visible to the world. When we think about what it means to act as Jesus' witnesses to the world, I think we often think in terms of what I do or what I say in my conversations with people. I'm struck by how much the New Testament writers speak of the witness of the assembly of believers, these radical communities that stick out in the world. Ephesians 3, 10-11 says,
00:14:08
Speaker
his intent was that now through the church the manifold wisdom of god should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in jesus christ our lord The manifold wisdom of God should be made known through the church. like That's a powerful idea. We've talked about this before too, but when Jesus says like greater things
Ekklesia's Role in God's Plan
00:14:31
Speaker
than I am doing, will my community do after I depart by the power of the Holy Spirit? What a shocking statement that our Lord, our King, said, yeah, you guys are going to be up to some greater things than I was even able to do in my limited time and space here.
00:14:46
Speaker
Why? Well, because you are all going to be functioning in these communities that will bring forth restoration in your little pockets of society, which is just more than one man can do in the Galilee in the first century. I think it's powerful to think about just what it would have actually looked like for one of these early church communities to form. So these communities of believers, who they broke so many of the cultural rules of both the Jewish world and the Roman world around them, So to become Christian was to declare that Jesus was Lord and King. This is blasphemous to a Jew and it's treasonous to a Roman. The call of Jesus was to live in response to a radical change within the world, this change that Jesus had brought about. He was king and death was defeated. So this reality was a call to be a new creation, as a corporate community to live out this new creation life together.
00:15:36
Speaker
apart from the body metaphor, there are other metaphors for the church community. One of them is temple, that this community of people together is functioning as the dwelling place for God by his spirit, that it's in the gathering together in his name, partaking of the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist, that God's presence is there, and that is called a holy people, a temple for the Lord, according to 1 Peter. which is pretty wild coming out of the Old Covenant with the very physical temple and the rituals of the temple complex. It's pretty wild to then apply that theology and being like, well, the more real reality toward which this was pointing is being fulfilled in the community of Jesus as they're gathering together. They are becoming the dwelling place for God, which is what is supposed to happen in new creation in the future when all creation is again the dwelling place for God. Yeah, if you understand that within that Jewish context, all of that language just becomes almost unfathomable. And you realize that the church, this community of believers, plays a huge and very important role. It gets elevated very, very high by both Jesus and the authors of the New Testament.
00:16:50
Speaker
Right, and you can also see why this was scandalous to the Pharisees, to the scribes, and to all those who were practicing Judaism at the time.
Communal Living vs. Individualism
00:16:58
Speaker
So we see this in Paul's ministry. He focuses heavily on the formation, the preservation, and the growth of these new communities, right? These Jesus-centered ecclesias. He wasn't simply converting individuals as he traveled about. He was focused on establishing these firm communities that were committed to declaring the good news of Jesus by living out this new creation community. Colossians 1.24 says, Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, which is the ecclesia. This focus in the Bible on the purpose of ecclesia community has changed dramatically how I think about Christianity and how I try to live it out. Here's, I think, the big shift for me.
00:17:41
Speaker
For a long time, I saw Christianity as really being all about individual transformation, salvation, and sanctification. So it was about individuals getting saved and growing so that those individuals could go evangelize witness to other individuals. The focus of my Christianity was my salvation, my sanctification, and my declaring the gospel to other individuals. Everything you said just now, I mean, that's kind of par for the course, I think, in kind of standard evangelical theology. I think so. and You're saying it's not it's not a right focus. Well, yeah, let's pull on this thread a little bit. So from this perspective, the purpose of a Christian community was entirely in its ability to encourage and equip me to grow. To recharge you. Exactly. Funny story on that. I remember a conversation I had with my brother-in-law. Shout out Josh. I was in high school probably at the time and he was at a Christian college. He might have been graduated by that time. But we were talking about like the role of the local church in particular.
