The Translation Problem

Written By Jason Nab

How one mistranslated word reshaped 1,700 years of Christian gatherings

biblicalekklesia.com  ·  Biblical Foundation Series

The Word We Lost

How a mistranslation changed what we think it means to gather

I've spent most of my life walking in and out of church buildings. I grew up in a Christian home, the kind shaped by parents who came to faith in the middle of the Jesus movement, back when following Jesus still felt like it cost something and looked like something real. And if I'm honest with you, something about the modern church never sat right with me. Not as a teenager. Not as an adult. Not even now, watching two family members serve as pastors and seeing up close what the machinery looks like from the inside.

I've watched men take the pulpit who know less about the Word than the people sitting in the pews. I've heard sermons pulled off the internet, or worse, generated by AI, because there wasn't time or will to sit with the text and let it work on a heart first. I've seen family members become estranged because a father wasn't leading his own household well, yet stood up on Sunday and told everyone else how to live. None of that is a new problem. But it made me start asking an old question with fresh urgency: what did Jesus actually say he was going to build?

Because whatever he said he'd build, it wasn't this.

Church isn't in your Bible

Here's something that surprised me when I first sat with it seriously. The word "church" does not appear anywhere in the original Greek New Testament. Not once. Every English Bible you own, mine included, translates a Greek word as "church" that never meant what "church" means to us today.

The word is ἐκκλησία, ekklesia. It shows up 114 times in the New Testament, and every single translation renders it "church." But that's not really a translation. It's a substitution.

Ekklesia comes from two Greek words: ek, meaning "out of," and kaleo, meaning "to call." Put together, it means "the called-out ones," or "the assembly of those summoned." In everyday first-century Greek, this wasn't a religious word at all. It was the word for the citizen assembly of a Greek city, the gathering that met when a herald went through town calling people out of their homes and shops to handle the public business of the city. Every person who heard Jesus say this word already knew exactly what it meant. It meant people, gathered.

The lexicon scholars still use to define New Testament Greek, BDAG, defines ekklesia at its root as an assembly of people summoned together, not a building or an institution. That's not my opinion. That's the standard reference work on the subject.

So when Jesus said this to Peter:

"And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." (Matthew 16:18)

He wasn't picturing a building with a steeple. He was picturing a people. An assembly, called out by God, summoned around his own name.

Even before Jesus said this, the word already had a history in Scripture. The Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, used ekklesia to translate the Hebrew word qahal (קָהָל), the word for Israel gathered together as a congregation before the Lord. Same idea. A people, assembled. Never a structure.

Where "church" actually came from

If ekklesia means "the called-out assembly," where did the word "church" come from?

There's a different Greek word, κυριακόν, kyriakon, which simply means "belonging to the Lord." It comes from kyrios, "lord." This word shows up exactly twice in the whole New Testament, and neither time does it describe a gathering of people:

"When you come together, it is not the Lord's supper that you eat." (1 Corinthians 11:20)

"I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet." (Revelation 1:10)

The Lord's supper. The Lord's day. Kyriakon is describing something that belongs to God, not a people who belong to each other in him.

But somewhere in the centuries after the apostles, once Christianity became the favored religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine, this word started getting attached to buildings. A "Lord's house." That word traveled north through the Germanic languages, changing shape as it went, until it landed in Old English as cirice, and eventually became our word "church."

So the word most of us grew up using for the people of God actually has its roots in a word for a building dedicated to God. That's not a small shift. It's the difference between "you are a called-out people" and "you belong in this structure." One is about who you are. The other is about where you go.

William Tyndale saw it, and it cost him his life

I didn't come to this on my own. Men before me saw this clearly and paid a price for saying so.

William Tyndale was the first man to translate the New Testament into English directly from the Greek text, in 1526. And when he came to ekklesia, he did not write "church." He wrote "congregation." He believed, rightly, that congregation carried the meaning of the Greek far more honestly than church did. Tyndale wasn't careless with words. He was a man who gave his life to getting them right.

"If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than thou dost." — William Tyndale

That's a man who believed ordinary people deserved the Word in their own language, plainly translated, without institutional varnish on it. And it's worth sitting with what that conviction cost him. Tyndale was condemned as a heretic and executed in 1536, strangled and burned at the stake. His refusal to use the word "church" was named among the charges against him.

