By Oyewole Sarumi
There is a word that appears in the New Testament more than a hundred times, a word that Jesus only twice on the gospels. And yet almost every English translation has chosen to render it in a way that fundamentally alters what He was actually saying. The word is ekklesia.
For two thousand years, Christians have been told that when Jesus said, “I will build my church,” He was talking about a building, an institution, a weekly gathering inside four walls.
But the Greek word ekklesia never meant any of those things. It meant something far more specific, far more political, and far more dangerous than anything we now call a church service. And Jesus never once told anyone to go to it.
The problem is not that the word is difficult to translate. The problem is that the translation we have inherited has already made a decision for us about what the Christian life is supposed to look like.
When you hear the word church, you almost certainly think of a place you go to, a service you attend, a building with a steeple or a stage. But the word Jesus chose does not carry any of that weight. It carries the weight of a civic assembly, a summoned gathering of citizens who have been called out of their homes to conduct the business of the city.
The Political Word Jesus Chose
In classical Greek usage, the ekklesia referred to the assembly of citizens in a Greek city-state, convened for public deliberations. It was the governing body of the polis, the entity that made decisions about taxes, war, justice, and the common good. When the herald went through the streets calling the citizens to assemble, the ones who responded were the ekklesia. They were not a passive audience. They were the ruling assembly. They had been called out of their private lives into a public responsibility.
This is not a religious word. It is a political word. And Jesus took it and applied it to the community He was forming, which means He was not inviting people to a weekly religious event.
He was calling them into a new kind of citizenship. The people who follow Jesus are not a religious club. They are a counter-society, an alternative city, a new kind of public assembly that answers to a different King.
The Greek word ekklesia is a compound of two words: ek, meaning “out of,” and kaleo, meaning “to call.” It means literally “the called out”. In the secular Greek world, it referred to the assembly of citizens who had been summoned from their homes to the public square to participate in the governance of the city.
And when Jesus uses this word, He is drawing on that entire cultural background. He is not inventing a new religious term. He is taking a term that every person in the first-century Mediterranean world would have recognized as the language of political identity and citizenship, and He is applying it to His followers.
Only Twice in the Gospels
Jesus uses the word ekklesia only twice in the Gospels. Both times are in Matthew, and both times He is not talking about a building, a service, a denomination, or a geographic location. He is talking about a community that has the authority to bind and loose, to include and exclude, to represent the reality of heaven on earth. The word is not a place. It is a people. And the people are not defined by where they gather, but by the fact that they have been called out.
In Matthew 16:18, Jesus declares, “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it”. In Matthew 18:17,
He speaks of the ekklesia as the community before which disputes among believers are to be brought. In both instances, the reference is to a community of people, not a location, not an institution, and certainly not a building.
The Old Testament background is essential here. The Hebrew word qahal means the same thing—a congregation, an assembly, a gathering of people who have been called together.
In the Old Testament, the qahal is almost always the assembly of Israel before God. It is not a voluntary gathering. It is a commanded assembly. When God calls His people together at Mount Sinai, that is a qahal.
When they gather for covenant renewal, that is a qahal. When they assemble for worship at the tabernacle, that is a qahal. And every single time, the emphasis is not on the building or the ritual. The emphasis is on the people who have been summoned into the presence of God.
The Old Testament qahal was the assembly of Israel gathered at the foot of Sinai, gathered at the door of the tent of meeting, gathered in the courts of the temple. They were called out of Egypt, called out of the nations, called out of their ordinary lives to stand before God as a people. And the entire Old Testament system of priesthood, sacrifice, and law was designed to make that assembly possible.
But the assembly had a problem. It was temporary. It depended on location. It depended on a building that could be destroyed. It depended on a priesthood that could fail. It depended on sacrifices that had to be repeated.
The assembly could be called together, but it could not be sustained. The people could be summoned, but they could not remain. The qahal was a shadow, a pattern, a preview of something that was coming. And when Jesus says, “I will build my ekklesia,” He is not starting something new. He is fulfilling something old. He is saying that the assembly that was called together at Sinai, the assembly that gathered at the temple, the assembly that had been scattered by exile and dispersed among the nations was now being reconstituted around a single person. Not a mountain, not a building, not a law, but a person.
The Gathering That Was Never the Point
The early Christians gathered. They gathered on the first day of the week. They gathered in homes. They gathered in the temple courts. They gathered even when it was dangerous to do so. If the assembly is not defined by the gathering, then why did they gather at all? And why did they treat the gathering as so essential that they were willing to die for it?
The answer has nothing to do with obligation. It has everything to do with embodiment. The gathering was not the point, but it was the place where the point became visible.
