Whatever Happened to the Church

Jesus once said he would build his church, and the gates of Hell would not prevail against it.  In the Greek text, the word church is “ekklesia”.  It simply means to call together an assembly or gathering. The tricky part in understanding what Jesus meant is that he didn’t speak Greek.  “Ekklesia” is the translation out of the Aramaic, and we only have several phrases that Jesus spoke in Aramaic in the New Testament translations.  The closest we have to the Aramaic would be the Hebrew Old Testament.  The Septuagint was a Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. The word “ekklesia” is used primarily to translate the Hebrew word “synagogue” which in English we translate as synagogue.  So Jesus might have been referring to the synagogue of his day and was saying he would build HIS  synagogue.  In this week’s teaching video we will take a look at what the early “synagogue” or “ekklesisa” or “church” looked like.  The description of what was vitally important to the early followers of Jesus, compared to the modern church in the Western world, makes me wonder, “Whatever happened to the church?” After watching the teaching, you might wonder the same thing.  Here is the link to Session #5 of our study in the book of Acts.  Alert!: the teaching was recorded off the camera audio instead of directly from my mic.  Baker has run the video through his best sound correction software, but it still is not great.  I hope it doesn’t’ bother you too much.