The Church We Forgot: Pt 1 - Ekklesia vs. "Church"

“I’m going to church.”

You’ve said it. I’ve said it. We all know what it means: we’re getting in the car, driving to a building, walking in the door, sitting in a seat, and participating in a service that will probably last about an hour and fifteen minutes.

“Church starts at 10.” “Our church just hired a new pastor.” “The church needs a new roof.”

In every one of those sentences, “church” means a building, an event, or an institution. A place you go. A thing that happens at a scheduled time. An organization with a staff and a budget and a facilities committee.

But it wasn’t always this way.

A Word Borrowed from the Streets

The word the New Testament writers used for “church” is the Greek word ekklesia. It appears 114 times in the New Testament. And it doesn’t mean a building. It doesn’t mean a service. It doesn’t mean an institution.

Ekklesia is a compound of two Greek words: ek (“out of”) and kaleo (“to call”). It means “a called-out assembly.” A gathering of people summoned together for a purpose.

And here’s what’s important: the word wasn’t religious. Before the Christians ever used it, ekklesia was a civic term. In the Greek world, it referred to the assembly of citizens called out from their homes to a public place to deliberate on matters of the city. It was the key institution of Athenian democracy — the gathering where political and judicial decisions were made. When a Greek-speaking person in the first century heard ekklesia, they didn’t think of a steeple. They thought of people assembling with authority and purpose.

The early Christians chose this word deliberately. They didn’t use religious terms that were available to them — words like synagogue or terms associated with pagan worship gatherings. They chose a civic word. A people-word. A gathering word.

When Jesus said “On this rock I will build my ekklesia” (Matthew 16:18), He wasn’t talking about a building. He was talking about a gathered people.

No Building for Two Hundred Years

For the first two centuries of its existence, the Christian church had no buildings. None. Zero church buildings anywhere in the world for over two hundred years after the resurrection.

The earliest Christians met in homes. The New Testament is explicit about this. Paul sends greetings to “the church that meets in their house” (Romans 16:5). He mentions the church in the home of Aquila and Priscilla (1 Corinthians 16:19). The Colossian church gathered in the home of Nympha (Colossians 4:15). Philemon hosted a church in his home (Philemon 1:2). Acts 2:46 describes the believers “breaking bread in their homes.”

These weren’t small groups that supplemented the “real” church experience. These were the church. The home was the church’s primary infrastructure. It was where teaching happened, where meals were shared, where new believers were welcomed, where the sick were visited, where disputes were settled, where the body of Christ functioned as a body.

The earliest known structure that was definitively used for Christian assembly is the building at Dura-Europos in modern-day Syria, which dates to around 233 AD — two full centuries after the resurrection. And even that wasn’t a purpose-built church. It was an ordinary home that had been converted for worship, with a large room created for communal gathering and a smaller room adapted as a baptistery. From the outside, a passerby would have thought it was a family home. Purpose-built church buildings didn’t appear until after Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 AD.

For 200+ years, the church was exclusively a relational, gathered community. The church didn’t have a building. The church was the people.

And a Church Formed to Attack Paul

Here’s a detail that might make you smile.

The same word — ekklesia — shows up in Acts 19:32, during the riot in Ephesus. A mob of silversmiths is furious at Paul because his preaching is threatening their idol-making business. Luke describes the angry, chaotic assembly using ekklesia — the same word translated “church” everywhere else in your English Bible. But in Acts 19, your translation doesn’t say “church.” It says “assembly.” Because obviously a riotous mob can’t be a church.

Except it’s the same word.

If translators had been consistent, you’d read: “And a church formed to attack Paul.” Which is a sentence that would make for a very different sermon series.

The reason this matters is that the English word “church” doesn’t actually come from ekklesia at all. It traces back through the German Kirche to the Greek kyriakon, meaning “of the Lord” or “the Lord’s house.” It’s a building word. So when translators chose “church” instead of “assembly” or “gathering,” they swapped a word about people assembling for a word about a place. And 1,600 years later, most of us hear “church” and think of a building on the corner with a steeple — which is exactly what ekklesia never meant.

How a People Became a Place

The shift from people to place didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, centuries-long drift.

In the first and second centuries, when Christianity was a minority movement and often persecuted, there was no question about what church meant. It meant the believers who gathered. You couldn’t “go to” church because church wasn’t somewhere you went. Church was something you were — a community you belonged to, a body you were part of, a family that met in homes and shared meals and cared for one another’s needs.

When Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 AD and began sponsoring the construction of grand basilicas, the architecture changed — and with it, the imagination. Suddenly there were magnificent buildings dedicated to Christian worship. The building became the center of gravity. Over the following centuries, as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the institution grew in complexity: clergy hierarchies, parish systems, property holdings, liturgical calendars built around the building’s use.

None of this was inherently wrong. Buildings can serve community. Architecture can honor God. But somewhere in the process, the container became the thing. We stopped saying “We are the church” and started saying “We go to church.” And the difference between those two sentences is the distance this entire series is about.

Where We Are Now

In modern American Christianity, “church” overwhelmingly means a building and an event. Most Christians experience church as something that happens at a scheduled time in a designated place. You arrive, you participate, the event ends, and you leave.

The metrics we use to measure the health of a church are largely building-centric and event-centric. How many people attended? How large is the facility? What’s the annual budget? How many services do we run? These aren’t bad questions. But they’re all questions about the container, not about the community inside it.

Meanwhile, the things the first-century church would have measured — Do people in this community know each other? Are the sick being visited? Are new believers being mentored? Are meals being shared? Are burdens being carried together? — those things often fall through the cracks of a model optimized for the Sunday event.

Acts 2:42–47 describes a church that devoted itself to teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, and prayer. They met together daily. They had everything in common. They sold their possessions and gave to anyone who had need. And the text says they did this “with glad and sincere hearts.”

That wasn’t an event. That was a way of life. And they didn’t need a building to do it.

What If We Tried This Again?

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying buildings are bad. I’m not saying Sunday services are wrong. I’m not saying we should all sell our church properties and meet in living rooms. The modern church has buildings, and many of those buildings are used to do extraordinary things for the Kingdom.

What I am saying is that recovering the ekklesia mindset changes how we think about everything. It changes what “attendance” means — because you can attend a building without belonging to a community. It changes what “growth” means — because you can grow a crowd without deepening a single relationship. It changes where we look for the church — because if the church is the gathered people, then church is happening at the dinner table on Wednesday night just as much as it is on Sunday morning in the auditorium.

A ministry leader who understands this thinks differently. They stop asking only “How many came?” and start asking “Do these people know each other?” They stop measuring success by the event and start measuring it by the relationships. They start building community, not just programming.

The early church didn’t have worship bands, sermon series, or children’s ministry wings. They had each other. They had homes. They had bread and wine and prayer and the apostles’ teaching. And they turned the world upside down. Not because their ekklesia had great facilities. But because their ekklesia was a genuine community of people who had been called out and were living like it mattered.

What if we tried that again?

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This is Part 1 of The Church We Forgot, an eight-part series examining attributes of first-century church life and what recovering them could look like today. Next up: Shared Elders vs. Solo Pastor.