Our Name
…and on this rock I will build my church (ecclesia), and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. (Matthew 16:18)
ecclesia (“ekk-la-SEE-uh”) is built around the idea that church is more than a place Christians go, more than a 1 ½ to 2-hour event on the weekend and possibly midweek. The church is a dynamic community of believers who participate in the way of Jesus and the work of
Jesus in the world. What would it look like if a group of people under the leadership and guidance of the Holy Spirit, reoriented their entire lives around the way and work of Jesus? We suggest it would look similar (not exactly) to what we find in Acts 2, 4, 5, 16 and 1 Corinthians 11. The term Jesus, and more often Paul, employed to describe a gathering of Christians (since there was literally no such collective noun at the time) was the Greek term “ecclesia”. Ecclesia literally means “the gathering of the called-out ones.” It comes from two Greek words, ek, meaning “out,” and kaleo, meaning, “to call.” In its original usage an ecclesia was not just an assembly or a gathering. The word ecclesia had a political aspect to it. In fact, it wasn’t a religious term, and neither was its use limited to a religious gathering. In Paul’s time, an ecclesia was a gathering of elders of a community. In smaller villages and towns across Judea, local elders (older men) would gather regularly to discuss and deliberate over a variety of social and political dilemmas facing the community. It was a community within a community whose function was to add value to that community. Isn’t it interesting that the base, raw material that he uses to develop this vision for us is that of a group of elders adding value to the village, bringing wisdom and connecting our destiny with that of the community? We think Christians should see themselves as sent by Jesus into the villages of which they are a part, to add value, to bring wisdom, to foster a better village.
