How Many Times Is “Church” in the Bible? 77 Times in the KJV, All in the New Testament

The KJV says “church” 77 times. Add “churches,” 37 more, and there are 114, every one in the New Testament. The first is Jesus speaking to Peter: “upon this rock I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). Behind nearly all of them stands one Greek word, ekklesia, an assembly.

An assembly is people, gathered. In ordinary Greek the word meant citizens called out of their homes into one public place, and the first Christians took it for themselves. So when the New Testament says “church” it names people: a household meeting in a home, the believers of a city, the whole people of Christ, called out and gathered to him.

Where does the word “church” appear in the Bible?

Unevenly. The word never appears in Mark, Luke or John, and Paul’s letters hold more than half of it.

If you count every verse of the King James text from Genesis to Revelation, these are the numbers you will get. Other Bibles come out slightly different, because translators do not always choose “church” for the same words; the Greek count, which does not depend on any translation, comes further on.

Acts first uses the word at the close of the Pentecost chapter: “And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved” (Acts 2:47). From there it follows the gatherings of believers as they spread. Acts 11:26 has both “church” and “Christians”: at Antioch “a whole year they assembled themselves with the church,” and “the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.” “Christian” is much rarer than “church”: the KJV uses it only three times, at Acts 11:26, at Acts 26:28, where King Agrippa says, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian,” and at 1 Peter 4:16: “Yet if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed.”

Paul writes to churches by place: “Unto the church of God which is at Corinth” (1 Corinthians 1:2), and to a church that met in a home, “the church that is in their house” (Romans 16:5). Two of the 114 do not translate the Greek word for church. In Acts 19:37 the town clerk of Ephesus says the Christians are not “robbers of churches”; the Greek word there is hierosylos, which Strong’s concordance defines as “a temple-despoiler”, and the temples in question were pagan ones. In 1 Peter 5:13, “The church that is at Babylon,” the Greek has no word for church at all, only a greeting from the one in Babylon chosen together with the readers, and the translators supplied “church.”

Where is the church first mentioned in the Bible?

In the order of the Bible, the first mention is Matthew 16:18, and it is Jesus who says it. He has asked his disciples, “But whom say ye that I am?” and Simon Peter has answered, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replies: “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:15–18). The first time the word is spoken, it is a promise, and the builder is Jesus.

The other two Gospel uses come two chapters later, in Jesus’ teaching on a brother who sins against you. If private correction and then two or three witnesses fail, “tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican” (Matthew 18:17). In the first saying the church is something Jesus will build; in the second it is a gathering that can hear a dispute and settle it.

Did Jesus use the word “church”?

In the Gospels, three times, all in Matthew and all quoted above. In Revelation the risen Christ uses it far more. John hears “a great voice, as of a trumpet” and turns to see one “like unto the Son of man”, who says, “I am he that liveth, and was dead” (Revelation 1:10–18). That voice tells him to “send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea” (Revelation 1:11).

And he speaks to seven churches. “The seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches,” he explains (Revelation 1:20). Each of the seven letters that follow is addressed “Unto the angel of the church” of or in its city (Revelation 2:1), and each carries the same call: “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches” (Revelation 2:7). The book closes with “I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches” (Revelation 22:16). Of Revelation’s 20 uses of “church” and “churches,” 19 are in Christ’s own words; the other is John’s greeting, “John to the seven churches which are in Asia” (Revelation 1:4).

Why is the word “church” not in the Old Testament of the KJV?

Because the Old Testament’s word for Israel’s gathered people is Hebrew, qahal, and the KJV translates it as “congregation,” “assembly” or “company,” most often “congregation,” 86 times. The Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, often used ekklesia for that word; Thayer’s Greek lexicon describes this use as “the assembly of the Israelites”. The Catechism of the Catholic Church adds that the Greek Old Testament used it “above all for their assembly on Mount Sinai where Israel received the Law”, the day Deuteronomy remembers as “the day of the assembly” (Deuteronomy 9:10).

The New Testament shows the link twice. Stephen, retelling Israel’s story, says Moses “was in the church in the wilderness with the angel which spake to him in the mount Sina” (Acts 7:38). And Hebrews quotes a psalm. Psalm 22:22 reads, “I will declare thy name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee.” Hebrews 2:12 quotes the same line as “in the midst of the church will I sing praise unto thee.” The psalm’s congregation and Hebrews’ church are one gathering in two English words.

Not every English Bible keeps the word out of the Old Testament. The Douay-Rheims, a Catholic Bible translated from the Latin Vulgate, uses “church” in 29 Old Testament verses, 10 of them in Judith, Sirach and 1 Maccabees. Its Psalm 21:23, the verse the KJV numbers Psalm 22:22, reads “in the midst of the church will I praise thee,” and Deuteronomy 23:1–3 says that certain people “shall not enter into the church of the Lord.” The Vulgate has ecclesia in that psalm, the Latin form of the Greek word, so the Douay’s Old Testament church is the same assembly of Israel that the KJV calls the congregation.

What does “ekklesia” mean?

