Head of the Church – A Messianic Title of Jesus
Introduction
Paul understood the image he was reaching for when he called Jesus the head of the church. The church, cut off from Christ, would be precisely that: religious forms with the life drained out. The metaphor fits.
Paul's statement in Colossians 1:18 grounds us: Jesus is the head of the church because he is "the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy." The resurrection is the ground of the headship. He leads his people from the other side of death, and the church gathered in his name exists because the tomb was empty.
The Greek Title and Its Meaning
The title comes from two principal texts: Colossians 1:18, kai autos estin hē kephalē tou sōmatos tēs ekklēsias (καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν ἡ κεφαλὴ τοῦ σώματος τῆς ἐκκλησίας), and Ephesians 1:22, where God has appointed Christ as kephalē hyper panta tē ekklēsia, head over all things for the church.
Kephalē (κεφαλή) is the ordinary Greek word for head, both anatomical and metaphorical, and it carries two overlapping meanings that together define what Paul intends. The first is authority and direction: the head governs the body, sets its course, and initiates its movements. The second is source and origin: in Greek usage, the kephalē of a river is its headwaters, the point from which the whole stream flows. Both meanings are active in Paul's usage. Jesus governs his church and is the source from which it draws everything it needs to live.
In the ancient world, the head was also understood as the seat of reason and the origin of the body's vital signals. Galen, the preeminent physician of the ancient Mediterranean, located the body's governing intelligence in the head. When Paul describes the church as a body whose head is Christ, his readers would have heard both the governance image and the organic-dependency image simultaneously. The body does not function by generating its own direction. It receives direction from the head.
Sōma (σῶμα) is the word for body, and Paul's use of it for the church is among his most distinctive contributions to Christian theology. The church is not a voluntary association of individuals who share common beliefs. It is an organism, a living body with members who are genuinely connected to one another through their shared connection to the head. The body metaphor demands both the headship of Christ and the interdependence of believers. Neither can be separated from the other without losing the image.
Ekklēsia (ἐκκλησία) means assembly or gathered community. In Greek civic life it referred to the assembly of citizens called together to conduct public business. In the Septuagint it translated the Hebrew qahal, the congregation of Israel. Paul uses it for the community gathered in Christ's name, both the universal church and the local congregation.
Key Occurrences in Scripture
The Old Testament Background
The title Head of the Church is primarily a New Testament formulation, but it draws on a long tradition of God's relationship to Israel as the one who leads, governs, and sustains his covenant community.
The language of headship in the Old Testament is frequently tied to kingship and covenant. Deuteronomy 28:13 places Israel at the head rather than the tail among the nations as the outcome of covenant faithfulness, establishing head-and-tail language as a way of describing supremacy and direction. Psalm 18:43 uses the same register when the LORD makes the psalmist "the head of nations." In the prophets, God's relationship to Israel is described in terms of a shepherd leading a flock, a king governing his people, and a husband sustaining his household. Each image carries the same logic: the life and direction of the community flows from the one who stands at its head.
Ezekiel 37, the valley of dry bones, is the most arresting Old Testament image of a community restored to life from the outside. The bones are scattered, the nation is dead, and it is the breath of God that reassembles and reanimates the body. The image anticipates the New Testament claim that the church exists because God raised the dead: the body of Christ's people is animated by the same power that raised its head.
Colossians 1:15-20 and 2:9-19
In the Christ hymn of Colossians 1, the headship claim appears as the second of two great declarations. The first addresses the Son's relationship to creation: he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, the one through whom and for whom all things were made. The second addresses his relationship to the new creation: "And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy."
The structure is deliberate. Creation and new creation are both gathered under the same head. The one who holds all things together is also the one through whom broken human beings are being gathered into a living body. His cosmic supremacy and his churchly headship are not two separate roles. They are one lordship exercised at two levels.
Colossians 2 extends the image in two directions. Verse 10 declares that believers "have been brought to fullness" in Christ, "who is the head over every power and authority." The headship over the church is grounded in a more comprehensive headship over the entire cosmic order: no power, angelic or political, stands above him. Verse 19 warns against the danger of losing connection with the head, "from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow." The ligaments and sinews are not decorative details. They are the relational and spiritual connective tissue of the community. A church that is truly joined to Christ will be joined to one another.
