The people who, in faith, hold Jesus as their spiritual Lord together form the Church.

The Church is thus the body of people who share a faith in Jesus as their Lord.

Sometimes we talk about the Church as being 'The Body of Christ' on earth.

This can lead to all sorts of puns, because a 'body' might mean the physical form that a person takes (as in 'a living body' or 'a dead body') or alternatively a 'body' might refer to a group of people such as a body of soldiers, or 'the governing body' of a school (= the school governors, meeting together).
[We sometimes also speak of a 'corps' of soldiers. 'Un corps' is French for 'a body' - in both senses. Now compare this with the English 'corpse' which refers to a dead body].

Both types of bodies, of course, have 'members'.

In the case of a physical body, arms and legs and ears and eyes are described as members of our bodies.

In the case of a body as a group of people, the people who form the body are described as its members.

Saint Paul makes uses of these puns on being members of a body in 1 Corinthians 12.12-27.

We become members of the Church through our baptism.

Another kind of 'church' altogether is a building in which a fellowship or a congregation of Christians meet together to worship God.

When we write about a church building in this sense, we usually give it a little letter on the first ('initial') letter, to distinguish it from 'the Church' as the body of faithful Christians (Church (1)) above.

Yet another way in which we use the word 'Church' (with or without an initial capital letter) is to describe the various divisions and denominations of the world-wide Church in (1) above.

Thus we have the Church of England, the Anglican Church, the Methodist Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church and many, many other branches of whole Body of Christ on earth. Or we can talk about the Orthodox churches or the Protestant churches, and so on.

© J D Yule 2003