What Is The Church?

Most of us by now understand “church” as a “people”, and not a “building”; further clarified: The Church is “God's” people.

I've known this for some time. I’d even heard that it meant more specifically, “those who are called”; equating “church” with “called”. With that understanding, I thought I was a super theological scholar.

Let's get into translation. I was traveling through Montrose Colorado one Sunday. When you’re 72 feet long you don't just pull into any old convenience store and ask for directions. Thanks to www.parishesonline.com, I found my portal to the universal Church where I would meet heaven halfway, receive communion, and worship God in union with all the saints that day.

The problem was, when I got there, it proved to be one of those times when Google Maps wasn't entirely accurate in the placement of their pinpoint, and there were at least 3, or 4 different churches on this, Clint Eastwood-style, old-western block, and everybody spoke spanish. Finally there was one bilingual who taught me to say, “Iglesia Catolica”.

I said, “Right on! Gracias Amigo.”

This inspired me to track down the origin of the word, “church”, which is much different from Iglesia.

We get our word ”church” as a derivative of the word kuriakos, which is mentioned twice in the new testament for the assembly of God's people. It just means, “pertaining to The Lord”.

Happy to see the connection to our modern word, church, but still looking for the connection to iglesia I found that most of the references to the assembly of Christians, (over a hundred times in the New Testament), used the same word as is used in the Old Testament which is, ecclesia, which literally means, “to be called out of”.

This puts a whole new spin on who we are. We understand we are called to Him; in every Mass we say, “You never cease to call a people to Yourself…”. But like Matthew Kelly, a great modern Catholic author and speaker says, “every journey toward something is a journey away from something.” It is one thing to be called to God but another thing entirely to be called out of, or away from something.

Why is this important to us? Consider our father Abraham. He was called out of his homeland where all his loved ones were, and he was comfortable, to a place of which he knew nothing but the promise of God. It is very difficult to walk away from something when we don't even know where we are going.

The Israelites were called out of slavery in Egypt and back to the promised land. Why’s that important? Because we are being called out of the slavery to sin and to the promised land where we belong. We are living in a land that no longer recognizes the lordship of Jesus Christ. We can heed the same warnings as the Israelites prior to their entrance into the promised land about how tempting is is going to be fall into the idol worship of the people who are occupying our promised land. It's their land. We are strangers here in this land where they worship the idols of comfort and convenience, celebrities and entertainment power and the like. While we must live among them, we need not fall into their practices. Instead, our promised land is slightly elevated above this physical planet where we live in love.