00:18:40
Speaker
And I was basically expressing a little bit of like flippancy. I was like, yeah, I mean, local gatherings are just to recharge you. And if you can get recharged by reading theologians' books or listening to good preaching on the internet and your Bible reading habit and prayer life is rock solid, then yeah, I mean, you can miss services. It's not that big of a deal. And he was like, ah, I totally disagree with you. It was kind of interesting. Good for him. Sounds like you kind of saw a church as almost like a gym membership for faith. Oh, exactly. Yeah, it was like to build you up. But but again, my point was like, that's great if you need it. But you definitely don't necessarily need it. Because if you're disciplined, you can you can eat right. You can do calisthenics on your own. You don't even need a gym membership if you do your push ups and sit ups, right? Yeah, just get yourself a home gym. Well, exactly. If you could accomplish for yourself everything that church would do for you there, like why would you leave your home, right? It's just a waste of gas at that point. Yeah, it's like the more disciplined you become in the spiritual practices, then the less you need church. Yeah. I thought view is correct that church that the assembly is about building you up individually. Exactly. And so here's what I had missed with this kind of church as a gym membership attitude.
00:19:53
Speaker
The community itself, the way it functions, the way its members love and care for people, is a key way that Christians are supposed to witness to the world. So when Christians live in an ecclesia that is shaped by the work of Jesus, it's going to look weird to the world, right? They're going to see something strange going on and have to come up with some sort of an explanation for why the church community looks the way it does. This transformed community is a powerful witness. The church is not just this gym that Christians are supposed to go to to get better at witnessing to the world, but it is actually in that practice of the church itself, the way it lives that Christ is witnessed to. The community itself acts as a signpost for greater reality. It's a signpost for the kingdom that is to come, for the new creation, the restored creation, the return to Eden that is to come, your little pocket of that.
00:20:42
Speaker
You know, your little assembly of Jesus people, even while you preach that reality to the society that doesn't necessarily follow Jesus or anything. We're also demonstrating to the society like, hey, if you want to take part and if you want to feel what it's like, hey, come check it out. Hang out with us. Yeah. You will know us by our love.
00:21:10
Speaker
Once you've made that shift from thinking the church is something that serves me to now actually the way I serve the church functions as part of this expression of Jesus in the world, that can really change the way that you seek to live out Christianity. Because if the ecclesia community is so important to Jesus' mission, then I should be looking for ways to invest and participate consistently within an ecclesia community. That now becomes a key part of living out my Christian faith. I think it's interesting, when you read through these New Testament letters that are written to ecclesias, the authors will urge the people in these churches to live and to love in accordance with the revelation of Jesus.
Spiritual Gifts and Community Purpose
00:21:45
Speaker
There's a lot of exhortations and encouragements aimed at individual behaviors in these letters. What I think is interesting is that, if you look carefully, these commands to individuals are almost always for the purpose of building up the ecclesia itself.
00:21:59
Speaker
By far, I think the majority of the commands are plural too, and are like, do this for one another, one another, one another, one another. Yeah. One of the topics that I think is super easy to individualize is spiritual gifts. What is your spiritual gift? What is my spiritual gift? I think it's interesting that in 1 Corinthians, Paul's talking about these gifts, and he talks about them in the context of building up the church. 1 Corinthians 14, 12, he says, so it is with you. Since you are eager for gifts of the Spirit, try to excel in those that build up the church. That's a key purpose of all these spiritual gifts. It's in the building up of this ecclesia. The ecclesia is so important, and the way we participate in this matter so much. When we talk about the daily habits that are important for Christians, the ways that we should seek to live out our faith, we often focus on, oh, my individual daily prayer or my daily Bible reading. What if we put the time that we spend investing in our community as one of those very important daily practices for Christianity?
00:22:56
Speaker
an essential spiritual discipline. Yeah, if you don't see the purpose of ekklesia in corporate witness, so and you do just view the church as sort of a Christian gym, the participation in ekklesia or in any kind of community only really makes sense when you benefit personally from it, right? When those benefits outweigh whatever costs it requires of you to go spend time in that community. I certainly wouldn't keep going to a gym if I wasn't getting the sort of result that I was hoping for. I wouldn't keep going if it became too much of a hassle. If I could find another gym and I thought I'd get better results at that other gym, then of course I would leave my current gym and go start working out at this new gym.
