Ecclesia: Without Community, There Is No Church

Pastors say the word church every week. Congregations say it even more. We say it when we mean a building, a service, a time slot on a Sunday morning.

The word itself will not cooperate with that. Church is based off of a Greek word, ecclesia, and ecclesia essentially means community.

Community.

So without community there is no church. It is not a church building or anything like that. That is not a slogan I workshopped for a landing page. It is sitting in plain sight underneath a word we all use every day, and it has shaped almost every decision I have made over the last several years. This essay is my attempt to look straight at it: what the word means, what it says about the way we do church now, and why I ended up betting a product category on it.

What ecclesia actually means

Ecclesia is not a religious-architecture word. In the Greek of the New Testament it is an assembly word: a people called out and called together, a gathering. When the New Testament writers needed a word for what Jesus was building, they did not reach for a temple word or a venue word. They reached for the word that meant a people gathered to one another.

I finished seminary in 2022 with an MDiv in Christian Ministry focused on global studies and missions, and I have always been really passionate about people feeling connected within the church. A lot of that passion comes from exactly this. The word church is built on ecclesia, and ecclesia means community. That is not a metaphor I chose. It is the plain content of the word.

You can watch the word take on flesh in Acts 2. The first believers gathered in each other's homes, ate together, prayed together, held their lives in common. I am not going to walk through that passage verse by verse, because the early church model already does that properly. I will only point at its shape: from the church's first days, church meant a people bound to one another, not a place people visited.

When church became an event

In the modern context, that can get lost. The focus becomes the sermon, or the worship.

I want to be careful here, because I mean this precisely. The sermon and the worship are great things, and they should be a part of the coming together of believers. I am not against preaching. I am not against singing. But there is much more to it than that, and a lot of that "much more" has to do with actual relationships with the people in the church.

When the service becomes the whole definition, church quietly turns into an event you attend rather than a people you belong to. A person can attend the event faithfully for years and never be folded into the ecclesia at all, because attendance and community are two different things, and only one of them is in the word. There is a longer form of this argument in the church is a people, not only an event, and I will let it stand rather than restate it here.

Known and being known

One of the ideas I try to live by is based off of 1 Corinthians 13. It is the idea that love is knowing somebody and being known by someone. That means you fully know another person and they fully know you, and the only way to get there is through deep relationships, the kind only community makes possible.

I have seen what that looks like when it is real. I came to faith in Thailand, not in the States, in rural country right on the border of Laos, surrounded by a community of Thai and Lao Christians who were strong and who knew one another. At the time I could not have told you much about the church in Acts 2. Looking back at that community now, it is easy to see. They were living out church as Acts 2 describes it.

The research points the same direction, for what research is worth on something like this. The church assimilation work Win and Charles Arn carried to pastors ties early friendships to who puts down roots in a church and who drifts out of one. There is a fuller and more careful look at that in the 7-friend threshold. But I did not start with the research. I started with the word, and with the people on the Laos border who were living it.

Community is how disciples are made

My philosophy on the word ecclesia is based in the idea of community, and that idea runs straight into discipleship. Jesus told the disciples to go therefore and make disciples of all nations, teaching them and baptizing them. That is Matthew 28. The human element is so necessary in walking alongside one another, and walking alongside one another is what discipleship actually is. You cannot walk alongside people you do not know.

I will say one honest thing about my own life here: I build with AI every day, I probably talk to AI more than I talk to most people, and it has never once spiritually fed me. Formation happens between people. Deeper connections lead to deeper relationships, and deeper relationships lead to better discipleship. If the Great Commission is the assignment, community is not an add-on to it. Community is the ground it grows in.

Why I built a company on a Greek word

When I started building FlockConnect, the why was already sitting in the word. I wanted to build something that would help people get connected, and help pastors see who is connected to one another in their church. Not another place to keep records. A way to take connection, the actual relationships between the actual people, seriously as the substance of the church rather than a nice extra.

That is why the category FlockConnect sits in is called a Church Relationship Manager. The theological root of ChRM is not a market analysis. It is ecclesia. If the church is community, then the relationships inside a church are not soft data around the edges of the real thing. They are the thing itself.

And it is why I have never thought of this as a product for American churches. Christianity transcends culture. God created humans in his image to have relationship with him, and he created man and woman to have relationship with one another, so relationship is integral to the creation story itself. And relationships are integral to ecclesia, to church, in every country and every culture where the church exists. A congregation in Southeast Asia or Latin America is an ecclesia in exactly the sense a congregation in North Carolina is.

So here is the organizing question, the one underneath everything I build: how can we do a better job at stewarding the relationships in our churches?

Not producing a better event. Not counting attendance more accurately. Stewarding relationships, so that people are known and not merely counted. My hope is that FlockConnect strengthens the human element within churches, and that relationships between individuals flourish. But the conviction is bigger than any product, and it will outlast this one. The sheepdog essay on this blog says it plainly: the church needs to become more human, not less.

Without community there is no church. With it, the church is exactly what the word has meant all along.

About the author

I am Michael Tribett, the founder of FlockConnect. I hold an MDiv in Christian Ministry from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (2022), and I came to faith in Thailand. I have served at my church since 2018, where my wife and I now lead a small group and serve in youth ministry. FlockConnect exists because I believe what this essay says: ecclesia means community, and the relationships inside a church are the church.

How this was written: built only from Michael Tribett's own recorded and written words, arranged with AI, then edited by him until it read as his. How FlockConnect uses AI