Words worth
explaining.

Christadelphians use some words in their own way, and some older words that are no longer common. Each one here is explained in a sentence or two, with a link to the fuller study where there is one.

Meetings and fellowship

Ecclesia

The word Christadelphians use for a local congregation, instead of “church”. It is the New Testament’s own Greek word, meaning an assembly of people called out.

Ecclesial

Belonging to an ecclesia or to ecclesias. Ecclesial autonomy means that each ecclesia manages its own affairs and makes its own decisions, with no headquarters over it.

Breaking of bread / memorial service

The main meeting each week, usually on Sunday, where members share bread and wine to remember Jesus’ death as he asked (Luke 22:19; Acts 20:7). It looks forward too: “ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Corinthians 11:26).

Fellowship

In everyday use, friendship among believers. In its technical sense, the recognition between members and between ecclesias that lets them break bread together, because they share the same faith and obedience (Acts 2:42).

Withdrawal

An ecclesia’s formal act of ending fellowship with a member or another ecclesia that persists in serious error of teaching or conduct (2 Thessalonians 3:6). Its aim is correction and, if possible, restoration.

Central fellowship

The largest of the groups of Christadelphian ecclesias that recognise one another, taking its name from the Birmingham Central ecclesia. Most Christadelphians in the world belong to it.

Birmingham Amended Statement of Faith (BASF)

The statement of the gospel used by most Christadelphian ecclesias as their basis of fellowship. “Amended” refers to a change to its clause on resurrection and responsibility made in 1898.

Doctrines to be Rejected

A list printed with the statement of faith, naming teachings that ecclesias do not accept, such as the immortality of the soul and the Trinity. It sits alongside the positive statement of what is believed.

Words about belief

Responsibility / responsible

Accountability to God for what we know of his will. A responsible person is one who will be raised to stand before Christ at his judgment, because God’s word has reached them (John 12:48; John 15:22). This is not a threat but an invitation: to know God’s will is to be called to answer it with faith and obedience. See Responsibility: who will be raised to judgment?

The Kingdom of God

God’s rule set up on the earth when Jesus returns, with Jesus reigning from Jerusalem on the throne of David over Israel and all nations (Daniel 2:44; Luke 1:32–33). It is the gospel’s central hope. See The Kingdom of God on earth.

Immortality

Freedom from death. Only God has it now (1 Timothy 6:16); human beings do not have an immortal soul. God will give it to the faithful when Christ returns: “this mortal must put on immortality” (1 Corinthians 15:53).

The devil / satan

Satan is a Hebrew word for an adversary; devil comes from a Greek word for a false accuser. The Bible uses them of human opponents and of sin itself, the power Christ destroyed by his death (Hebrews 2:14), not of a fallen angel. See Satan, the devil and the real enemy.

Sin in the flesh

The tendency to sin that belongs to mortal human nature since Adam. Jesus shared that nature but never sinned, and so God “condemned sin in the flesh” in him (Romans 8:3).

“Clean flesh”

A teaching, rejected by Christadelphians, that Jesus’ nature was free of the sentence passed on Adam, so that his death was wholly for others. Scripture says he “likewise took part of the same” nature as us (Hebrews 2:14). See The sacrifice of Christ.

Words about prophecy

Historicist

A way of reading Daniel and Revelation as a continuous outline of history, fulfilled step by step from the prophet’s own day to the return of Christ. It is the method of John Thomas and Robert Roberts, and of this website.

Day for a year

The principle that in symbolic prophecy a day stands for a year, “I have appointed thee each day for a year” (Ezekiel 4:6; Numbers 14:34). So the 1,260 days of Daniel and Revelation are read as 1,260 years.

Seals, trumpets and vials

Three series of seven in Revelation (chapters 6–8, 8–11 and 16). Read historically, the seals trace the Roman Empire to the end of its pagan rule, the trumpets the invasions that broke it in the west and the east, and the vials the judgments on Europe from the French Revolution onward. See Revelation unsealed.

Gog

The leader of the great northern confederacy that invades the land of Israel in the latter days and is overthrown by God (Ezekiel 38–39). With John Thomas and Robert Roberts, we identify him with the power that holds the far north, today Russia. See Ezekiel 38.

Holy oblation

The square portion of land set apart in Ezekiel’s vision for the sanctuary, the priests, the Levites and the city, “five and twenty thousand reeds” each way (Ezekiel 45:1; 48:8–20). See Models and maps.

Books and writers

Elpis Israel

John Thomas’s book of 1849, whose title means “the hope of Israel”. It sets out the gospel of the Kingdom from Genesis onward and remains a foundation of Christadelphian teaching.

Eureka

John Thomas’s detailed exposition of the book of Revelation, published in three volumes in the 1860s.

Christendom Astray

Robert Roberts’s lectures comparing the teaching of the churches with the Bible, subject by subject. Our studies suggest the relevant lecture as further reading.

Sulley

Henry Sulley, a Christadelphian architect who drew a detailed reconstruction of Ezekiel’s temple in The Temple of Ezekiel’s Prophecy. Our temple model follows his plan.

The Bible Companion

A plan of three daily readings drawn up by Robert Roberts, taking the reader through the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice each year. See Daily readings.