00:23:31
Speaker
this kind of consumeristic mentality, individualistic mentality toward ecclesia. And doesn't this just lend itself to church shopping? Honestly, the way that organizations do church services. I mean, in the evangelical world, I think basically we are captured by this idea of entertaining people. There's no way out of it. It's like the model. It's just what we do. And we have to have the best singing and dancing and coolest preaching and nice effects and all that. Otherwise we lose membership. We lose visitors. We lose YouTube views. It's like the game that basically we're all playing. Certainly all the mega churches are playing.
00:24:12
Speaker
It makes me question a little bit what we're doing if we're falling into the trap of just like trying to entertain people or get them to come into the door by the spectacle of the thing. Yeah. And it maybe it betrays that while we've thought about this whole thing incorrectly and we've been thinking about it as a as a gym so that each individual that walks into the door can get the thing that they need. Well, maybe that whole question's wrong-headed. It's not about people coming to this event to get something that they want or they need, much like you'd go to a Coldplay concert to feel something.
00:24:45
Speaker
Maybe we got it all turned upside down. A reason for gathering. Yeah, it absolutely leads to, like you said, that church shopping mentality, or perhaps a, you know, a church splitting mentality. Oh, if I can't find the church that's going to best suit my needs, then I'll go create it. Maybe for some people, it just leads to an indifference about church or community in general. You're a Christian saying, Oh, I'm a Christian. I'm all about Jesus, but I'm not really
Challenges of Modern Church Practices
00:25:08
Speaker
about the church. You know, I just kind of do my own thing. That sort of mentality is very prevalent, and it makes perfect sense. We're an extremely individualistic, consumeristic culture, so it's very easy and tempting for us to approach church that same way. However, for a New Testament church planter like Paul, the unity of the church is a huge deal.
00:25:26
Speaker
If the radical love that's enabled by resurrection hope doesn't shape these communities, then they're not being effective, right? They're like a neon window sign that isn't plugged in. They can't do what they're supposed to do. Now this sort of investment in a community, a community that's going to actively live out this resurrection hope, this new creation requires a lot of time, a lot of effort and energy. We see Paul and other early missionaries. They went to extraordinary measures to found and grow Christian ecclesia communities because they saw how important they were. If the purpose of these communities really was just to help individuals grow in faith, I can't fathom why Paul would have worked so hard to keep these communities together. It seems like he could have just said to the Romans, hey, you guys have this big split between the Jewish and the Gentile communities.
00:26:13
Speaker
Well, I'll actually be more effective in building up individuals if you guys just go your own way, you know, split into a couple of different groups, and then you guys will be more effective at growing the individuals within those groups. We won't have to deal with all of this infighting. That's what we would do, actually. Like, that's what modern American evangelicals would do. In fact, like, it is a church planting strategy to target a demographic. and the, like, pour all your resources and programming towards reaching, like, a specific age group or ethnicity. a Language, obviously, language barrier is a real thing. But, like, much beyond the language barrier, books are written about these. I've read some of them. And, yeah, church planting strategy is basically, well, yeah, if you have, like, two very different groups, definitely don't try to, like, get them all together. Just plant a church for this group and then plant a church for that group. The same type of mentality actually goes on denominationally as well.
00:27:04
Speaker
denominations will send out their missionaries to certain parts of the country or certain parts of the world, and they won't even check if there's a Christian community there. They'll just feel like, well, I mean, if I'm a Presbyterian organization sending forth my Presbyterian people to plant Presbyterian churches, I mean, if there is a Baptist church in that neighborhood, I don't know what that is, but I'm just not going to assume that that's like the church. I mean, it's not Presbyterian. This denominational weird kind of tribal mindset also lends itself to thinking about churches in this very hyper individualistic type of way where we are reaching particular people with our particular theology because we think that'll particularly help those individuals and we're not having a view towards the global Jesus community.
00:27:51
Speaker
Yeah, we we kind of have this mindset that Christians shouldn't have to worship together if they're gonna have significant things they disagree about. So rather than deal with those issues and fight through them, it's actually easier if we just keep dividing up and dividing up until you get to be just with a group of people with a pretty narrow set of beliefs that you all agree on. Greg Boyd is so critical of this in his book, Myth of a Christian Nation. And I think he gets into it more in Myth of a Christian Religion as well. How, you know, two of Jesus's disciples were Matthew, the tax collector, the sellout to Rome, and then Judas Zellit, the radical against Rome, the insurrectionist, so to speak. And those are two of the disciples that were expected to follow Jesus and find new life in him.