In ordinary Greek, ekklesia was a city’s public assembly. Thayer’s lexicon defines it as “a gathering of citizens called out from their homes into some public place”, and traces it to a word meaning “called out or forth.” Acts 19 shows that everyday meaning. When a crowd gathers in uproar at Ephesus, Acts uses ekklesia for it three times, and the KJV says “assembly”: “the assembly was confused,” the clerk tells them a complaint belongs “in a lawful assembly,” and then “he dismissed the assembly” (Acts 19:32, 39, 41).

The early Christians took that word for their own gatherings. The same word that named a confused crowd in Ephesus came to name the people Christ calls out of every home. Cyril of Jerusalem, in one of his catechetical lectures, wrote that the church “is rightly named (Ecclesia) because it calls forth and assembles together all men”. The English word has a different origin: the Catechism explains that “church,” like the German Kirche, derives from the Greek kyriake, which means “what belongs to the Lord.”

If you count in Greek, ekklesia appears 115 times in the verses of an edition of the Textus Receptus, the printed Greek text behind the KJV, and 114 times in a modern critical edition, the SBL Greek New Testament. Blue Letter Bible’s concordance gives 118 for the Textus Receptus because it also counts three closing notes printed after Romans, 2 Timothy and Titus. The KJV renders 112 of the 115 as “church” or “churches” and the other three, in the Ephesus riot, as “assembly.”

Is the count the same in every Bible?

No. In five other Bibles, counted verse by verse as the KJV was, the word also stays in the New Testament, but the totals differ:

• the Reina-Valera 1960 has its word for church 108 times, 72 singular and 36 plural;
• the Almeida Revista e Corrigida has it 110 times, 74 and 36;
• the Van Dyck Bible (Smith-Van Dyck) has it 112 times, 76 and 36;
• the NIV has “church” 79 times and “churches” 35, 114 in all, and the ESV 74 and 35, 109 in all.

A handful of verses make the difference. The Reina-Valera and the Almeida both say “congregation” at Acts 7:38, where Stephen speaks of Israel in the wilderness, and at Hebrews 2:12, where Hebrews quotes the psalm, and both call the men of Acts 19:37 sacrilegious rather than robbers of churches. The Reina-Valera also says “congregation” at Hebrews 12:23 and at 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. The Almeida, like the Greek, has no word for church in 1 Peter 5:13, and the Van Dyck differs from the KJV only at Acts 19:37 and 1 Peter 5:13. Whichever of these six Bibles you count, you will find a total of 114 or a little below it, no use in the Old Testament, and Matthew 16:18 first. The Douay-Rheims, as we saw, also has the word in the Old Testament.

What does the New Testament mean by “the church”?

In the New Testament the word names people: a gathering in one house, the believers of a city, or the whole people of Christ, sometimes all within one letter.

The local church and the whole church

Most uses are local: “the church of God which is at Corinth,” “the church that is in their house,” the seven churches of Asia. Others take in every believer. The church Jesus will build on the rock in Matthew 16:18 is one church, and Paul writes that God gave Christ “to be the head over all things to the church, Which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all” (Ephesians 1:22–23). Hebrews speaks of “the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven” (Hebrews 12:23).

The body of Christ

Paul pictures the church as a body. “Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular,” he tells the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 12:27), and to the Colossians he writes that Christ “is the head of the body, the church” (Colossians 1:18). Each believer is a part with its own work, and Christ is the head. How that image shapes worship and life together is the subject of how the church is the body of Christ.

The bride of Christ

He also pictures it as a bride. “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it,” Paul writes, so that he might “present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing” (Ephesians 5:25–27), and he adds, “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32). Revelation ends with the same image, the new Jerusalem “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2). Christ’s love for the church, as the New Testament describes it, is gathered in Jesus’s love for the church.

When was the church first called “catholic”?

About the year 110, in a letter. Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the Christians of Smyrna, urged them to stay with their bishop, “even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church” (To the Smyrnaeans 8). It is the first known place, the Catholic Encyclopedia notes, where the phrase is found, though “some difference of opinion prevails” over exactly what Ignatius meant by the word. Cyril of Jerusalem, writing later, gave his own reason for the name: the church “is called Catholic then because it extends over all the world, from one end of the earth to the other.”

The word passed into the Nicene Creed, which comes from the councils of 325 and 381 and which the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls “common to all the great Churches of both East and West to this day.” In the Orthodox Church in America’s wording, it confesses faith “In one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.” The free course Christianity: What Christians Have Believed for 2,000 Years has a short lesson on why Christians say the creed.

Catholic and Presbyterian teaching agree that “catholic” means universal, and differ over where that church is found. The Catechism says the word “means ‘universal,’ in the sense of ‘according to the totality’ or ‘in keeping with the whole.’” It teaches that the one Church of Christ “subsists in” the Catholic Church, “which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him” (816). The Westminster Confession, the confession of Presbyterian churches such as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, speaks of the church in two ways. First, “The catholic or universal church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the Head thereof” (25.1). Then, “The visible church, which is also catholic or universal under the gospel … consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children” (25.2).

Both reach back to the first time the word was spoken, to a people Jesus would gather to himself: “upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).

Related reading

• How is the church the Body of Christ?
• 22 Bible Verses About the Church
• Jesus’s Love for the Church
• What Is Christian Worship?
• What happened on the day of Pentecost?
• What “apostolic” means, and how apostolic churches differ