ecclesiast

From Ancient Greek ἐκκλησιαστής (ekklēsiastḗs).

ecclesiast (plural ecclesiasts)

1. A member of the Athenian ecclesia (public legislative assembly).
2. (rare) A member of any ecclesia (church or other assembly).
   • 2006, Richard Higgins, Gods Agenda with 2006 Apocalypse Calendar (→ISBN), page 133:

     ... way of Grace, Charity, and this new way was to treat everyone as if he is your brother And that unlike the chosen race of the Jews you don't have to be born into this set of people the ecclesia which is the Greek word for Church, so to join the right church we automatically become an ecclesiast. You can join if you follow your inner mind, What now passes of as Jewish is a sect of people who follow all sorts of extended Old Testament rules and solidly based for the Israeli's of that era.

   • 2009, David S. Potter, A Companion to the Roman Empire (→ISBN), page 233:

     Menodora, from the otherwise unknown city of Sillyon, distributed cash awards [...] 77 [denarii] for each member of the assembly [...] In this city the members of the assembly (ecclesiasts) were clearly a privileged group, not co-extensive with the citizenry as a whole, The ecclesiasts’ wives were also a privileged category.

3. A cleric; someone (such as a priest) who administers a church (ecclesia) or other religious gathering/group.
   • 2007, Gabriel Audisio, Preachers by Night: The Waldensian Barbes (15th-16th Centuries) (→ISBN):

     As we have seen, the Waldensians took the apostolic lives led by their barbes as proof that they spoke the truth, just as, contrariwise, it proved the priests who lived unworthy lives had no power. Again, Monet Rey gives the most precise explanation of the matter in 1494:

     The ecclesiasts had and possessed too great wealth and more goods than they needed; it was for that reason that they committed many bad actions; [...]

   • 2012, Laura Jarnagin, Portuguese and Luso-Asian Legacies in Southeast Asia, 1511-2011 (→ISBN):

     Furthermore, the large numbers of conversions in the Vietnamese polities of Tonkin and Cochinchina, widely publicized in Europe in the 1650s by jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes, had caused a dilemma. There were not enough priests to minister to these expanding flocks, yet the ecclesiasts of the Padroado Church were reluctant to sanction the ordination of local Christians.

   • 2013, Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History, Routledge (→ISBN), page 59:

     Leonti Mroveli, it is assumed, was an ecclesiast, Mroveli being the adjective for the diocese of Ruisi, whose bishop he probably was. His shadow is very faint: textual evidence leaves us with A1) 1072 as the latest date at which he could have written ...

   • 2015, Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story Of Auschwitz (→ISBN):

     The priests and nuns in the camp proved that they had real strength of character. One rarely met that except in deportees who were animated by faith in an ideal. Apart from the clerics, only the active members of the underground, or the militant communists, had that spirit. Many of the ecclesiasts were executed shortly after they arrived.

   • For more examples of usage of this term, see Citations:ecclesiast.

• Ecclesiastes