00:28:36
Speaker
And if those two can somehow figure out how to find new life in Jesus and follow him faithfully, how much more are communities with our petty political differences should we be able to find new life in Jesus and follow him faithfully together in community? And we don't. You look out at evangelicalism in our country and you basically see churches that lean left or churches that lean right. And not a whole lot that are a mixed group because they're bound by a common cause that isn't something petty or smaller, like political identity or national identity or anything like that, which we affirm are just smaller kind of petty identities compared to our identity in Jesus. It's an indictment of our theology. It's an indictment of our lukewarmness.
00:29:20
Speaker
of our lack of following King Jesus that we would continue to separate denominationally or otherwise or just practically based on silly things like small fine print theological points or like I said political identities or certainly ethnicities for God's sake like that still happens practically speaking even though we don't exclude certain groups from our churches it just happens to be the case that we all end up looking the same all the time. It's like, what is going on here? Are we just as, if not more, tribal than the world? Yeah, it's disappointing because when the church is able to work across all of those things that normally divide people, that is one of the ways that the church can witness so powerfully to the work of Jesus in overcoming these normal tribal barriers that
Diverse Communities in Jesus' Mission
00:30:05
Speaker
divide humanity. Yeah, where the ethic of Jesus very much stands out from just the cycle of worldly ethics that produce tribalism and all the violence that ends up resulting from tribalism. ah You stand as something distinct and different and beautiful and good.
00:30:23
Speaker
But it's a lot of work. I think the only way realistically that anybody's going to be willing to invest a lot of time and energy into building communities across all of these barriers that typically divide people is if they really have a vision for the purpose of an ecclesia community within Jesus' restoration of the world. In other words, we need to get our definition of church right, which is why this conversation is probably important. Exactly. It's this shift where I went from seeing ecclesia as simply kind of a supporting role to my Christian faith to suddenly seeing, oh wait, my Christian faith is really about how it's lived out within an ecclesia community. Yeah. That's shifted radically the way that I try to live this out.
00:31:05
Speaker
So let's take a left turn here and ask the seemingly simple question. How should we translate, Ecclesia? We only turn right. We're evangelicals. When we discuss Scripture and seek to live out its wisdom, right, what English word or words best convey what the New Testament authors meant by ecclesia? Yeah. So the vast majority of English translators have used the word church to translate ecclesia. Now, there is actually one very interesting and notable exception here, and it's old Willy T. William Tindale. So at the time of the Reformation, right the word church was closely associated with the formal institution of the Roman Catholic Church. yeah So William Tyndale, the reformer, he was working on an English translation of the Bible. He wanted to make it clear to his readers that ecclesia didn't just mean the Roman Catholic institution. So he translated ecclesia in several places with congregation rather than church. So here's Matthew 1618 out of the new Matthew Bible, so slightly updated English version of his translation.
00:32:04
Speaker
And I say also to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my congregation, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." So this translation implies that the true authority rested in the local congregation, right rather than the larger institution. And it wasn't actually long after this that the Reformers kind of started reclaiming church language, right? So they made it clear like, hey, even though we're not part of the Roman Catholic Church, we're still part of church.
Translation and Misconceptions of 'Church'
00:32:29
Speaker
So it didn't take long before English translations all pretty consistently went back to using church, right? And so ever since then, odds are if you're reading an English translation, the vast majority of the time it shows up in the New Testament, you're going to see church there.
00:32:41
Speaker
So that begs the question, is church in modern English a good translation for ecclesia? We've been talking a lot about what ecclesia means, so let's just ask how does church get used? Yeah, I mean, I can, off the top of my head, think of several ways where church means nothing like what ecclesia would have meant in the New Testament for Jesus communities. I mean, ah buildings are called churches all the time. That's Webster's dictionary first definition. Oh, really? like Theologically, it's obvious that that has little to nothing to do with the community of Jesus followers. It perhaps just facilitates them when they gather inside of it. But yeah, a building is not.
