The Word We Lost: Ekklesia Translation

The Word We Lost: Ekklesia Translation

How one translation choice reshaped what we think it means to gather

I've spent most of my life walking in and out of church buildings. I grew up in a Christian home. My parents came to faith in the middle of the Jesus movement, back when following Jesus still felt like it cost something and looked like something real. If I'm honest with you, something about the modern church never sat right with me. It didn't as a teenager, and it didn't as an adult. It doesn't now, with two family members serving as pastors and a close view of what the machinery looks like from the inside.

I've watched men take the pulpit who knew less of the Word than the people in the pews. I've heard sermons pulled off the internet, or generated by AI, because no one had the time or the will to sit with the text and let it work on his own heart first. I've watched families fracture because a father wasn't leading his own household, yet stood up on Sunday and told everyone else how to live.

None of this is new. Paul warned about it two thousand years ago:

"For if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church?" (1 Timothy 3:5)

Those failures drove me back to a question older than all of them: What did Jesus actually say he was going to build?

Because whatever it was, I'm not convinced it was this.

What Jesus said he would build

"And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." (Matthew 16:18)

The word translated "church" here is the Greek ἐκκλησία, ekklesia. It appears about 114 times in the New Testament. And here is what most of us were never told: when Jesus spoke this word, he wasn't inventing a religious term. His hearers already knew it. It came to them from two directions.

From the Greek world, it meant an assembly. In a Greek city, the ekklesia was the gathering of citizens summoned to handle public business. It was not a building, and it was not a religion. It was people, called together.

You don't have to take my word for this. Luke shows you in Acts 19. When a mob fills the theater at Ephesus, Luke calls that crowd an ekklesia three times (Acts 19:32, 39, 41). Open your English Bible to those verses. The translators render it ”assembly.” It is the same Greek word. Only when it refers to the followers of Jesus does it become "church."

Ask yourself why.

From Israel's Scriptures, it meant God's people gathered before him. The Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, regularly used ekklesia to translate the Hebrew קָהָל, qahal: Israel assembled before the Lord. Moses repeatedly calls the day Israel stood at Sinai to hear God's voice "the day of the assembly" (Deuteronomy 9:10; 10:4; 18:16). Stephen calls Israel under Moses "the congregation in the wilderness" (Acts 7:38). Hebrews puts Psalm 22 on the lips of Christ himself:

”I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise." (Hebrews 2:12)

In both passages the Greek word is ekklesia. In both, the ESV says "congregation."

So when Jesus said “my ekklesia," a Jewish listener heard something staggering. God had once gathered his people at the foot of a mountain to hear his voice. Now Jesus was claiming that he would gather them around himself. The weight of the sentence falls on the word my. This was never a plan for a building. It was a promise of a people.

A brief note for careful readers: you'll often hear that ekklesia means "the called-out ones," from ek ("out of") and kaleō ("to call"). The parts are real. But in actual first-century usage the word simply meant "assembly," and we shouldn't build doctrine on a word's pieces. We don't need to. Scripture teaches the "called out" truth directly: God "called you out of darkness into his marvelous light" (1 Peter 2:9). The standard lexicon of New Testament Greek, BDAG, gives ekklesia senses ranging from a civic assembly to a casual gathering to the community of believers, whether meeting in a house, in a city, or throughout the world. Every one of those senses describes people. None describes a building.

Where the word "church" came from

If ekklesia means "assembly," where did our English word "church" come from?

It came from a different Greek word entirely: κυριακός, kyriakos, meaning "belonging to the Lord," from kyrios, "Lord." It appears exactly twice in the New Testament, and neither time does it describe a people:

"When you come together, it is not the Lord's supper that you eat." (1 Corinthians 11:20)

"I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet." (Revelation 1:10)

The Lord's supper. The Lord's day. In the centuries after the apostles, as Christians came to meet in dedicated buildings, and especially after Constantine gave the faith imperial favor, a phrase meaning "the Lord's house" became a common name for those buildings. That word traveled north into the Germanic languages, changing shape as it went, until it reached Old English as cirice. Eventually it became "church."

The Romance languages took a different road. French église, Spanish iglesia, and Italian chiesa all descend from ekklesia. English is one of the languages whose word for God's people grew out of a word for a building.

That is not a small shift. Ekklesia tells you who you are: a people God has gathered. "Church," at its root, tells you whose house you're standing in. Yet Scripture says plainly where God's house is:

"The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man." (Acts 17:24)

"Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?" (1 Corinthians 3:16)

In that second verse, the "you" is plural. The people are the house.

How the English Bible settled the question

I didn't come to this on my own. Men before me saw it and paid for saying so.

William Tyndale was the first to translate the New Testament into English directly from the Greek, printed in 1526. When he came to ekklesia, he did not write "church." He wrote “congregation.” That choice was not lost on his opponents. Sir Thomas More singled it out for attack in 1529, and Tyndale defended it in print in 1531. He knew what the word meant, and he would not cover it over.

John Foxe records Tyndale telling a learned clergyman:

"If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than thou dost."

Tyndale believed ordinary people deserved the Word in their own language, plainly translated, without institutional varnish. His translation work made him a hunted man. In 1536 he was condemned as a heretic, strangled, and burned at the stake near Brussels. The formal charges centered on his Reformation teaching, but he died because he put the Word into the hands of the people.