Then in 1604, King James called together the Hampton Court Conference to commission a new English Bible, the one that would carry his name. Among the rules he gave the translators was this one, written down plainly:

"The old Ecclesiastical Words to be kept, viz. the Word Church not to be translated Congregation." — Hampton Court Rules, Rule 3, 1604

That is not a rule about accurate translation. That is a king protecting an institution. James sat as the head of the Church of England. A Bible that told English readers they were a called-out congregation, gathered by God, would have quietly undercut the entire structure of state religion he presided over. "Church" was the safer word. The more convenient word. And so it became the only word.

This isn't an attack on the King James Bible or that translation or the men who labored over it. But we don't have to guess at the king's reasoning here, because he wrote it down himself. Rule three of the Hampton Court instructions isn't a private letter someone uncovered later. It's the documented, explicit instruction James gave his translators, preserved in the historical record. A king who sat as head of the Church of England told his translators, in writing, to keep the word "church" and reject "congregation." That's not speculation about motive. That's simply reading what he ordered.

Tyndale wasn't alone either. Miles Coverdale's 1535 Bible often used "congregation." So did the Geneva Bible of 1560, the Bible the Puritans carried to America and the Bible Shakespeare read. Robert Young's 1862 literal translation rendered ekklesia plainly as "assembly." None of these men were confused about Greek. They were trying to protect the meaning.

Why this actually matters for how we live

Somebody might read all this and think, so what? Words shift over time. Does it really matter whether we say church or ekklesia?

I believe it matters enormously, and here's why, in plain terms.

It changes what you picture. When you read "I will build my church," most of us picture a building, a service, a program, a stage. None of that is in the text. But the word "church" drags all of it in with it, like baggage nobody asked for. When you read "I will build my assembly," you picture people. Called people. Gathered people. That's a very different image, and images shape how we live.

It changes what you think is required. If "going to church" means walking into a building with a paid professional up front and a structured program running, then starting one feels impossible for ordinary believers. But Jesus said something different:

"For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them." (Matthew 18:20)

Two or three. Gathered in his name. That already qualifies. You don't need a building, a budget, or a title to be the ekklesia. You need Jesus in the middle of you.

It changes what happens when you gather. Paul described what the early ekklesia actually did when it came together:

"When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up." (1 Corinthians 14:26)

That's not a description of an audience watching a performance. That's a description of a body, every part contributing something for the good of the whole. The word "church," with everything it's picked up over the centuries, makes this participatory picture harder to see. We've been trained to sit, watch, and receive. The New Testament ekklesia gathered to give.

It changes where you think it has to happen. The New Testament ekklesia met in homes:

"Greet also the church in their house." (Romans 16:5)

Not because the first believers were hiding, and not merely because they lacked resources, but because a home is a natural place for people to gather as people. The word "church" pulls our imagination toward a special building set apart for God. The word ekklesia leaves that question open, exactly as Scripture does.

What I believe we're meant to recover

I don't write any of this to condemn every building with a steeple, or to say every person who uses the word "church" is missing something. Plenty of faithful believers use that word and mean exactly what ekklesia means. Words can be redeemed by the people who use them well.

But I've spent enough years watching pastors preach borrowed words instead of studied ones, watched leadership fail while claiming authority, watched families come apart under the weight of positions men weren't living up to at home, that I've come to believe part of the sickness is upstream of any one pastor's failure. It's in the word itself, and the picture that word puts in our heads before we ever walk in the door.

Paul wrote this about the ekklesia:

"And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all." (Ephesians 1:22-23)

A body. Not a building. Not a program. Not a stage with an audience in rows. A body, made of parts, each one necessary, each one functioning. That is what Jesus said he would build, and that is what he is still building, with or without a building to hold it.

Ekklesia is not a place you go on Sunday. It's who you are, and what you do when you gather with other called-out people around the name of Jesus.

If that stirs something in you, don't take my word for it. Open your Bible and read it for yourself. Look up the word. Read the letters Paul wrote to actual house gatherings of ordinary people. See what he expected of them, and ask honestly whether what you've experienced looks like that. The Word of God does not need an institution to protect it, and it was never meant to be read only through someone else's eyes. It was meant to be read by ploughboys, by fishermen, by you.

For further study

On the word ekklesia

  • Walter Bauer, William Arndt, F.W. Gingrich, and Frederick Danker, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG), 3rd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2000

  • Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, eds., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT), Vol. III, Eerdmans, 1965

  • Dr. Tom Wadsworth, tomwadsworth.com — word studies on ekklesia and the nature of the church

On the history of the translation

  • David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography, Yale University Press, 1994

  • Adam Nicolson, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, HarperCollins, 2003

On the nature of the New Testament assembly

Greek language tools

All Scripture quotations are from the ESV unless otherwise noted.

Jason Nab https://www.biblicalekklesia.com