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    Ekklesia of Christ: Becoming the People of God
    Ekklesia of Christ: Becoming the People of God
    Ekklesia of Christ: Becoming the People of God
    Ebook112 pages1 hour

    Ekklesia of Christ: Becoming the People of God

    By Heritage Christian University Press

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    To understand the Lord better and what he expects of his followers, then we need to understand what Scripture teaches about the church—the community of believers he left behind. The Ekklesia of Christ will bless you as you seek to be salt and light to your community. It will invigorate you with the exhilarating message of the kingdom o

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHeritage Christian University Press
    Release dateDec 10, 2019
    ISBN9781956811124
    Ekklesia of Christ: Becoming the People of God

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      Book preview

      Ekklesia of Christ - Heritage Christian University Press

      title

      THE EKKLESIA OF CHRIST

      Becoming the People of God

      Published by Heritage Christian University Press

      Copyright © 2015, 2019 by Ed Gallagher

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      The Ekklesia of Christ: becoming the people of God /edited by EdGallagher

      Berean study series

      p. cm.

      Includes Scripture index.

      ISBN 978-17320483-2-4 (pbk.)

      ISBN 978-1-9568111-2-4 (eBook)

      1. Church—Biblical teaching—Study and teaching.

      I. Gallagher, Edmon L. II. Title. III. Series.

      BS680 .E64 2015     262—dc20     2019-933599

      Cover design by Brittany McGuire and Brad McKinnon

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

      Select Scripture quotations are taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, copyright© 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

      Select Scripture quotations are taken from the NEW KING JAMES VERSION®. Copyright© 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

      Select Scripture quotations are taken from the NEW REVISED STANDARD VERSION BIBLE, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

      title Contents title

      Introduction—Why the Church?

      Ed Gallagher

      1The Kingdom of God

      Ed Gallagher

      2The Israel of God

      Nathan Daily

      3 The Church as Salt and Light

      Bill Bagents

      4From All Eternity

      Ted Burleson

      5A Community of Believers

      Philip Goad

      6A Royal Priesthood

      C. Wayne Kilpatrick

      7A Holy Nation

      Brad McKinnon

      8The Church and Worship

      Jeremy Barrier and Lori Eastep

      9Care of Widows and Orphans

      Michael Jackson

      10Such Were Some of You

      Rusty Pettus

      11Equipping the Saints

      Jim Collins

      12The Mission of the Church

      Travis Harmon

      Scripture Index

      Contributors

      halftitle

      Introduction

      title Why the Church? title

      Ed Gallagher

      The church is the hope for the world. This bold assertion may strike many Christian readers as patently false—far from being the hope for the world; the church is everything that is wrong with Christianity. The church represents the institutional nature of Christianity, rules-based religion, and hypocrisy. Give me Jesus without the church! For Jesus is who is the hope for the world. He is the one who provides the perfect example of a life lived in service to God. He is the one who ate with sinners and welcomed prostitutes while chastising the hypocritical Pharisees. He is the one who sacrificed himself on behalf of others, whose blood washes away sin. He is the one who conquered death, who ascended to the right hand of God, who always intercedes on our behalf. He is the one who left behind a community of followers to carry on his mission of turning the world upside down.

      Aye, there’s the rub. That community of followers that Jesus left behind is the church. If the church is the body of Christ, as Paul says on a number of occasions (e.g., 1 Cor 12:26; Col 1:18), then you cannot have Christ without the church. (That would be like Christ without Christ.) If the church manifests the kingdom of God in the world today, then it continues the mission of the one who came announcing that kingdom. If the church is a royal priesthood and a holy nation, as Peter thinks (1 Pet 2:9), then the world needs the church to be what God designed it to be. If God has planned the church from all eternity (Eph 1:4) and intended the church to reveal his manifold wisdom to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places (Eph 3:10), then what does that mean for the importance of the church? The community Christ left behind shares his vocation of being a light to the nations (Isa 49:6; Matt 5:14) and bringing salvation to the ends of the earth (Matt 28:19). The church is the hope for the world.

      The importance of the church in God’s scheme of redemption becomes clear when studying Paul’s interpretation of scripture. He continually interprets the Old Testament scriptures as finding their fulfillment in the communities that he is forming throughout Europe and Asia. When the law of Moses forbids muzzling a threshing ox (Deut 25:4), Paul insists that this commandment was written altogether for our sake (1 Cor 9:9–10). The story of Israel’s sin with the golden calf (Exod 32) was written for our instruction (1 Cor 10:11; cf. Rom 15:4). Just as Christ fulfills the promise to Abraham of a seed (Gal 3:16; cf. Gen 22:18), so we who are in Christ are also Abraham’s seed (Gal 3:29). One scholar has described this interpretive strategy as Paul’s ecclesiocentric hermeneutic, a hermeneutic centered on the church (ecclesia).¹ Paul sees much of the Bible as leading up to and foreshadowing the church.

      Terminology

      The Greek word ekklēsia signifies the assembly of believers, and many languages have taken their word for church from this word (cf. Latin ecclesia, French église, Spanish iglesia). The English language is different in this regard: the English word church derives not from ekklēsia but from a different Greek word, kuriakon, an adjectival form of kurios, meaning lord (a common description of Jesus or God in Greek). The adjective kuriakos appears a couple of times in the New Testament, once to describe the lordly supper (1 Cor 11:20), and another time to describe the lordly day (Rev 1:10). In the fourth century, the adjective could signify the lordly house, that is, the church building, as in the following example from the early church historian Eusebius: "[The Roman Emperor Maximinus II] now allows [Christians] both to observe their form of worship and to build church buildings [kuriaka, plural of kuriakon]."²

      Here the word kuriakon simply means church building. When the German tribes heard this word used for church buildings, they adopted it and applied it more broadly not only to the building but also to the institution, or the people who met in the building. The Germans bequeathed this word to the English, who made their own adjustments to the spelling and pronunciation, producing our word church. But this word, church, is now used as a translation of the New Testament word ekklēsia.

      In the New Testament, the word ekklēsia appears 114 times, almost always referring to a Christian congregation or assembly. It does not have this meaning every time, such as in Acts 19:40, where it refers to an assembly of a pagan mob. The word also appears in the Greek Old Testament—the Septuagint, commonly abbreviated

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