For a time his choice held. Coverdale's Bible (1535), Matthew's Bible (1537), and the Great Bible (1539) all kept "congregation." But the Geneva Bible (1560) and the Bishops' Bible (1568) went back to "church," and the question came to a head under King James.

In 1604, at the Hampton Court Conference, James approved a new translation. Rules for the translators were drawn up under his authority by Bishop Richard Bancroft. The third rule reads:

"The old Ecclesiastical Words to be kept, viz. the Word Church not to be translated Congregation." (Rule 3, 1604)

This was no accident of translation. It was a deliberate decision, written down. The translators' own preface to the 1611 edition explains that they avoided the word choices of the Puritans, who put "congregation" for "church" and "washing" for "baptism." In other words, the choice of "church" was made in the middle of a fight between the established Church of England and its critics over what the people of God are and who governs them. James, the supreme governor of that church, summed up his view at the same conference in three words: "No bishop, no king."

This is not an attack on the King James Bible or on the men who labored over it. Much of their work was faithful and beautiful. But on this one word, the record shows that the decision was not driven by the Greek. It was driven by the need to protect an institution.

Not everyone followed. Robert Young's literal translation (1862) and John Nelson Darby's translation both rendered ekklesia plainly as ”assembly.” These men weren't confused about Greek. They were protecting its meaning.

Why it matters for how we live

Someone might say: words shift over time, so why does this matter?

It matters because a word puts a picture in your head before you ever open the text, and the picture shapes how you live. Here is what changes when you recover the word.

It changes what you picture. Read "I will build my church," and most of us picture a building, a service, a stage. None of that is in the text. Read "I will build my assembly," and you picture people: called, gathered, belonging to Christ. Those are two very different images, and only one of them is in the Bible.

It changes what you think is required. If the ekklesia requires a building, a budget, a paid professional, and a program, then ordinary believers can only attend it. They can never be it. But listen to Jesus. Right after he tells the disciples to bring an unrepentant brother before the ekklesia (Matthew 18:17), he promises:

"For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them." (Matthew 18:20)

Jesus attaches his presence and his authority to a gathering as small as two or three, gathered in his name. He doesn't require a building, a budget, or a title. He requires that he be in the midst.

It changes what happens when you gather. Paul describes the assembly at Corinth:

"When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up." (1 Corinthians 14:26)

Each one. That is not an audience watching a performance. It is a body, with every part contributing for the good of the whole. We have been trained to sit, watch, and receive. The New Testament ekklesia gathered to give.

It changes where you think it can happen. Again and again, the New Testament ekklesia met in homes:

"Greet also the church in their house." (Romans 16:5; see also 1 Corinthians 16:19; Colossians 4:15; Philemon 2)

A home was not a fallback. It was a natural place for a people to gather as a people, as a family. "Church" pulls our imagination toward a special building set apart for God. Scripture leaves us with living stones:

"You yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ." (1 Peter 2:5)

It changes who you think is in charge. Paul says God gave Christ "as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all" (Ephesians 1:22–23). One head, many members, and every member necessary. When we think of the church as a place, leaders become managers of the place and members become its customers. When we think of it as a body, every man must answer to the Head, starting in his own home.

What we're meant to recover

I'm not writing to condemn every building with a steeple, or every believer who uses the word "church." Many faithful saints say "church" and mean exactly what ekklesia means. Words can be redeemed by people who use them well.

But think back to what I described at the start: pulpits filled with borrowed words, leaders who claim authority they aren't living out at home, congregations trained to watch rather than to serve. Those failures don't come from nowhere. Part of the problem is upstream of any one pastor. It lies in the picture we were handed before we ever walked through the door: a place to go, a show to watch, a man to listen to. A people gathered around Christ will expect something very different from one another than an audience gathered in front of a stage.

So let me ask you what I had to ask myself:

• When you hear "church," do you picture a place or a people?
• When believers gather where you are, does each one bring something for the building up of the others, or do most people simply watch?
• Is Christ functionally the head of your gathering, or is a person, a program, a budget or a Pastor?
• If the building disappeared tomorrow, would your ekklesia still exist?

Ekklesia is not a place you go on Sunday. It is who you are, and what you do when you gather with other called-out people around the name of Jesus.

Don't take my word for any of this. Open your Bible and read it for yourself. Look up the word. Read Acts 19 and see what the translators did. Read the letters Paul wrote to ordinary believers gathered in ordinary homes. See what he expected of them, and ask honestly whether what you've experienced looks like that.

The Word of God does not need an institution to protect it. It was never meant to be read only through someone else's eyes. It was meant for ploughboys, for fishermen, and for you.

For further study

On the word ekklesia

• Walter Bauer, William Arndt, F. W. Gingrich, and Frederick Danker, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG), 3rd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2000
• Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, eds., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT), Vol. III, Eerdmans, 1965
• Dr. Tom Wadsworth, tomwadsworth.com: word studies on ekklesia and the nature of the church

On the history of the translation

• David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography, Yale University Press, 1994
• Adam Nicolson, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, HarperCollins, 2003
• "The Translators to the Reader," preface to the 1611 King James Version

On the nature of the New Testament assembly

• John F. MacArthur, sermons and writings on ecclesiology
• Tabletalk Magazine, tabletalkmagazine.com
• Nick Franks, firebrandnotes.com/blog

Greek language tools

• Blue Letter Bible (blueletterbible.org): search Strong's G1577 for ekklesia
• Bible Hub Interlinear (biblehub.com)

All Scripture quotations are from the ESV unless otherwise noted.