Weird Ideas: Apostolic ChurchSýnishorn

Let’s unpack the word “apostle.” It’s a transliteration, not a translation, which means it’s bringing the sound of a word from one language into another instead of importing its meaning. The New Testament Greek word for “apostle” is apostolos. Drop the final -os (which is grammatical) and you can see that English doesn’t translate the word at all. Translators just took it straight out of Greek and plopped it into our language.

Apostolos is a noun and derives from the Greek verb apostello. Look it up in any lexicon and you’ll see it translates to “send.” So in some static way, you could say an “apostle” is a “sent one.”

Fine. But that’s a bit wooden. Because more important than a word’s roots is how it’s used. There’s a more dynamic way to understand the word. An apostle is an ambassador.

An ambassador is someone sent on behalf of a king or government who speaks with authority on their behalf. That authority was all the more important in Jesus’s day. Before instant global communication, an ambassador couldn’t just pick up the phone to ask what his king wanted. He had to know the mind and heart of the king, the extent of authority he had to speak on the king’s behalf, and the limits of what he could do, understanding the full responsibility that what he said reflected on the government. An ambassador could make peace or start a war. If he abused that authority or spoke incorrectly, he would have to answer for it.

The Church doesn’t just guard a deposit of faith. And it doesn’t just witness. It acts on Jesus’s authority. The Church is his ambassador to a world not yet aware or not yet under his reign. It’s sent out to speak for Jesus, bring his blessing, and act with his authority. It’s an awesome responsibility. It has sadly been abused. But it is nonetheless what Jesus has commissioned his Church to do. It’s what it means to be apostolic.