Matthew Miller

Is the Church a People or a Place?

This can lead us to wonder, Are we often misusing the word church? The answer has a bit of a story to it. And that story explains why we tend to use the word church in these several ways.
We begin in the first gospel. When Jesus says, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18), the Greek word for “church” is ekklēsia. In all 114 instances that the New Testament uses this word, it designates a people, or an assembly of people, responding to the call of God in Christ. It sometimes refers to the whole people of God and other times to a local congregation (Eph. 5:27; 1 Thess. 1:1). From ekklēsia we call the doctrine of the church “ecclesiology” and speak of the courts of sessions, presbyteries, and synods or assemblies as “ecclesiastical courts.”
In the New Testament, ekklēsia always designates a people, never the place where they meet. The family of Romance languages (such as French and Spanish, each descending from Latin) named the church directly from its New Testament word, ekklēsia. That is why the French speak of l’eglise and the Spanish of la iglesia, each derived from the Latin ecclesia.
It’s more complicated for us English speakers, however, because our word church is from another source. Together with German (Kirche) and Dutch (kerk), the English word church comes not from ekklēsia but from another Greek word, kyriakon, meaning “of a lord” or “belonging to a lord.” Whereas ekklēsia appears 114 times in the New Testament, kyriakon appears twice—once in 1 Corinthians 11:20, where it specifies “the Lord’s supper,” and once in Revelation 1:10, where it designates “the Lord’s day.” But nowhere does the New Testament use kyriakon to refer to the Lord’s people.
Over time, however, Christians began to refer to the meeting place where they would assemble—on the Lord’s Day, often to celebrate the Lord’s Supper—as the kyriakon (abbreviated version of “the Lord’s house”). This means that our word church does technically refer, at least originally, to the physical building and location where Christians would meet to worship.

Three Tests for Diagnosing Idols of the Heart

In recent years, the church has come to speak of this second kind of idols as “idols of the heart.” Is God the object of our hearts’ deepest affections and longings, or is something else captivating us? That “something else” need not be evil in itself. When Jesus says we must choose whether we will serve God or money, it is not because money is bad in itself; rather, as Paul says, it is “the love of money” that is the root of all kinds of evil (Matt. 6:21–24; 1 Tim. 6:10, emphasis added). Accordingly, our fallen hearts can take all kinds of good things—money, achievement, romance, patriotism, family, even a noble cause—and turn them into dangerous idols that lead us away from a pure devotion to the Lord and into spiritual adultery (with all the danger and misery that includes).
If you have an idol in your heart, you should not delay in dealing with it. But you must first know if it’s there, and that requires spiritual diagnosis. In this short piece, I want to suggest there are three symptoms that indicate the presence of an idol of the heart. If you find these three symptoms of idolatry present in your life, you need to take urgent action.
The first symptom of an idol is you continually find yourself thinking about it when you have nothing else to think about it. It operates like an obsession in the back of your mind, calling for constant attention. You think obsessively about winning the next game, or getting married, or that pressing issue at work, or the state of your portfolio, or the details of your kids’ lives, or what other people may be thinking or saying about you.
It would be entirely appropriate to give some of your attention to these things, and sometimes even significant attention to them. You would want to be prepared for tomorrow’s presentation at work, attentive to your child’s well-being, involved in the affairs of your nation, or committed to a good cause. But if you find that all of your thoughts have a way of funneling toward this central obsession, and have for some time, it signals the presence of something that has become an idol.
The second symptom of an idol is you find yourself taking unwise measures to attain it. You might date someone you know you shouldn’t date or let a relationship cross boundaries you know it shouldn’t cross.

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