What is "Church"

A scarcely-examined question

Introduction

“The church” has taught me any things. In fact it taught me so much that for two thirds of my adult life I carefully avoided it, being happy to join the “unchurched” back in the early 1970s by the time I was 21, when many others were doing likewise. I won’t go into that here, but I did write about it in Testimony.

What I write here is not for happily-churched people that don’t want their traditions and beliefs disturbed. It is for those that sense something wrong and happily stay away, and for those who sacrificially pursue truth online and in person but encounter immense opposition, leaving some to ask “how can this be happening?” The latter might be a good title for another post, but I won’t pursue it here.

There are good reasons for such people to find “church” unattractive. But there are also good reasons to look more deeply at what’s going on with churches. I am not “anti-church”, but I certainly would like to see churches do their jobs better, and my relationship with them is complex. In my Substack bio ClearMiddle, I refer to it as “church hesitant”. Some churches do reasonably well, even within the constraints under which they choose to operate, and some of the worst of them, doctrinally speaking, do well serving people in need.

My remarks specifically address “Christian” churches, and we’ll get to that soon, but first let’s look simply at definitions of the word “church” itself, and then at some of the things the Bible has to say about the matter. If you are new to this Substack, don’t worry, I’m not going to try to convert you to anything, church tradition skeptic that I am. Read on, and you’ll see what I mean.

Definitions

The word “church” is quite flexible. Here are some definitions:

church¹

1 of 3

noun

ˈchərch

1 : a building for public and especially Christian worship

2 : the clergy or officialdom of a religious body

3 : often capitalized : a body or organization of religious believers: such as

3a : the whole body of Christians

3b : denomination

3c : congregation

4 : a public divine worship

5 : the clerical profession

church

2 of 3

adjective

1 : of or relating to a church

2 chiefly British : of or relating to the established church

church

3 of 3

verb

churched; churching; churches

transitive verb : to bring to church to receive one of its rites

Etymology

Noun, Adjective, and Verb

Middle English chirche, from Old English cirice, ultimately from Late Greek kyriakon, from Greek, neuter of kyriakos of the lord, from kyrios lord, master; akin to Sanskrit śūra hero, warrior

The Noun “Church”

The word “church” is indeed flexible. Let’s keep it simple and go through just the meanings of the noun, but with a biblical perspective in view. I’ll provide a source of references later on for what I say here, a well-researched book, rather than attempting to write an entire book here in the footnotes.

1 : a building for public and especially Christian² worship

Early gatherings of believers, called assemblies,³ typically met in homes, although the Apostle Paul may have rented a hall⁴ for some of his teaching. Church buildings can be expensive to buy, operate, and maintain, leading to incessant fund-raising, often called “tithing”. Established churches⁵ could collect tithes as a tax. There is, however, no mention of a “tithing requirement” among the early assemblies. There is “for God loves a cheerful giver“ in 2 Corinthians 9:6, often offered as a “proof text”⁶ for tithing, but if one reads that verse in context, it’s not about that. It’s about a collection for the Judean believers.

2 : the clergy or officialdom of a religious body

The assemblies had no clergy or officialdom as we would understand those words today, although there was organizational structure. There were no seminaries or degrees, so there was no body of credentialed clergy.

The organizational structure that did exist did not operate the way “church” today ordinarily does. They did not have pastor-rank leaders preaching regularly to congregants. There was not a fixed “order of service”. It was spontaneous. The members possessed differing talents and gifts through which they served accordingly, and everyone contributed to meetings, one at a time.⁷ This is not “church” as we typically know it, although there are contemporary approximations to it.

Try standing up and asking a question during a sermon, when doing so has not been scripted—NOT REALLY. Depending on the size and preparedness of the church, you just might meet with the security detail if you were to do such a thing.⁸

3 : often capitalized : a body or organization of religious believers: such as

3a : the whole body of Christians

Well maybe, but did they call themselves Christians?

3b : denomination

There was no such thing in the first century that I have found.

3c : congregation

This could be used as another word for “assembly”. I recall that there is a specific Greek word for “congregation”, but I’ve lost track of what it is. It doesn’t appear frequently.

The form of a first century assembly, as exposed in the New Testament, is quite different from what the activities of a typical modern congregation would look like, although there is overlap.

4 : a public divine worship

Well yes, but a different sort of worship from what is ordinarily seen in churches, as described in preceding comments.

5 : the clerical profession

Not as we understand it today. As already touched upon above and in footnotes, there were no pastors, no stages, no pews, no lectures with a presenter preaching to a passive audience. And while certain clerical “ranks” derive their names from Greek words applied to certain members of the assemblies, the job descriptions are usually not the same.

Discussion

There has been a substitution of one thing for another. The new thing doesn’t do all that the old thing did and vice versa, and while this is not entirely incapacitating, it can lead to a wide range of problems.

My own first church of note was a Christian cult-church with which my mother and I became involved when I was 12 years old. This article was inspired by what I learned while recovering from that early experience.

That church taught heretical doctrines intermingled with truth, something my mother and I failed to notice.⁹ I spent decades deprogramming from that organization (my mother never did) but interestingly enough, truths were taught there that rarely were spoken elsewhere.

Among the actual truths were claims — historical facts — about how the “other” Christian churches had incorporated pagan beliefs and practices into their gatherings. This is known as syncretism.¹⁰. “Other” of course meant, from their point of view, all the other “false” churches as opposed to this one claiming to be the “one true church” as this one did.

