by June McGee

Created on: May 13, 2009

In order to arrive at and understand the answer to this question, we must first come to understand the question itself. When we state that we are "going to church" what we usually are saying is that we are going to a building of some sort, along with others of the same belief, to impart worship and praise to God. This is, in particular, a reference to the building itself in most cases and it is one of the biggest misconceptions we have in the church today. This is why we ask things like, "What was the name of the Biblical Church?" What are we looking for when we ask such a question? Are we trying to see if perhaps it would have been named the same as the church we are attending today? Maybe it was Catholic, or Methodist, or Lutheran, or any of a million other names men have placed on the church of today? Would it then tend to insight a certain pride in one's self for being in what we perceive to be "The Church of Old"? Look all you like; you won't find it if you are looking for a denominational name. I cannot say that divisions and disagreements over the Word didn't exist at that time in history, but they were not so far spread as they are today, so as to cause what we now have as Denominational Churches.

What we actually need to do is to define the word "church" before we can go any further. Church, as used most commonly in the Bible, refers to a meeting, a community, or an assembly of members, specifically denoting a congregation of God's People. In its very basic essence, the word church could refer to any gathering of people but most often it is a specific reference to a gathering of God's People. This is what church is; it is a gathering together of God's People and it actually has nothing to do with the building they gather in. So that is the significance of having a name affixed to it? The only reason we have names attached to church building is because we have conjured and invented so many different sets of beliefs under the banner of Christianity. There was, is, and will always be, only One True God and it should be that no matter what church you gather together with or in, it should all be pretty much the same. That is to say, whenever the people of God gather together one should hear the same teaching and the same preaching out of the same Bible. There should not be any different beliefs and if there are, then it ought not to be under the name of Christianity.

The church, the true church, Christ's Church, had no name, per se. It was simply a

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