Ekklesia — The Gathering of the People of God in a Post 2020 World
“To gather with God’s people in united adoration of the Father is as necessary to the Christian life as prayer.” — Martin Luther
What is Church? A place? A 501-C3? Or maybe a better question should be, how can we identify the Church? After a year like 2020, we added another very pertinent and primary question: Is the regular physical gathering of the people of God an identifying quality of the Church?
To address any of these questions, we first have to define what the Church is. According to Robert Webber in The Biblical Foundations of Christian Worship, the Church is determined by the Greek word ekklēsia, which is usually translated as “church” in two ways: “(1) to describe a meeting or an assembly and (2) to designate the people who participate in such assembling together — whether they are actually assembled or not.” It is essential to recognize that the New Testament never identifies the physical place of assembly as a “church” but is generally used to describe believers in a local context.
Robert Webber goes further to clarify the use of ekklēsia in the New Testament: “On the most basic level, the ekklēsia is an organized local entity — comprised of all the believers in any given locality, under one pluralistic eldership. On another level, the ekklēsia is the universal Church whose constituents are all the believers who have ever been, are now existing, and will ever be.” When we think about the Church, this brings a couple of clarifying thoughts: The Church is both local and global, both a gathering and a people, but should rarely be identified as a physical location. Does having a designated physical gathering place aid the people of God in gathering? Yes, but even the priority of having a designated physical place reveals a primary function of the Body of Christ, which is to gather together.
How should the Church gather? In Acts 2:42–47, we have a description of how the early Church went about gathering, which I believe is applicable and prescriptive for today. This is what God’s word says:
“And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.“
In this verse, we see that the gathering of the people of God consisted of teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, prayers, and generosity towards each other. Some of this can be done through electronic means and Zoom calls, but the majority is best executed through physical presence with one another. We’ve always known that watching a service separated from other believers was never a long term solution unless absolutely necessary, however, throughout 2020, we confirmed that the gathering of the Church is tremendously greater than watching a service; it is the active participation of the individual in the context of the family of God that makes what the unique defining qualities of ekklēsia exist. The Church could easily be miscategorized as gathering for entertainment or learning without the identifying marks of teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread, prayer, and generosity. But these unique qualities allow the Church to become a living, breathing organism. The active body of a resurrected Christ is present to continue the work started over 2,000 years ago. Although we can be evangelistic through broadcast church, we can never enter the fullness of the definition of ekklēsia through computer and phone screens. The Church needs the physical presence of people to be as fully alive as God intended for it to be.