The early Christians gathered on the first day of the week not because they were required to, not because the law demanded it, not because a building was waiting for them, but because the resurrection had redefined what time itself meant.
The first day of the week was the day the tomb was empty. It was the day the new creation began. And when they gathered on that day, they were not merely meeting for a religious service. They were publicly declaring that the old world had passed away and a new world had begun.
Justin Martyr, writing around 155 AD, provides our earliest account of Christian worship outside the New Testament itself. In his First Apology, addressed to the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius, he describes what happens when the Christians gather. He does not call it a church service. He calls it the assembly. And he describes it in language that would have been immediately recognizable to any Roman reading it.
The Christians gather on the day called Sunday. They read the memoirs of the apostles and the writings of the prophets. The president gives a discourse. But notice what Justin does not say. He does not describe a building. He does not describe a hierarchy. He does not describe a ritual that separates them from the world. He describes an assembly of people who have been called out of the worship of idols and into the worship of the one true God.
Justin writes: “On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things”. He goes on to describe the prayers, the Eucharist, and the collection for the poor. But Sunday is the day on which they hold their common assembly, “because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Savior on the same day rose from the dead”.
For Justin, that assembly is not an event. It is an identity.
The Witness of the Roman Governor
There is a letter written by a Roman governor named Pliny the Younger around 112 AD, and it is one of the most revealing documents we have about early Christian gatherings. Pliny is writing to the Emperor Trajan because he does not know what to do with these Christians. They refuse to worship the emperor’s statue. They refuse to burn incense to the gods. They are stubborn, and they are multiplying.
In his letter, Pliny describes what he has learned from interrogating them. He says they meet on a fixed day before dawn. They sing a hymn to Christ as to a god. They bind themselves by an oath not to commit theft, robbery, or adultery, not to break their word, not to deny a trust. Pliny is not a theologian. He is a bureaucrat. But he has noticed something that most modern Christians have forgotten. The gathering was not the end of their obedience. The gathering was the place where they renewed their oath to live a certain way. The gathering was the moment they reminded themselves who they were, so that when they scattered, they would live like it.
Pliny also learned that Christians were not just found in towns, but were spread out in villages and rural areas as well. He learned that Christian associations were comprised of males and females, older and younger, and people of various social classes. He learned that many Christians believed that a true Christian would never recant one’s faith even under duress. The Roman governor, charged with suppressing this movement, could not help but document the extraordinary character of the people he was persecuting.
The Cost of the Assembly
Polycarp was bishop of Smyrna in the second century. He was old, probably in his eighties, when the authorities came for him. They arrested him in the countryside, brought him to the stadium, and gave him a choice: “Swear by Caesar, curse Christ, and live.” Polycarp refused. He said, “Eighty-six years I have served him, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my king who saved me?” They burned him alive.
What is often missed in that story is what Polycarp said just before his arrest. When the soldiers arrived, he asked for an hour to pray. He prayed aloud for two hours, and the soldiers were so moved that they regretted coming to take him. Polycarp was not afraid of the gathering that was about to happen in the arena. He was already gathered with the assembly of heaven. The earthly gathering was about to cost him his life, but the heavenly gathering was about to receive him into eternal rest.
The early Christians gathered even when it was fatal to do so. They gathered in secret. They gathered in catacombs. They gathered in upper rooms with the doors locked. They gathered knowing that a knock on the door could mean arrest, torture, and death. If the gathering was not the point, why did they risk their lives for it? The answer is that the gathering was the only place where the assembly could publicly declare its allegiance. In a world that demanded loyalty to Caesar, the ekklesia gathered to proclaim that Jesus was Lord. That was not a private devotional sentiment. That was an act of treason. And the gathering was the moment when that treason became visible.
The Shadow and the Substance
The Old Testament assembly at Sinai was a theophany. The mountain shook, the trumpet sounded, the people trembled. They were gathered to hear the voice of God and to swear allegiance to His covenant. That assembly was terrifying, glorious, and temporary. It could not last. The people could not remain on the mountain. They had to go back to the camp. They had to live out the covenant in the ordinary days.
But the New Testament assembly is not called to a mountain that can be touched. It is called to the heavenly Jerusalem, to the assembly of the firstborn whose names are written in heaven. The writer of Hebrews makes this explicit: “You have not come to a mountain that can be touched. You have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God.” The gathering of the ekklesia on earth is not a distant echo of that heavenly assembly. It is the earthly manifestation of it. When the ekklesia gathers, the heavenly assembly breaks into the present moment. The veil between the ages is thin. The King is present, and the gathering is the place where that reality becomes so real that people were willing to die for it.
