Semantics

“You’re just playing with words, aren’t you?  All this talk about church and ekklesia and kuriakos is just a smokescreen.  Everybody knows what church is.”

According to any good dictionary, semantics is the study of words and their meanings, including changes in meaning over time.  However, this word itself seems to be undergoing a change in meaning.  The way it is used popularly gives the impression that it is not about meanings but about the manipulative and seductive use of language to make a point that would otherwise be difficult to make.

For many people, semantics is little more than ‘playing with words’.  And this is often the charge brought against people who attempt to get at the truth of a matter by using the meanings of words and noting how meanings have either changed or been manipulated in the process.

‘You’re just playing with words’, or ‘That’s just an exercise in semantics’ is a charge I regularly hear if I ever get to engage with people on topics they have a vested interest in.  This subject of church is one of them.

The truth is, they are the ones ‘playing with words’ – they are the ones engaged in the manipulative and seductive use of language to make a point.  Indeed, the case of the word ‘church’ is one we should be protesting loudly about.

King James I, when putting together the translation team for what we know as the Authorised Version of the bible (the King James Version), gave a specific instruction to translate the key Greek word in such a way that the readers of the book were led to believe that the man-made structures of the christian religion were God’s true ecclesia.  That was playing with words. 

King James himself engaged in an exercise in the manipulative and seductive use of language to make a point that would otherwise be difficult to make.  And to this day – for the same manipulative and seductive outcome – we perpetuate the error.

It is quite clear to many – though few will admit it – that the choice of this word by the writers of the New Testament was deliberate and this word had a very clear meaning at the point in time when it was chosen.

And an important part of that meaning is that it referred to things that were distinctly not the institutions of the day, but rather a congregation or assembly of the ordinary people of the day, chosen and tasked for a particular function.  In Greek society at the time, to refer to their ekklesia as synonymous with their institutions would have been preposterous on the one hand and insulting on the other: preposterous to the Emperor and the institutions and insulting to those who made up the ekklesia.

The point is – from the beginning, there was a clear distinction made and that distinction needs to be continued.  We cannot let the evolution of language rob us of such a fundamentally important truth as the ecclesia, especially given that the evolution was not natural but imposed deliberately to confuse the matter and to conflate two distinctly different things into one murky mass of mediocrity.

There are institutions and there is ecclesia.  I reiterate – they are as different and distinct as dogs and fish.  And it is not I who is making this a matter of playing with words.  I am making it a matter of semantics – actual meanings of words.  It was King James, and so many others who have not undone his mischief, who are playing with words and abusing language for their own vested interests.

The prophets of today, as in every generation since the ecclesia was born at Pentecost, know that this is true.  Many ordinary people know deeply, in their heart of hearts, that the ecclesia of God is not the same thing as the institutions of religion; they just don’t quite know what is real or what to do about it.  The institutions insist on demanding allegiance to them on threat of believers losing their salvation – at best, calling people back from ‘backsliding’ and ‘forsaking assembling’.

The truth is, the accusers are the ones guilty of backsliding and forsaking assembling and are, I believe, genuinely at risk of getting to the finish line and hearing the words, “depart from me, I never knew you.”

The demands of the institutions look, sound and feel very much like the actions of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day.  If it looks like a duck etc., etc., etc….!  Indeed this is a suggestion made by a number of writers today.

Yes, I am exercising semantics – because it is absolutely vital to understand this issue.  No, I am not engaging in ‘playing with words’ and the ones accusing me of doing so are the very ones guilty of that charge.

A very old phrase says, “Methinks he doth protest too much”.  I have learned in life that when I hear repeated pained loud public protests on a subject, I am hearing and seeing what that person is guilty of.  This has proved true over and over again.  If you weren’t guilty of it, you would not be protesting so long and loud about it.

It is time for the ordinary believers to stand firm and say strongly to the institutions, “You are not the ecclesia: not now, never have been, never will be.”

I have reached a point of saying, let the institutions have the word ‘church’ (though I disagree that they are ‘the Lord’s possession’ as the word means), but make a clear distinction between that and ecclesia, and make it clear that ecclesia is God’s called-out people, not organisations, programs, buildings and clergy.  In ‘church’, men get to decide who is in and who is out; in ecclesia, that is a matter for God – because, in ecclesia, it is not about a faith or a religion but about a passionate relationship between a Father and his children, mediated by Jesus, not by a priest or a reverend or a pastor.

Put another way, church is external, ecclesia is internal.  Church is always other and external; something you join or don’t join; something you go to, belong to or attend.  Ecclesia is always internal – a matter of personal transformation and romance; you don’t join it, it joins you to your Father and brothers and sisters; it is not something you go to or belong to or attend, it is what you are.

This matter is a matter of semantics – and rightly so – because we seem to have lost our way and so many people have been brutalised and killed.  But for years we have been lied to and deceived by the very ones telling us we are wrong and they are right.

In Why Revival Tarries (1959), Leonard Ravenhill has a message titled, ‘WANTED – A PROPHET TO PREACH TO THE PREACHERS’.  I would be delighted to do that job. Indeed, I have done it from time to time – and at sixty years of age and over forty years in christian ministry, perhaps I might just be qualified.