The Prayer Thread is a collection of teachings and practical prompts to help as we learn to pray in community. This text was originally delivered on February 21, 2025 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
The greek word, “ekklesia,” is formed by two parts. The first part, “ek” means “out of” or “from.” The second part, “Klesia” comes from the root word, “Kaleo” which means, “to call.” So, literally, the greek points to a sense of being called out from.
In translation, it has come to mean “assembly.” In its greek context, it referred to the gathering of local men who made decisions about common life. In the early Christian church, it was appropriated and became a synonym for “the church.”
Especially our time, the meaning narrowed to refer primarily to the institutional church. Therefore, if one studies ecclesiology, one studies what it means to be church, especially through the lens of its institutional structures.
As I imagine the gatherings of early Christians, knowing from historical context, that they most often assembled in domestic spaces, due both to not being a formally recognized church, as well as to the fear of persecution, I sit with the meaning of being “called out from” the private, domestic realm into the public realm. I imagine the tensions that early Christians held as they figured out how to translate the intimate, life-transforming patterns of their domestic assemblies, into a public-facing manifestation of the initially domestic patterns.
Gathering around food and oral testimony. Telling stories of transformation and making sure that everyone who come to the table had something to eat; finding way through customs of dress, food preparation, who speaks and when; all of these patterns developed from the intimate realm of the domestic assembly. The ordinary elements of home–bread, water, oil, fire, cloth, slowly got translated into the more public expressions of institutional gatherings as the fruits of the Spirit manifested within the early, life-changing gatherings.
Therefore, though our contemporary understanding of ecclesial leans toward an emphasis on institutional patterns, these memories of the early Christian assemblies invoke a sense of ecclesial patterns as originated in the ordinary, intimate realm of the domestic church. The ekklesia is both private and public. The patterns of prayer formed in the intimate setting of home and family are “called out” to spill-overr into life-giving patterns of prayer and presence in our common public life.
May we, today, become more at-ease as we continue in the work of translating the ecclesial patterns of domestic prayer into the ecclesial structures of public life.
