WHAT DO YOU think of when you hear the word “church”? Perhaps you picture a cathedral or a building with a spire. Or you think of the place you currently call your church home.

But as you may already know, in the New Testament, the word that’s typically translated as “church” doesn’t refer to a building. It’s not a place, but a people, those whom God “calls out” of the world to himself.

Still, the English word “church” has its own Greek roots; ultimately, it derives from the word for “Lord.” We might say, then, that the church is the people who have been called to belong to the Lord. There is the Church with a capital C, referring to all those who have been called by God through the centuries and around the world. And we can also speak of “churches” — with a lower-case “c” — or “congregations,” local gatherings of people who meet together regularly.

Paul wrote about the church in a day before there were buildings constructed for that purpose; for the most part, believers gathered in private homes to worship together. It was an ongoing, organic fellowship of people who to some extent did life together. They were a diverse bunch whose membership violated the taken-for-granted boundary lines of ethnicity and social class. Their unity came from the one key thing they had in common: their allegiance to Christ.

Thus, as Paul writes to the Colossians about the supremacy of Christ, he briefly describes their relationship as a church to Jesus. Here are his words again, but this time, as they read in the Common English Bible:

He is the head of the body, the church,
who is the beginning,
        the one who is firstborn from among the dead
        so that he might occupy the first place in everything. (Col 1:18)

This was not the first time Paul used the metaphor of the body to describe the church. In his earlier letters to the Corinthians and the Romans, he did the same. To the divisive congregation in Corinth, for example, Paul wrote:

We were all baptized by one Spirit into one body, whether Jew or Greek, or slave or free, and we all were given one Spirit to drink. Certainly the body isn’t one part but many. …You are the body of Christ and parts of each other. (1 Cor 12:13-14,27)

And similarly, to the Romans, he wrote:

We have many parts in one body, but the parts don’t all have the same function. In the same way, though there are many of us, we are one body in Christ, and individually we belong to each other. (Rom 12:4-5)

The members of a church are like the parts of a body. Each may have a different function, but they belong together and depend on each other for the health of the whole. When everything works in harmony as it should, the body is able to do the work it was called to do.

In neither of these letters, though, does Paul refer to Christ as the “head” of the church. That way of speaking is reserved for the letters he wrote later to the Colossians and the Ephesians, letters which may have been written and delivered at about the same time. What does he mean by saying this?

There needn’t be one single explanation, as if Paul were trying to give a logical definition of what it means to be the “head” of the body. After all, if Paul can say that the church is the body of Christ — a body which includes a head as well as eyes and ears (see 1 Cor 12:16-21) — what would it mean to say at the same time that Christ himself is only the head of the body? That alone should warn us against pushing Paul’s imagery too far.

Instead of isolating Paul’s statement about Christ being the head from the rest of the verse, we should read it in context. Notice all the statements he makes about Christ in verse 18: he is the head of the body; he is the beginning; he is the firstborn; he occupies first place in everything. The last phrase is the most general, and I take it as encompassing everything else Paul says in the rest of the verse.

Let’s work backwards. To say that Christ “occupies first place in everything” is to claim that he is preeminent in every way. Prior to that statement, Paul again uses the idea of Christ being the firstborn. In verse 15, Christ was presented as preeminent in creation; here, he is preeminent in new creation and resurrection.

The word “beginning” can describe something that comes first in a temporal sense, but it typically means more than that. Paul uses the word four times in the letter, and in every other instance, the Common English Bible translates it as “ruler” or “rulers” — including in the statement just two verses prior to this one, in which he speaks of “thrones or powers or rulers or authorities” (Col 1:16). It’s also the word John uses to open his gospel: “In the beginning was the Word…” (John 1:1). Just as Christ was preeminent in creation, therefore, so too is he preeminent in authority over the church.

All of this, then, should help us understand what Paul means by “head” — it’s another expression of Christ’s superiority or preeminence, particularly in relationship to the communities of people that comprise the church. The word “head” can mean that Christ has authority over the church, but it also means that he is its source and origin. There is no church, there is no body, without Christ. We’ll see these words again in chapter 2, where Paul will speak of Christ as the “head” in relationship to the so-called “rulers” that are distracting the Colossians.

For now, though, it’s worth pondering what it means for the church to be the body of Christ. There is meant to be an organic connection between the body and its head. But I fear that we sometimes take that connection for granted as we go about the business of being Christ’s hands and feet. Indeed, in chapter 2, Paul himself will warn against those who have lost connection with the head.

That’s the danger confronting the Colossians. Is it confronting us? Let the body beware.