Things You Already Know About The Church… Part 1
I grew up in the small Arkansas town of Russell. In this town we were lucky enough to have a school house. It was bigger than most old red one room school houses that you see portrayed on T.V. it was actually 3 or 4,000 square feet so the only reason I can find to justify calling it a school house is because that is what all the adults who went to the school house called it. This functioned as the school for our community until the early 60’s when it was absorbed into the greater Bald Knob Metropolitan School District. The point I want you to see is that it was called a school house because of what went on inside its walls. Until I started studying to write this article it never occurred as strange that my grand mother would say when we were going to church lets go to the church house. She said this because that is what she thought went on inside the building was church. There may be some that still refer to their church building as the Church house, and I know the church I attend started literally in a house.
I want to focus in this article and a couple of follow-ups not on the church house but on the church. In case you don’t already know the Greek term for church used in the Bible is Ekklesia. It means literally “called out ones” In Greece these were the people called out to an assembly. For us as Christians we are called out of the world by Christ, into Christ. It does not have anything to do with a building.
In his book “Pagan Christianity” Frank Viola puts it this way, ”If your were to ask a first century Christian where they went to church they would have no idea what you were talking about.” They would probably look at you like you had 3 eyes. They were the church they did not have to go to where they were. They knew what their identity was in Christ. They understood what it meant to be called out of the world they were living in. This meaning is lost today by a lot of attenders. They believe that once a week they go to church and the other six and a half days the church sits empty. They have no idea what the church really is.
Today there are generally two ways of looking at who the Ekklesia are. First each local assembly is an ekklesia unto itself. Your home church is an ekklesia. That congregation whether a house church or a mega church is a local part of the body of Christ. Second the whole body of believers around the world is the ekklesia making up the body of Christ. This is also known as the “holy catholic church” with a small “c” meaning universal church. This is the belief of my denomination the Church of God (Anderson, IN).
Quoting Form the Church of God Beliefs on the website:
“The message of unity is that all God’s people are one (John 17) and are called to recognize that unity, to relate to each other as brothers and sisters in Christ, and to coordinate their efforts in mission to the world.”
Frank viola says later in his book that The first use of the phrase “go to church” that we are aware of came in a letter written around the year 190 from Clement of Alexandria and other than converted houses and catacombs there were no actual church buildings until Constantine began to build them over cemeteries where the bodies of their martyrs were buried. I know that the popular author Rick Warren says they did not have a building for the first 15 years of their church.
So my first post will end with this: having a building does not make a church.
