Chapter Twenty-Two: The Assembly That Was Not a Building

Ekklesia — What the Church Was Before It Had a Building

"And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it." — Matthew 16:18 (NET)

The Greek word ekklesia is translated church throughout the New Testament. In contemporary English, the word church carries primarily institutional connotations: a building, a denomination, an organization with a governance structure and a budget and a membership roll. When people say they are going to church or leaving the church or looking for a church, they are describing their relationship to an institution. The ekklesia of the New Testament is something different and something older.

Ekklesia in the Greek-speaking world of the first century was the assembly of citizens called out from their homes to conduct the public business of the city. It was a civic and political term before it was a religious one. The called-out ones were not defined by a building or an organization. They were defined by the fact of being called, by the one who called them, and by the business they gathered to transact.

When Paul addresses his letters to the ekklesia in Corinth or Rome or Philippi, he is addressing the people who have been called out by Christ in that city. Not the building. Not the institution. The people. The calling defines them, not their location or their organizational affiliation. They are the ekklesia because they have been called, and because they gather as the called-out ones to do the business of the kingdom in that place.

The early communities addressed in the New Testament letters had no canon of Scripture in the sense we mean today. They had the Old Testament, read in the Septuagint form most of them knew. They had the letters circulating among the churches — but slowly, by hand, one copy at a time. They had the oral traditions about Jesus — what He said and did, preserved and transmitted from eyewitness to eyewitness and then to the communities they founded. There was no printing press. There was no Bible on every pew. The Apostles' Creed was taking shape as a summary of the faith before most of the New Testament was widely available in written form, and even then the distribution of manuscripts across the empire was uneven, slow, and dependent on the networks of travel and commerce that connected the churches to each other.

In that world, the ekklesia was the walking, breathing, working embodiment of the gospel before anyone in most cities could acquire a copy of the Scriptures. The community was the primary vehicle of transmission. Their shared life was the text most people could read. When Paul writes to the Corinthians that they are a letter from Christ, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts (2 Corinthians 3:3), he is not speaking metaphorically about spiritual formation alone. He is describing the actual mechanism of gospel transmission in a world where written copies were rare and the community's visible life was what the watching city encountered first.

The institutional connotations of the English word church have produced a significant distortion in how the New Testament's teaching is received. The most significant is the privatization of Christian identity: you belong to a church rather than being the church. The church is the institution you attend and support. It is not something you are. This produces the consumer orientation toward Christian community that is endemic in contemporary Western Christianity — the church exists to serve my needs, and when it no longer does, I find a different one.

The ekklesia of Acts 2 owned nothing. It met in homes. It had no buildings, no denomination, no institutional structure of any kind. It was the people who had been called by Christ, gathered in His name, doing the business of the kingdom in Jerusalem. The institutional structures that developed over time served the community. They did not define it. The community preceded and superseded the structures.

The Recovery

Read Acts 2:42–47 as a description of the ekklesia before institutional structure existed. Notice what defined it: the apostles' teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, prayer, shared life, generosity, common worship. Not a building. Not a governance structure. Not a membership requirement. The people who had been called, gathered, doing the business of the kingdom. Ask what it would mean to be the ekklesia in your neighborhood rather than to attend one. The question is not rhetorical. It is the recovery of the word's actual meaning and the commission that comes with it.