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Part 1 : The Meetings of the Assembly

If you have read many of the articles on this site, you know that I frequently refer to the ekklēsia, the assembly of people whom God has called out of the darkness of this world into His marvelous light (1 Peter 2:9). Naturally, readers frequently want to know what the meetings of the ekklēsia were like and how they can conduct meetings of the ekklēsia today. This article is the first in a series in which I will answer these questions.

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Are You Meeting in God’s House?

It is common to hear people refer to the building in which the church meets as God’s House or the Lord’s House or something similar. Probably you have heard it: “It’s good to see you in God’s House today,” “We should be in the Lord’s House every Sunday.” Sometimes a loose reference is made to Scripture, such as Psalm 122:1: “Let us go into the house of the LORD.”

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Ekklēsia or Church, Does It Matter?

In the New Testaments of most English Bibles, the words “church” and “churches” appear a total of over one hundred times. (From now on, I will use “church” to stand for both the singular and plural.) With one exception in the King James Version (found in Acts 19:37), all of these instances of “church” are mistranslated from the Greek word ekklēsia. (Unless I am quoting a portion of Greek text, I will use the lexical form ekklēsia.) That’s right, I said mistranslated. Not only that, they are a deliberate mistranslation of ekklēsia. The fact that this mistranslation is so widespread and that it is deliberate should cause us to suspect that it is important to know what ekklēsia really means. In this article, I am going to tell you the origins of the word “church” and its meaning, what ekklēsia means and how it was used in history and the Bible, what Jesus meant by His ekklēsia, why ekklēsia was deliberately mistranslated as “church”, and why all of this is important.

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