PROPHETIC OUTLOOK 2025 - tphpbiblestudy.org

Church: A Radical Proposition From “Something Wrong” to “Something More”

Jesus did not state, “I will build My Temple” or “I will build My synagogue,” the two most prominent Jewish religious institutions at the time. Instead, He chose a secular entity first developed by the Greeks when He said, “I will build My Ekklesia.” Why? The answer is fascinating, challenging and empowering.

Nowadays, when we hear the word church, we usually picture a solemn building with a cross on top, a pulpit, clergy, a choir, a worship leader and members. I do not put such notions down, because they reflect cherished expressions of how and where most Christians teach or practice their faith today. During the days when Jesus walked this earth, however, Ekklesia—the Greek word translated into English as “church”—was not religious in nature or connotation at all. In fact, by the time He first uttered the word in the gospel of Matthew, it had been in use for centuries in both the Greek and Roman empires to refer to a secular institution operating in the marketplace in a governmental capacity.

When Jesus chose the word Ekklesia to introduce His redemptive agency, no one among His disciples would have conceived it as redeemable—as we will see later—since the existing ekklesia embodied a foreign stronghold. (Note that when I use the term ekklesia with a lowercase e, it refers to the secular institution. When I capitalize the term, I am referring to Jesus’ Ekklesia of Matthew 16:18.) Granted, the term Ekklesia is present in the Septuagint (Greek) translation of the Old Testament to describe religious assemblies, but Jesus’ usage was related to the secular Greek version.

So, how did this secular institution that Jesus was referencing evolve into the religious one we are so familiar with today? And more important yet, once the Ekklesia became Jesus’ redemptive agency, how did it mutate from the pivotal, pace-setting role in society that we read about in the Scriptures into its seemingly less relevant and more ethereal role of today?