The Old Testament Sabbath was also a shadow. It was the seventh day, the day of rest, the day God ceased from His work. And it was given to Israel as a sign of the covenant, a reminder that they were a people set apart. But the Sabbath was always pointing forward. It was a promise that there would be a rest that no amount of human effort could achieve, a rest that would come only when God completed a work of redemption that matched the work of creation. Every week Israel paused. Every week they laid down their tools. Every week they trusted that God would provide. And every week they were rehearsing a hope that had not yet been fulfilled.
The Sabbath said, “Rest is coming.” But the rest did not arrive until a man hung on a cross and said, “It is finished.” And then lay down in a tomb on the seventh day and then rose on the first day. The substance of the Sabbath is not a day of the week. The substance is a person who finished the work. And when He rose, He did not merely restore the seventh day. He inaugurated an eighth day, a first day, a day that had never existed before. The Lord’s Day is not a new Sabbath. It is the day the Sabbath was always pointing toward.
The Puritan Witness
The Puritans understood something that we have largely forgotten. Cotton Mather, the great New England Puritan, said distinctly that he “found no just ground in Scripture to apply such a trope as church to a house for public assembly”. The church, in the Puritan’s way of thinking, worshipped in the meeting-house, and he was as bitterly opposed to calling this edifice a church as he was to calling the Sabbath Sunday. The Puritans did not call their sanctuaries churches, for the word church in the New Testament means a company or assembly of Christian believers, not a place or building where they meet.
John Chrysostom, the great preacher of the fourth century, likewise understood this distinction. He addressed the Christians of his time and said, “Let the house be a Church!” The Church is neither a building nor a symbol. The Church is the Body of Christ. Chrysostom also warned, “It is this that ruins churches, that you do not seek to hear sermons that touch the heart, but sermons that will delight your ears with their intonation and the structure of their phrases, just as if you were listening to singers and lute-players”. The problem of consumer Christianity is not a modern invention. It has been with us for as long as the Church has existed.
What the Gathering Was For
The Greek word leitourgia is the one the early Christians used for what they did when they gathered. It is almost never translated correctly in our modern Bibles. Leitourgia means public work or service on behalf of the people. In the ancient Greek world, it referred to a wealthy citizen who funded a public festival or outfitted a warship for the city. It was not a private devotion. It was a public act that served the common good.
When the New Testament uses this word for the gathering of the ekklesia, it is saying something that completely subverts our modern understanding of worship. The gathering is not about what you get. It is about what you do for the assembly. The singing, the teaching, the breaking of bread, the prayers—these are not consumer activities. They are acts of citizenship. They are the work you do for the city of God. Every person who enters the gathering as a passive consumer has missed the entire point. You do not go to the assembly to be served. You go to the assembly to serve the assembly, to build it, to strengthen it, to make it visible.
The Didache, one of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, compiled between 50 and 70 CE, provides practical instructions on how a Christian community should function. It sets out how congregations should baptize, fast, pray, receive visiting prophets, and the like. It offers unique insights into the way the earliest Christians lived and worshipped. The Didache links the Lord’s Supper to the Lord’s Day, indicating that the Eucharist was observed each Lord’s Day. But the emphasis throughout is on the community and its shared life, not on a building or a ritual.
The Modern Crisis
Recent statistics reveal a crisis that should give every church leader pause. In Britain, weekly church attendance fell from 8 percent of the population in 2018 to 5 percent in 2025. Among people aged seventy and above, weekly attendance halved. The Church of England’s Statistics for Mission figures for 2025 show that regular worshippers dropped from 1.11 million in 2019 to 1.02 million in 2025, a decline of ninety thousand. Average weekly attendance dropped from 854,000 to 707,000. In the United States, forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past twenty-five years. Median in-person attendance, which dropped from 137 in 2000 to 45 during the COVID-19 pandemic, has only partially recovered.
These numbers are sobering. But they may also be revealing something deeper than mere cultural decline. Perhaps the reason people are leaving our churches is that they have not found in them the reality of the ekklesia that Jesus promised to build. Perhaps they have found only a weekly event, a building, a program—and they have sensed, even if they could not articulate it, that there must be more.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his doctoral dissertation Sanctorum Communio, interpreted the church as “Christ existing as church-community”. The community of faith is God’s final revelation as “Christ existing as community,” ordained for the end time of the world until the return of Christ. Bonhoeffer argued that the church has a two-fold nature: on the one hand, the church-community, as the new humanity realized and actualized through Jesus Christ’s vicarious representative action, is a divine reality; on the other hand, it is a concrete human community. The church is not merely a human institution. It is the very presence of Christ in the world.
