Nice body

In Greek, the word 'soma' primarily means 'body'. Now because this idea of a body is given a metaphorical application to the diversity in the assembly of God, it can become a name for a group of Christians. You might say they are a 'body of believers', which works on both the level of collective noun as well as the descriptiony thingo.

You wouldn't know it to look at me, but I actually know some cool people. I myself am not a cool person, but I know some and can usually spot one a mile off. Believe it or not, I even know some cool people who are Christian. Mostly, they're baptists. But the few I know who aren't baptists go to Soma Church in Macquarie. Because the people I know who go there are cool, I assume everyone else that meets with them must also be cool.

This past week Soma Church has been on my mind a lot, as I've been studying Greek in preparation for the relatively tame Greek exam I had today (I'm tipping a distinction average for the class). The reason I've been thinking about Soma is because one of our base words for learning the Greek noun system is soma (σωμα), so it comes up quite a bit.

Unfortunately for the Soma Church crew, the word has a similar semantic range to the word 'body' in English. That is, our dictionary definition is:

σωμα: body, corpse.

It's cool to name your Christian gathering after the 'body' metaphor of the New Testament. It's slightly less cool to name it 'corpse'. Though incidentally, that also is an accurate way to describe some church groups.