The Road to Redemption – The Church as the Called Out People of God

    Several weeks ago someone asked me where the word "church" came from. My first response was to talk about the Greek word ekklesia, which we translate as church. On further reflection it occurred to me that ekklesia doesn't seem to have any connection to our English word, church. With a bit of research I discovered the answer; however you will have to wait for the end of this article to find out how they are related. Where I want to begin is with a discussion of the concept of the ekkelsia and how we got from there to here.

    The word ekklesia was not originally a religious word. It had two secular meanings. The first meaning is that of people who are called out. In Greece when a city needed to gather its citizens for a discussion about a particular matter or to deal with issues of security a herald would move through the city "calling people out." The people would then gather for the meeting. The second meaning of ekklesia carries with it the image of those who had gathered. So the complete meaning in secular Greek was that the ekklesia was the called out and gathered together people…again without any religious connotation.

    At first glance then it might appear that the early Christians simply borrowed that word from secular Greek and put it to work to describe this new people of God. However there is more to it than that. The word ekklesia had also been in use by the Jewish community for some time. In the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) the word ekklesia is used almost a hundred times in order to describe God's people. What sets the Biblical usage apart from its secular use is that in scripture ekklesia is always modified by "of the Lord." In other words the Hebrew people are the called out and gathered people of the Lord. This use of ekklesia makes sense in terms of the overarching story of God's people. The people of God were not those who happened to discover YHWH one day and decide to worship. It was always God (as we noted last week) who called people together for the purpose of being a blessing to the world.

    When the early Christ followers used the term ekklesia then (Paul uses it extensively in this writings to refer to the Christ following community) they were not merely borrowing a secular term but were claiming the title of called out and gathered people of God for themselves. This makes sense when we understand their concept of who they were. Early Christians believed that in Jesus of Nazareth God had acted decisively to redeem the world. Through Jesus' death, resurrection and appearances to the disciples and others Jesus had initiated a new moment in history and called forth from the old ekklesia of God (traditional Judaism) a new ekklesia which was to proclaim Jesus as Lord and live in the Jesus' way (which is a reminder to us that the earliest followers of Jesus were called "The Way."). We need to be careful to note here that the Apostle Paul is clear that this new ekklesia is an extension of and not a replacement of the old ekkelsia. According to Paul the Jews are still God's people and the followers of Christ as merely a branch grafted into God's Old Testament ekkelsia.

    The church then began to adopt other words which Judaism had used to describe their ekklesia of God. The church began to speak of themselves as the elect (God had chosen them) and saints (they were to lead God centered lives).

    We are now led back to our original question of the origins of the word "church." The answer is that it is derived from the work of Theodoric the Great (454-526 CE). Theodoric was as an Ostrogothic King who ruled Italy after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. He was an Arian Christian who spread the faith into Germany. Along the way he spoke of believers as kuriche, meaning those who belong to the Lord. From this we get such words as Kirche (German), Kirk (Scottish) and Kyrke (Swedish) and Church (English). Of interest is that Spanish (Ilgesia), French (eglise) and Italian (chiesa) maintain a clear sense of ekklesia. Regardless of the name, we are still the called out and gathered people of God.

    

The Road to Redemption – The Church as Community

    

God always calls communities and never individuals. This was a rather remarkable statement. I am not sure when I heard it for the first time it but it didn't quite seem to jive with my church upbringing. The image with which I had been raised was that Jesus was all about the individual. What each of us was striving for was a personal relationship with Jesus. After all salvation was not a collective endeavor and spirituality was individual experience. Therefore I had always assumed that God called individuals and that the church was an add-on which existed solely for the purpose of occasionally pumping people up and aiding believers in doing together what they could not do individually. The idea that God calls communities and not individuals seemed a real stretch.

The more I have studied scripture, the more I have come to appreciate the observation that God does indeed call communities. As a prelude to our discussing the church I want to spend a few lines considering the concept of community in the scriptures. We can begin with the two opening stories in Genesis. In the first creation story (Genesis 1) the crown of God's creative efforts is humanity. As God creates human beings God does not make one individual and then wait to see what happens. God creates them male and female. God, if not creating a community, at least creates a team. In the second creation story (Chapter 2) God creates the man first. God quickly realizes however that the man is not adequate in and of himself (someone once commented that this meant Adam had no idea how pick up in the Garden of Eden) and so Adam was in need of another human who would undergird and complete him. Both stories then tell us that as individuals we are incomplete in and of ourselves.

The second major story in the book of Genesis which points us in the direction of community is that of the call of Abram. At first glance this story would appear to work against the idea that God calls communities; why else would we call it the call of Abram? However if we look beyond its title what we see is that God did not just call Abram. God told Abram to take his family (Sarah, his nephew and his slaves…as well as all of their goods) and go to the land which God would show him. What Abram is also told is that God will give him many descendants and that through those descendants God will save the world. Even though salvation ultimately comes through Jesus of Nazareth, it is the collective community of Abram that is the incubator into which the messiah is born, which teaches the messiah the message of salvation, and which orients the messiah's view of the world.

The Old Testament continues with the idea of community by using the image of "the people of Israel." It is the people of Israel that God frees from Egypt. It is the people that God leads through the wilderness. It is to the people to which God gives the land of Promise. It is to the people of Israel that God gives judges, prophets, priest and kings. It is the people of God that God chastises and that God saves. While there may be charismatic individuals whose stories we read (such as Samson, David, or Elisha) ultimately their stories were always sub-plots in the larger story of God's people. Their work and witness was never about individual spirituality but was always intended to impact the community.

We continue with this image of community as we enter the New Testament. Unlike many of the prophets who had come before them, who acted as lone spokespersons for God (even as they were speaking to the entire people of God), both John and Jesus called men and women to follow them (you can find the names of some of the women in Luke 8). John and Jesus understood that what they were called to create was a kingdom of persons whose lives were linked together as they served the one, true living God. At Pentecost the Spirit is given to the disciples and on that day a community of 3,000 is created. Finally wherever the Apostle Paul traveled he did not simply make individual converts but created communities. Over the next several weeks we will spend some time with the community we call the church and see what meaning it has for us.