00:33:17
Speaker
is not, by any theological definition, a church. Though that's how it's used colloquially. Usually like one year into seminary, everyone's like, hey, buildings aren't churches. And like, it's kind of an obvious point for anyone who just thinks about it for a little while. I've given it a lot of thought too, though. Like, even our nonprofit organizations that we call churches aren't that. They, like a building, facilitate church gatherings. But they're not a New Testament ecclesia by any stretch. And what I mean by a nonprofit organization is churches, I guess, like the First Baptist Church of Antarctica, that will have a 501c3 nonprofit status. And so the donations given to it don't have to pay taxes on them. So what to do. That's kind of nice. Yeah. wooo That status and then the the constitution that they're required to have to be an organization, along with like a doctrinal statement, who can become members of this organization, those are all in service to a nonprofit organization that may or may not have much to do with a local gathering of Jesus followers. Typically there's like a lot of overlap. And so it's easy to just kind of confuse the two. And it'd be like First Baptist Church of Antarctica is the local church.
00:34:29
Speaker
But I actually think it does tricky things to our brains once we start thinking of local congregations as 501c3 nonprofit organizations. We will start having this strange sense of competition with other nonprofit organizations, or like, membership in one is not membership in the other. I mean, that's actually written into the documents of these organizations. Typically, yeah you can't be members of both, which, again, is to demonstrate that these aren't, strictly speaking, ecclesias. They do a lot of good things in the community. I'm like not knocking our nonprofit organizations. I think it's great that we don't have to pay taxes on donations to these nonprofit organizations and we could do a lot of social good with them. ah Great organizational power to them. Yes. I think it would be better to not call them churches though. Call them like community centers or something like that.
00:35:18
Speaker
Like a building, they facilitate the gathering of Jesus followers at certain times and in a certain place. And that's how we we should view them, I think. But like, it can be damaging to think of the organizations as local churches. And I was alluding to this earlier because we we do kind of find it strange if someone like fellowships in one church and is very invested in another church or goes to the Sunday service at another church. That doesn't happen very often. And I actually think that should be really normal and non-controversial. like someone wants to be involved in your small group or they live in your neighborhood so they're invested in your small group and that's kind of their main source of ecclesia but they also like to you know go to larger gatherings of christians at one of these quote-unquote churches on a sunday morning
00:36:04
Speaker
Great. I don't think we should care where they go. You should be able to drive down the road and experience a different culture's expression of Jesus worship in their gatherings on a Sunday morning. And I don't see any problem in that whatsoever, as long as there's like a consistent life on life community that those people have, which doesn't have to like fall on a Sunday morning by any means. I mean, your contention is that should be almost a daily thing that we have these communities that we're very invested with. Yeah, it is weird when you start calling these not for profit organizations or the building itself, the church, you really kind of drawn a tight line around what is church and what you know kind of happens literally outside the church. People will use that language or anything that doesn't occur inside the building or within the control of the organization.
Cultural Perceptions and True Participation
00:36:48
Speaker
Doesn't that stunt our view of what is meaningful church participation? I think so. And doesn't it elevate certain things? Like if you have more of a gifting towards like publicly facing type of things like singing and worship or organizing or preaching or teaching, like those are the things that get elevated at a higher status of spiritual gifting because those are the things that people see at quote unquote church. Yeah.
00:37:14
Speaker
Well, we'll actually draw the designation between church ministries and then maybe, you know, ministries that happen outside the church or like a para ministry, right? Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't thought of that word for a while, para church organizations. Maybe I'm radical, but I honestly do you think of like nonprofit organizations. Again, First Baptist Church of Antarctica. I think of that as like a para church organization. I don't see a meaningful difference. They're all good, hopefully, nonprofit organizations that facilitate the gatherings of Christians, which is the church. Am I radical? Am I way off here? I mean, it is quite a shift, I suppose, for some, but... Yeah. I mean, I think you're spot on. The other thing that's kind of weird about it is if we're calling the church building,
00:37:54
Speaker
or the organization, the church. That then implies that participation within the organization or within like the facility of the building itself is necessarily some sort of like a church function, right? So if you're doing something to the building or any work that you're doing within the organization, right? If you're helping organize technical aspects of the organization, I don't know what goes on behind that kind of stuff. I've never messed with any of that. But you could do all of that stuff and never have any meaningful connection to an actual community. Yeah, not be fulfilling your one another obligations. Yeah. But we in our culture would still say, oh yeah, that's church work, right? We would still confuse that language. It is kind of odd. And that's not to say that that work is bad. A lot of that's necessary. Yeah. Like this 501c3 organization is probably a good way that Eclicia gets lived out within our community, right? It probably facilitates Eclicia within our cultural context well.
