Churches

The English word church comes from the Greek word ekklesia (ecclesia), a term that literally means “the people of the Lord,” and from the third century has signified the community of Christian believers. Today the term church is applied primarily to fellowships of followers of Christ, yet the term has also been applied more broadly to refer to the gathering of the faithful in Buddhist and other religious communities.

Some scholars argue that prior to the emergence of Christianity in the Mediterranean region, the Greco-Roman populace of antiquity used the term ecclesia to refer to an association of free male Roman citizens, thus establishing boundaries on gender and citizenship. According to Yale New Testament professor Abraham Malherbe, the early Christian church was an “alternative community” that nevertheless had commonalities with other Greco-Roman societies, such as offering a home to socially uprooted, alienated individuals seeking a substitute to the dominant culture. What distinguished the early church communities from other volunteer societies of the Greco-Roman world was the makeup of its members and the center around which the community found its identity and unity together. The social makeup of early churches was strikingly egalitarian compared with similar volunteer associations of the Greco-Roman world. Starting as house fellowships, where followers of Christ would gather to pray and read letters from the disciples of Christ and early church leaders, thus gaining comfort and guidance in a context of subjugation, such household gatherings were characterized by a relativization of social statuses within the household of faith. In the words of the biblical writers, “For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him” (Romans 10:12) and “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). In the biblical vision of the church—the gathering of the followers of Jesus Christ—social statuses are relativized under the banner of God's new covenantal relationship with human beings, broadening the notion of God's elect to include all people, male or female, slave or free.

[Page 219]Whereas the first distinct mark of the early Christian church is its social composition, a second distinguishing quality of the church is its theological content—its central affirmation that Jesus Christ is Lord and the concomitant commitment to be a community of believers guided by the example given by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The message itself was quite radical given the cultural and religious constraints of the time—for a Jewish sect to open the covenantal promises of that tradition and widen the interpretation of Jesus’ message as one that was not just for Jews but also for all peoples (e.g., Gentiles as well), regardless of ethnicity or gender. Though the Christian church started in the first-century Greco-Roman world, in a matter of a few 100 years its center of gravity had moved to the eastern Mediterranean (e.g., Constantinople), then to northern Europe (e.g., Ireland), then throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Since the 1980s, there has been a massive shift in the demographic spread of Christianity worldwide, with more Christians in the Global South than in the Global North. This enormous southward shift, which has made Africa, Asia, and Latin America the global centers of church expansion, has given rise to a proliferation of kinds of churches, at once reflecting the specific struggles and opportunities presented by each social, cultural, and religious environment out of which the church has emerged as well as generating greater global connections through denominational and intradenominational conferences and ecumenically oriented missions and ministries.

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