From being a rather insignificant and somewhat frightened group, the apostles
were transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit and boldly preached the message they
had learned from Jesus. Wherever they preached, those who came to believe in Jesus
and who accepted baptism formed themselves into small communities. These
communities would meet for prayer and particularly for the celebration of the Eucharist.
They also supported and helped one another, and shared their goods in common (see
Acts 2:42-47).
The early communities ultimately came to be called ekklesia, the Greek word for
church, which means a grouping or assembly of people. In most northern European
languages, the word church comes from the Greek Kyriake oikia, meaning the family
of the Lord. Always, therefore, the essence of church is a gathering, a family, a closeknit group. Sometimes the word was applied to a small house gathering or to Christians
in a specific locality; sometimes it was applied to the whole group of Christians
everywhere. So, even today, a small gathering for celebration of the Eucharist can be
called church; so also can all the Catholics in a local area such as a diocese. Catholics
all over the world constitute the Universal Church. Such a diverse use of the word is
obviously confusing, and so, when we use the word today, we must be well aware of the
context. Only much later in history did the word church is to be applied to the building
where the ekklesia worships and celebrates the Eucharist.
From this somewhat sketchy summary of the beginnings of the church some
important points emerge. From its origin, church means people: people who believe in
Jesus, who come together to profess their faith, to worship and celebrate together, to
commemorate the Lords death and resurrection and to help one another. Therefore, one
of the salient features of the early Christian church was a sense of community, a sense
of togetherness. Community a helping, sharing, caring community is the bedrock
principle on which the church is built. The human race was meant to live in harmony and
peace with God, with one another, and with the earth, but sin changed all that. Jesus
Christ came to re-establish our true unity with God and with one another; his work was to
overcome the destruction and alienation of sin. His instrument for accomplishing his
purpose is the church built on the ideal of community, a community centered in the
Eucharist where it experiences Christs unifying presence.
However, as time went on, the church became more and more institutionalized
and defined in legalistic terms. The sense of church (community) was to a large extent
lost; the church became an it, not a we. This loss of the sense of being church, of our
own personal involvement in church affairs, is truly a tragic quirk of history that has had
the effect of altering our whole thinking and our whole theology of church. One effect, for
example, is the way we think about and participate in the sacraments. We too often tend
to view sacraments as things done to us, things that we receive from the ministers
of the church, rather than actions we do. Another effect of the legalistic definition of
church is that the word church came to be applied almost exclusively to the leaders of
the church: the Pope, bishops, and clergy. The general tendency of those who write or
speak about the church today is to identify the church with its leaders. It is true that
these leaders are an essential part of the church; however, they belong to the whole
people of God and are not separate and apart from this people. They should not, and do
not, form a special caste, though this is often the common perception.
Source: Theology for Teachers, Ian Knox, CSSp, Claretian Publications, Quezon City, 2011, pp.
165 167.