[Jesus said,] "I will build My church."
   - Matthew 16:18

The day of Pentecost in Acts 2 is the Church's birthday. While the Lord was on earth He was not forming a Church, but presented Himself to Israel as their true King and Messiah and gathered a remnant of true believers and disciples around Himself, while the leaders of Israel rejected Him more and more.

These faithful believers of the Lord's time existed as individual followers of Christ and became the nucleus of the Church at its formation on the day of Pentecost. On that day they were baptized by the descended Spirit into the body of Christ and were thereby joined to their glorified Savior on high. "By one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free--and have all been made to drink into one Spirit" (1 Corinthians 12:13). Then they no longer existed only as individual believers but as a corporate body, the Body of Christ, and members one of another, linked together by the Spirit of God which now indwelt them. This was the beginning of the Church of the living God.

The Church is not a material building, but a body of living believers, living stones forming a holy temple in the Lord (Ephesians 2:19-22; 1 Peter 2:5). The believers meeting together in any certain place constitute a true Church, the building where they meet being but the meeting place, whether a home, hall, chapel, or formally designated church building.

From the meaning of the Greek word for "church" ("ekklesia"), we may observe that the Church of God is, therefore, a company of "called-out ones"--called out of the world--those whom God has called unto Himself by the gospel of His grace and who have accepted that gospel and the Savior it presents. They are thus separated from the world and are spoken of as "those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus" (1 Corinthians 1:2), which means "set apart" in Christ.

In harmony with this we have the words of James in Acts 15:14: "Simon has declared how God at the first visited the Gentiles to take out of them a people for His name." This is what the Church is: a people taken out of the nations for His name by the sovereign operations of the Holy Spirit.

Raymond K. Campbell