00:38:43
Speaker
Yeah, it sure can. But it's important that we don't confuse the two. I think so. All the Christian traditions that I'm aware of will require a whole lot more of you to become a member than that you're baptized in Jesus' name. Which is, again, telling us that these things aren't technically the ecclesia. and The only requirement for the ecclesia, the New Testament ecclesia, the Jesus community, the only requirement for entrance is baptism in the name of Jesus and then continued participation in the community and primarily through the Eucharist, the breaking of bread. and But like we have sometimes several page long doctrinal statements that you have to sign up to in order to be a member of this nonprofit organization, which actually I think is maybe fine. I just feel some type of indifference towards really viewing that as church membership. No, that's that's that's organizational membership. I don't think anyone should be obliged to be a member of any nonprofit organization if they don't want to be. They can still very much be a healthy member of Jesus's ecclesia in their area. And I bring this up because I've read church membership books and they do tend to operate on this assumption that church membership is being part of some particular nonprofit organization. I think that's really odd.
00:39:57
Speaker
And I don't think that's a healthy way to think about church membership in the least. Though it might be fine and good and great for you to be a part of one or many nonprofit organizations as a member, one shouldn't reduce their ideas about being a part of Jesus's community to their membership in a nonprofit organization. And everything I'm saying here is like more aptly applied to, I guess, like Protestants or evangelicals. like This whole conversation might sound weird if you're Catholic or Orthodox or something like that. but I think maybe kind of in response to this organizational approach to defining church is that sometimes you'll hear people say something like, well, the church is everyone who has a genuine faith in Christ.
Visible vs. Invisible Church
00:40:40
Speaker
ok This was kind of a Reformation-era thing. They would actually talk about the invisible church.
00:40:44
Speaker
Yeah, I mean that does seem to kind of correspond to like the idea of the universal Church. Yeah, I definitely see how people get there. I do think it's a little unfortunate that it totally scrubs ecclesia of having any functional meaning. It's like it just a static designator of all the people who are justified and saved, even if we can't tell who they all are. Yeah, it's kind of ironic to you as the word equasia, as you've noted, is one of the basic Greek words for assembly of a bunch of people to then use that word to describe like individuals who have a certain like faith or something. That's sort of ironic, actually. Yeah, it definitely misses a key part of what ecclesia is meant to carry out within that Christian context. Yeah, ecclesia has purpose and it has corporate purpose, like built in. Exactly. So all of this stuff considered, is church a good translation? I work in structural analysis and we have this saying that all models are wrong, but some models are useful. I kind of feel this way about a lot of translations. OK, yeah. There's no English word that's going to perfectly capture everything meant by ecclesia. But can we find words that are useful?
00:41:51
Speaker
So is church a useful translation? Again, maybe I don't know. I think it's maybe more helpful when reading Ecclesiastes in Scripture to think about an assembly or community, because these words carry the idea of a group of people gathered together for a purpose, maybe better than church does in modern English. They also carry a lot less of this weird extra meaning carried by the word church. yeah right If I say community or assembly, nobody thinks, oh, about a nonprofit organization or about a building. Oh, good point. You don't get all this extra baggage. They maybe think of something approximating more the the real thing.
00:42:24
Speaker
Yeah, here's what I do care about. I hope that in our reading of Scripture, when we come across ecclesia, we think in terms of people assembled with a purpose. I hope we see the ecclesia, the body of Jesus, as a central calling to our faith. Because ecclesia provides an opportunity to declare to the world the transformation that Jesus can bring. I hope that we can work to build the kind of communities that can only exist as a result of Jesus' victory and can only function by the work of the Holy Spirit. Communities that are inspired by resurrection hope to love one another and to love our enemies in a way that makes the world around us take notice. May our ecclesias be a banner to the world, a bold witness declaring Jesus as king. I don't care what you call it, but let's do that.