The Call to Leadership
This is where the application lands with full weight on those who lead the people of God. If you have ever walked into a church building on a Sunday morning and felt like something was missing, you were right. The building is not the problem. The problem is that we have been trained to think of the assembly as a place we go to instead of a people we are. We have been told that church is something you attend, and if you attend faithfully, you are a good Christian. But Jesus never said that. Paul never said that. None of the New Testament writers ever said that. What they said was that you are the assembly. You are the called-out ones. And the moment you think of the assembly as a destination, you have already missed the point. The assembly is not where you go. The assembly is who you are.
The ekklesia does not cease to exist when the people are scattered. The ekklesia is not defined by the gathering. The ekklesia is defined by the calling. You have been called out. You are always called out. You do not stop being a citizen of the kingdom when you leave the building. You carry the assembly with you into the marketplace, into the workplace, into the living room. And that means the question is not whether you went to church today. The question is whether you are living today as a member of the called-out assembly.
The book of Acts makes this explicit. When Luke describes the early believers, he does not say they went to church. He says they devoted themselves to the teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. He says they were together in the temple and broke bread from house to house. He does not use the word ekklesia to describe a location. He uses it to describe the people. And when persecution scatters them, they do not stop being the ekklesia. They carry the assembly with them wherever they go. The word follows the people, not the place.
A New Imagination
We have a decision to make. We can continue thinking of church as a service we attend, a building we enter, a weekly obligation we fulfill. Or we can let the text rewire our imagination. We can let the word ekklesia do its work and realize that we have been called out of the world not to attend an event, but to be a people. And that change in thinking will affect everything. It will affect how you gather. It will affect how you scatter. It will affect what you think you are doing when you walk into a room with other believers. It will affect what you think you are doing when you walk out.
If you have ever left a church service feeling empty, it may be because you were waiting to receive something that you were actually supposed to give. The early Christians did not ask whether the sermon was good enough or whether the music moved them. They asked whether the assembly was being built. They asked whether the body of Christ was being strengthened. They asked whether the ekklesia was living as a called-out people.
The New Testament understanding of the ekklesia encompasses both local gatherings of Christians and the universal body of believers. It is used to describe both the assembly of Israelites and the Christian church as a whole. It conveys the idea of a group of people who are “called out” from the world to belong to God, forming a distinct community centered on faith in Jesus Christ. Paul writes in Ephesians that God “made Him head over everything for the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all”. The church is depicted as the body of Christ, emphasizing unity and diversity among believers. It is a holy and sanctified community.
The Unshaken Kingdom
The final tension resolves itself in a single truth. The ekklesia is not a building you enter. It is a people you become. The gathering is not the goal. It is the moment when the goal becomes visible. And the call is not to go to church. The call is to be the called-out assembly of the risen King, a living testimony that the world’s allegiances are passing away, and that the only true citizenship is in the kingdom that cannot be shaken.
Every time we gather, we have a choice. We can walk into a building and sit in a seat and leave the same person we were when we arrived. Or we can enter the assembly of the called-out ones, confess that Jesus is Lord, renew our oath to live as His people, and walk out carrying the assembly with us into every room we enter. The building will not save us. The gathering will not save us. But the One who called us out of darkness and into His marvelous light—He is the One who builds His ekklesia, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
The writer of Hebrews captures this with breathtaking clarity: “You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire; to darkness, gloom and storm; to a trumpet blast or to such a voice speaking words that those who heard it begged that no further word be spoken to them. But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven.” The earthly gathering is not an end in itself. It is a foretaste of the heavenly assembly, a glimpse of the eternal ekklesia that will gather around the throne of God and of the Lamb.
Conclusion
The word ekklesia appears in the New Testament over one hundred times, predominantly in the writings of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles. It is a term rich with meaning, weighted with history, and charged with political significance. And yet we have reduced it to something small, something safe, something manageable. We have turned an assembly of called-out citizens into a weekly religious service. We have transformed a counter-cultural movement into a cultural institution. We have exchanged the dangerous reality of the ekklesia for the comfortable convenience of the church.
But the word has not changed. The call has not been rescinded. Jesus still says, “I will build my ekklesia.” He is still calling people out of darkness into His marvelous light. He is still forming a people who will be His witnesses to the ends of the earth. And He is still inviting us to be not merely attendees of a weekly event, but members of a heavenly assembly, citizens of an unshaken kingdom, the called-out people of the living God.
The question before every church leader, every pastor, every elder, every teacher, and every believer is this: Will we settle for the comfortable fiction of going to church, or will we embrace the dangerous reality of being the ekklesia? The answer we give will determine not only the future of our congregations, but the witness of the gospel in a world that desperately needs to see a people who have been truly called out.
The building will not save you. The gathering will not save you. But the One who called you out of darkness and into His marvelous light, He is the One who builds His ekklesia, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. – Prof. Oyewole Sarumi