I grew up having this background knowledge about syncretism, imperfect knowledge but nevertheless fairly accurate in at least some respects. Unfortunately we did not learn about the parts that they omitted, concerning the pagan beliefs and practices that that church also had adopted.

Out of this upbringing, and ensuing incidents that occurred after I turned 21,¹¹ I no longer wanted anything to do with Christian churches — that one or any other — for much of my adult life. I see now that it was an overreaction. There was a problem, but it could not be solved by running away. But then mistakes can be good teachers, if you survive them.

I have been back with Christian churches now for more than a decade, and there is no end to the problems I encounter, but they do create community, and they may preserve some of the practices that the early assemblies featured.

Ironically, because of all the problems, they may also resemble the early assemblies closely in one important respect: those assemblies had no end of problems either! And the problems of the early assemblies offer lessons from which we could learn now, if the modern churches were to teach them. And sometimes they do, but too often they don’t.

For some of us, this provokes a question that pops up repeatedly in a variety of curcumstances upon taking a closer look, “Why isn’t this taught?”

Why Isn’t This Taught?

One day somewhat recently an article turned up on another Substack, highlighting a book titled Pagan Christianity.¹² I read it, and roughly 80% of the book told of history that I already knew. The other 20% was the part that had escaped my notice. The book seems to me to have a rather negative tone about it, and I have some difficulty with that, although it is balanced by another later book in the series¹³ that I have also read. I am not promoting the ideas about what to do that are presented in either of these books, nor am I promoting their author’s business interests, but I did find them helpful as a reference point for better understanding “why isn’t this taught?”, and for clarifying my own relationship with these peculiar institutions known as Christian churches.

That said, the material in Pagan Christianity offers well-researched evidence supporting the claims I made above concerning “the noun ‘church’”, and it serves as a published reference for those claims. However, my prior knowledge of the material had a cushioning effect that other church-goers might not experience. I don’t want others to read the book and run screaming from their communities. Things are not that bad. If anyone feels this way, post a comment here. Let’s talk about it.

There is also good news hiding behind the “not taught” curtain, and I hope to go peeking behind that curtain again in future posts, seeking those parts. Whether you believe what it says or not, the Bible has very good news about what we are doing here on this Earth and what our destiny can be. The trouble is, it’s not all taught!

Stay tuned.

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Related:

1. “church,” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/church. Accessed 6/7/2025.

2. See my What is a Christian post for details about that word.

3. In this post I use the word “assembly” rather than “church” to refer to the type of first century gathering addressed in the New Testament, because for the most part that is how the underlying Greek reads. The usual term is ἐκκλησία (“ekklēsia“, referring to people with shared belief, community, or congregation. There’s much more I could say about this word. If you are curious, feel free to ask about it in the comments.

Because the pronunciation is typically butchered, thanks in part to peculiar transliteration conventions, I will mention that, in transliteration, ē represents the Greek letter eta, similar in sound to a long “a” in English — it’s not an English long “e” sound — and the accent here is on the “i”, not the ē, usually shown only in the Greek alphabet rendering, not the transliteration. And there are other differing pronunciation conventions, but I’ll not go into that.

4. See Acts 19:9 (NASB), “But when some were becoming hardened and disobedient, speaking evil of the Way before the people, he withdrew from them and took the disciples away with him, and had discussions daily in the school of Tyrannus.“ There is scholarly debate regarding whether this was a rented hall or what, but it clearly was not a “church building”. Depending upon how the Greek is translated, it could even have been an assembly in a private home.

5. See, for example, established church in Britannica Online.

6. Proof texting employs a short passage (or several) out of context to support a particular teaching. See, for example, What Is Proof Texting?

7. See for example 1 Corinthians 14:29-31 (NASB): “Have two or three prophets speak, and have the others pass judgment. But if a revelation is made to another who is seated, then the first one is to keep silent. For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all may be exhorted;…” This passage applies specifically to “prophesying, which is a whole ‘nother topic, but I use it as an example. Can you imagine doing this during a sermon? Can you imagine passing judgement on the sermon as part of a church service? I can’t. The assemblies were spontaneous and interactive, but still orderly. Church is “control” focused.

8. I say this as a church volunteer who, on those Sundays when working as a member of the tech team, sees the security detail sheet for that service and knows who these otherwise generally un-noticed people are and how to get their attention. I don’t recommend that you get their attention by interrupting the fully-scripted-and-planned-down-to-the-minute service.

9. I did sort-of notice, when I was older and when we were actually permitted to attend services (a somewhat long story, and not terribly relevant here). As good cult members we took notes on the sermons, and I would bring my notes home and review the scriptures that had been cited. At home, away from the spell of the pastor, I kept finding discrepancies between the scriptures themselves and the claims made about them in sermons, but I thought it must have been problems with my understanding.

10. Syncretism: “The union (or attempted fusion) of different systems of thought or belief (especially in religion or philosophy)“, from English Dictionary - Offline.

11. I left twice altogether, at 21 and again at 48 years old. I won’t go into great detail, but the first time there was major “say one thing and do another” hypocrisy going on within the congregations, and there was a major failed prophecy, made by the founder whom the members regarded as their “apostle”.

The second departure is difficult to explain and did not directly involve my local church or its denomination—it was one of my better communities. But I caught a glimpse of what I am writing about here, my belief system melted down, and I ran away.

12. See Pagan Christianity on Goodreads. This book is not the whole story, and I have issues with certain things that the author writes about in this and his other books. I recommend reading the reviews on the Goodreads website.

13. Finding Organic Church, also on Goodreads.