Talk:Church

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[edit] Preparing for page moves

Previous discussion seems to indicate that there is some consensus to have separate articles on church qua building, church qua gathering of worshippers, and several other senses of the term. Before any changes are made, I think it would be a good idea first to hammer down exactly how we're going to do this. Here some synthesis of the proposals from above, which I personally find favorable:

• church (building) for what the present article currently describes.
• church (body) for a body of worshippers
• Church will serve as a disambiguation page and also contain information on the senses of the term that do not yet (or likely never will) have articles. From Nowhither's list:
  • A local community of Christians who meet together regularly, often having clear standards or rituals for membership ("I belong to this church."
  • The primary regular, usually weekly, meeting of such a group ("I'm going to church.")
  • The legal/corporate/organizational structure of such a group ("The church has title to 3 acres.")
  • A Christian denomination ("My church has local congregations in 20 cities.")
  • All followers of Jesus, worldwide ("The invisible church includes people in every nation.")
  • All Christians (or just those of a particular denomination) living in or near a particular city ("The Pope is theoretically just the bishop of the church in Rome.")
  • The leadership hierarchy of a Christian denomination, esp. of the Roman Catholic Church ("The church has repressed the laity for centuries.")
  • Clergy work, as a profession ("The younger sons inherited no land, and so found other professions; the second went to the army, the third, to the church.")
  • A building whose primary use is as a meeting place for a Christian congregation ("My church is on 3rd Street.")
• Church (disambiguation) will redirect to church or be deleted (I assume the former is more likely to happen).

So what does everyone think? Simões (^talk/_contribs) 00:02, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

If we must have two articles, then the disambiguation plan you mentioned will work quite nicely, I believe. It won't necessarily be a problem if there are some duplicate definitions (e.g., explaining in both building and community the origin of the word church), as people will usually only be looking for one article anyway. Even if they read both, a little bit of duplication is not a problem, and is quite common on Wikipedia. -Patstuart^{(talk)(contribs)} 00:13, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

The suggestion:

• church (building) for buildings and those lovely photos etc.
• church (body) for a body of worshippers
• Church will serve as a disambiguation page and also contain information on the senses of the term that do not yet (or likely never will) have articles.

Sounds very agreeable to me. Psalmuel (talk)

I do not think church (body) is very clear. The use of "body" in this sense is technical and is not likely to be understood by readers who are not already familiar with the subject. It is likely to be misunderstood as referring to the human body, as if "church" was a name of a bodily organ. I suggest church (group) or church (organization). --FOo 01:06, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I agree with this comment. Perhaps church (congregation)? I think Church (organisation) might be more appropriate for the church as an institution (vis state) or as a corporation. Then I am unsure of the relationship between the concept of Church (body) and Ecclesia (Church) which I haven't seen mentioned here. I agree with Church as a disambiguation page, and Church (building). -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 01:20, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I just saw that "Church (congregation)" pretty much already exists as the stub congregation (worship). I suppose the disambig page can point to that instead of a new article. Simões (^talk/_contribs) 01:26, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I get the impression that 'congregation (worship)' is related to a more specific gathering than the 'church (body)' we are talking about here. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 19:08, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

In order to retain the page histories we are going to have move the article currently at Church Buildings to Church (building), which is currently a redirect. There appears to be consensus for that much. The article at Church (disambiguation) could also be moved here to Church (this also seems agreed). We just need to decide what to call the page about church community/bodies/groups, so we can move this page to the new name. Perhaps someone could elaborate a definition so we can determine a suitable name. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 19:08, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

update, User:Psalmuel has decided to create another article at Church (Origin) to make his point. This will obviously have to be renamed. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 20:28, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Or deleted. There's no content in that mess worth keeping. We can create the new article just as easily once a consensus is reached, so I went ahead and prod'ed it. Simões (^talk/_contribs) 20:50, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Initial page moves

I moved the contents of Church Buildings and its talk page to church (building). I think a better course of action would have been to have an administrator delete church (building) and then move Church Buildings to it so the talk page history will follow, but I guess this will do well enough without getting an administrator involved. I've come to the conclusion that page moving is way too powerful of a tool for regular users to have.

What's left is to move the contents of church (disambiguation) to church. I'd do that, too, but I don't have time at the moment to fix all the double redirects it would create. Simões (^talk/_contribs) 21:16, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Update: zzuuzz has pointed out on my talk page that by WP:MOVE we should always consider it worth getting an administrator involved in this type of fiasco. I'll go ahead and revert my own changes (if someone else doesn't beat me to it). Simões (^talk/_contribs) 21:21, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

• This mess needs to be cleaned up. Totally agree with Church as disamb page, and Church (building) containing the current info in Church Buildings. I'm not sure why we need a Church (body) article, can't this definition just be one sentence on the disamb page? --JW1805 (Talk) 01:32, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Hi, I'm an admin. I've gone ahead and moved Church Buildings to Church (building). I'll be offline for the next three days, but after that, please let me know if I can help any more - there seem to be a number of moves necessary? Cheers. -GTBacchus^(talk) 06:27, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

