Church, church, "church" - Part 1 - Definitions

There are many loaded words within the Christian vocabulary.  One of the most burdened of these is:  church.  It's meaning shifts willy-nilly with the context of the discussion and the background of the individual.  I've observed more arguments among Christians over this single word than perhaps any other word in the English language.  Most of these arguments involve conflict among three primary definitions of the church.  For the sake of simplicity, let's call them:  Church, church and "church."

1.  Church:  The sum total of all Christ followers throughout space and time.  That concept of a great "cloud of witnesses" referred to in Hebrews 12:1.  It is important to note that this includes "God-followers" - those who followed God before Christ was known.

2.  church:  An individual gatherings of believers.  

3.  "church":   Church culture.  The shared language, beliefs and behaviors of a particular group of Christians.

Those of us at the fringes of organized Christianity often find ourselves there because of bad experiences or fundamental disagreement with the entity commonly referred to as church.  But which is the right definition?  Which of these do we really have the problem with?  Is it possible that there is still a place for us?

So what is the church?  Probably anyone who has ever cracked a study bible will know that the Greek word for church in the New Testament is "ekklesia."  The word means simply "gathering" or "assembly."  It is built from the Greek preposition "ek" [out] and the verb "kaleo" [to call].  Some readers have found in the etymology of this word ("called out ones") a demand for a kind of fundamentalist separatism based on 2 Cor 6:17 in which Paul cites Isaiah 52:11 - "Come out from their midst and be separate."  However, while one can certainly read this into scripture, it's hard to legitimately get such a reading out of it.  Louw-Nida's Greek lexicon observes, "this type of etymologizing is not warranted either by the meaning of [ekklesia] in NT times or even by its earlier usage."  Even without considering the isolation and exclusivity this definition has caused, it appears that it simply isn't justified.

Now, we generally identify an "assembly" of people by the reason they come together.  In Greek culture, the ekklesia was a governmental assembly tracing back to the democratic voting body of Athens in the 5th century BCE.  However, the Jewish culture of Jesus' day would have understood ekklesia as it is used in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) - the religious assembly of the people of God.  Governmental overtones may well have been present when referring to the corporate body of Israel as well.  Jesus and the first Christians, as Jewish people, would naturally have adopted this latter usage for their own gatherings, both formal and informal.  This is exactly what we find in the NT.  So it seems we can fairly refine our root definition of the Christian church/ekklesia as a gathering of those devoted to Jesus as Christ [messiah].  Across the varying uses of the word in the NT, this is the root meaning.  When in doubt - when there is no obvious clarification - this is the primary emphasis to which we must fall back.

Questions:

1.  Which of the above definitions of church do you struggle with?  Which do you agree with?

2.  Does the information we've surveyed support one of the above definitions better than the rest?

3.  How does the idea of a "Universal church" fit into what we have looked at?