What is the Church in the New Testament

I'm writing a paper this week on the Spirit and the Church. I thought I'd do some thinking here.

First, in Paul's writings, we should really translate the word ekklesia more as an "assembly"--a local assembly in fact--than church.

[By the way, I have long assumed that the Assemblies of God Church took their name from some passage like 1 Corinthians 11:16 or 14:33--"the assemblies of God."]

The idea that the church are those who are "ek + kaleo"-ed, the "called out" ones, is rubbish from a linguistic and NT meaning standpoint, although it has some value as a sermon illustration. The churches of Paul are the local assemblies of people in house churches, primarily.

Paul can broaden the term, apparently. He speaks in Galatians 2:13 of persecuting the "assembly of God" where he must at least mean the believers of Jerusalem--a seemingly larger target than some sole house church. Here he refers to believers in a particular region, it seems.

Of course this broadening of the term reaches its fullness in Colossians and Ephesians, where the universal church is said to be the body of Christ (Eph. 1:23-24). This is a development from 1 Corinthians, where Christ is a part of the body, namely, the head (1 Cor. 12; but also Eph. 4:15).

An interesting parallel to Ephesians' use of "church" language is in Matthew 16:18, where Jesus tells Peter that he will build his "church" on the rock either of Peter or his confession of Jesus as Messiah or both. This of course does not refer to a local assembly but presumably to all who confess faith that Jesus is the Son of God.

Again, an interesting extension of this imagery is in Hebrews 12:13, where Hebrews refers to the "assembly of the firstborn" in heaven.

Some thoughts:
1. First, it is striking to me that this church imagery seems to presume embodiment and visibility. The local assemblies are clearly visible. The assembly in heaven of Hebrews, even if a metaphor of some sort, is a visual metaphor of people gathered in heaven.

And when Colossians and Ephesians extend the scope of the assembly metaphorically to include all Christians, the metaphor is visible and embodied. It is the body of Christ that is the church, not the Spirit of Christ! Indeed, "There is one body and one Spirit" (Eph. 4:4).

Here is where the relevance to my topic, the Spirit and the Church comes first into view. The Spirit inhabits the church. Here we see that the Spirit inhabits the church as the visible embodiment of the Spirit.

2. Second, we see that by very definition, the church is a collective concept, that is, it is plural. There is no such thing as an assembly of one. There are no instances in the New Testament where the church refers to anything close to one person. It implies both gathering and plurality.

When we come to appropriating this imagery today, new questions emerge that none of the NT authors might have imagined. Can there be a church of one? Is a person a part of the assembly of the firstborn without interaction or connection to the rest of the body?

This question is completely foreign to the Bible. When Paul removes a lone person from the assembly, he is delivering this person over to Satan. In the modern scenario, the ear doesn't talk down to the eye--it just leaves to go fishing. Paul's imagery of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12 requires that all its believers be on the same body (hard to do when you're not in the same room).

And when Ephesians suggests that we have one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all (Eph. 4:5-6), the theology doesn't work unless this is a unity expressed across a plurality of individuals, in this case, across the ethnic divide of Jew and Gentile. We are not to forsake the regular assembling of ourselves together (Heb. 10:25). Our forebears were of course way off in using this verse to make us feel guilty for not attending Wednesday night service... but if you are an Easter and Christmas nominal "Christian," the verse well suits.

In short, we might say of the lone Christian the same thing that Paul told husbands and wives: a believer should not stay away from the body of Christ except for a time, perhaps to devote oneself to prayer, then come together again so Satan will not tempt you (1 Cor. 7:5).