I think all remains to be done for now is to delete church (Origin) and move church (disambiguation) to here. From there, we'll work on fleshing out the disambiguation page and anything else that needs to be done (and can be done without the assistance of an administrator). Thanks for your help! Simões (^talk/_contribs) 19:38, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good. Move the disambiguation page here. Where shall we put the content that is currently here? How about church (group)? -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 22:33, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

church (group) sounds acceptable to me. Is there enough salvagable content on this article to warrant it being kept there, though? Simões (^talk/_contribs) 22:55, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm going to suggest that the material currently in this article is merged into the article at Ecclesia (Church). The content repeatedly mentions εκκλησια - ekklesia, and seems to be about nothing much else. It would expand the historical element to that article. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 19:29, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree. We need two more pages from Nowhither's list.

* "church" as a local group/gathering, of which there is more than one, as distinct from the global Church. This is used both in everday speech and has biblical basis (e.g. Acts 14:23, Rev 1:11).

* "the Church" as a political or historical entity in civil society. This is important even in contemporary thought - eg. The separation of church and state. -- nigelhenry ^(talk) 11:14, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I think we've put off finishing this task for long enough now. What were we trying to do again? ;)

Okay, so we're:

• merging this page with Ecclesia (church).
• moving church (disambiguation) to here.

With each article having its own talk page, this should be nice and messy. How should we begin? Simões (^talk/_contribs) 07:41, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Agree to merging existing page here with Ecclesia (church) but keep merged article here and keep disambiguation where it is User:itohacs Itohacs 13:07, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Deleted Change

My recent edit was reverted, and Simoes said to see the disambiguation page. I did, and it says that "Church" is a body of people who share a faith, and points to the page I edited. Thus, it is not only Christian. Suggest page "Church (Christian)" to replace this page, and page "Church" for all organizations which call themselves churches. And, edit the disambiguation page to say: Church a body of people who share a faith Church a body of people who share the Christian faith

But if this page is just about a body of people who share a Christian faith, then my edit should stand. Will wait a while and change it back.

Also, a church is a legal thing, isn't it? This general "chruch" page has to have a general definition, like the one I supplied.

Maybe you are fixing this, but putting "Church" into the search and hitting GO, takes me right to the page I edited.

No, I'm gonna revert to my edit, till this is straightened out. People don't need to be told, even for a moment, that "Church refers to the group or body of persons who share faith based in Christianity."

Ok, now there exists *Church (Christianity), a body of people who share the Christian faith.

Which has of now the same text as

• Church, a body of people who share a faith.

Martinphi 22:21, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

P.S. This should be seen as an emergency POV edit, due to the rather extreme nature of having "Church" refer only to Christianity. I'm sure it will get changed to another organization when all this is straightened out.

Martinphi 22:30, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi Martinphi. Your edit was just bad timing. This page is currently at a critical point in terms of what it will contain in the future, and several other articles will be affected by what happens here. If you see the above discussion you will notice that we were just about to have this article moved. However, for my part anyway, I have changed my view. The content of this article has changed a fair bit since we started this discussion, and it has also become apparent that nobody is really quite sure what this article is about, least of all me. ISTM it may be best to expand this article to fully disambiguate the different concepts of 'church', including any secular uses of this concept. A lot has already been written about the origin of the term in the bible. There is some prime copyfodder in the Ecclesia (church) article which could be merged here to supplement it. There could be short sections on the relationship between churches and church buildings, and non-Christian churches (eg Church of Scientology), something about church and state or organised churches, the relevance of church services or meetings, etc all leading off to other articles. But all in relation to this group of people known as 'church' (Christian or otherwise). We seem to already have a few section suggestions from previous discussions. The current disambiguation page is probably OK where it is, as long as the full article on church (building) is prominently linked from somewhere, I think this article will trump a diambiguation page here through its coverage of the primary uses of the term, church. My view is now that we should keep and expand this article. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 22:46, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, thanks for your kind reply Zzuuzz, I thought later I might have been stepping on toes a little too much in that edit, since I'm new to this page. Is there any real alternative to having "Church" be a general article and a nexus point for other articles, since this is the page people hit first? The Origins part works well for a general page.

Martinphi 00:22, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure that this is the primary usage of the term. The context I hear it most often is actually referring to buildings. Webster's dictionary also supports this, listing the building definition first[1]. So by this standard, Church (building) should be here. On the other hand, it is true that at least a couple different senses of the term have enough currency of usage that many looking up the church article will find that it isn't referring to the sense in which they're interested. These considerations, I think, warrants going with the original plan of moving Church (disambiguation) to here and merging the present content with Ecclesia (church). Simões (^talk/_contribs) 20:29, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Church (Christianity)

• I don't get it; Church (Christianity) is identical to Church. I'm making church (christianity) a redirect. —EdGl 03:28, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] etymology needed

I see - oddly enough - no discussion about the etymology of this word. It is not a Greek word but Saxon-Nordic or perhaps Germanic. (kirk). Should at least be mentioned.Brosi 22:42, 28 December 2006 (UTC)