Ephesians 1:20-23
Paul's account of the headship in Ephesians develops the cosmic and churchly dimensions together with even more force. God raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, "far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come." He placed all things under his feet. Then comes the declaration that makes the church's identity astonishing: "And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way."
The one who fills the entire cosmos is somehow completed, expressed, and manifested through his church. The word plērōma, fullness, is the same word used in Colossians 1:19 for the divine fullness dwelling in Christ. The church is the fullness of the one who is himself the fullness of God. This is not a comfortable or manageable claim. It is a staggering one: the risen and exalted Lord, head over every authority in existence, has appointed the gathered community of his people as the place where his presence is specifically and bodily expressed in the world.
Ephesians 4:15-16 and 5:23
Ephesians 4 shifts from declaration to instruction. The goal of Christian maturity is stated in terms of the head-body relationship: "we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work."
The body grows upward into the head. Maturity is not growing away from Christ into independence. It is growing into greater conformity with him, greater dependence on him, greater expression of the love and character that flows from him through every ligament and sinew of the community.
Ephesians 5:23 applies the head-body image to marriage: "the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior." The qualifier matters. Christ is the head of the church as its Savior. His headship is defined by self-giving rather than domination. He is the head who gave himself for the body, not the head who used the body for himself.
Theological Significance
Two Headships, One Lord
Paul distinguishes between Christ's headship over the church and his headship over every power and authority, and both matter for understanding the title. His headship over the powers (Colossians 2:10; Ephesians 1:21-22) is the headship of the victor: every cosmic, political, and spiritual authority stands beneath him, subject to his sovereign rule. His headship over the church is the headship of the lover: he gave himself for it, nourishes it, and is building it toward the fullness of his own character.
These two headships are not unrelated. The church's confidence in its own head rests on the fact that every other authority that might threaten or diminish it is subject to him. No power that rises against the church stands above its head.
The Resurrection as the Hinge
The resurrection is the event that makes the headship real. Colossians 1:18 is precise: Jesus is the head of the church because he is the firstborn from among the dead. A dead Christ could inspire a movement, generate a philosophy, or leave a collection of teachings. A risen Christ can actually lead a living body. The church follows someone who is alive, who is present, and who holds the future open.
This is also why the church's confidence in its head is not nostalgic. It does not look back to a founding figure and try to preserve his legacy. It looks to a living Lord who is actively present and who has promised to build his church (Matthew 16:18).
The Head as Source
The kephalē as source, not only as authority, gives the head-body image its organic character. The church does not generate its own life and then submit it to Christ's oversight. It draws its life from Christ in the first place. Every capacity for love, every impulse toward holiness, every act of genuine service flows from the head through the body. Paul's warning in Colossians 2:19 about losing connection with the head is a warning about spiritual death, not merely disobedience. A limb severed from its source does not simply become less effective. It dies.
The Fullness of Christ
The claim in Ephesians 1:23 that the church is the fullness of Christ is the most demanding theological statement attached to this title. The one who fills all things in every way is expressed and manifested specifically through his people. The church is not a human institution that Christ patronizes from a distance. It is the body through which his presence takes visible, corporate, embodied form in the world. When the church loves its neighbors, speaks the truth, serves the suffering, and gathers to worship, it is functioning as the body of the one who is its head. When it fails to do these things, it is not merely performing poorly. It is failing to be what it is.
What This Title Means for Christian Faith and Practice
The church is a notoriously messy institution. Every generation of Christians has had to reckon with the gap between what the church claims to be and what it visibly is. The title Head of the Church does not paper over that gap. It names the only solution to it.
Every substitute head the church has tried has failed. Celebrity pastors who become the de facto center of their congregations reproduce their own strengths and limitations throughout the body. Denominations that define themselves by their distinctive doctrines or practices produce communities shaped by those distinctives rather than by Christ. Movements built on a particular cultural or political identity produce churches that look more like that identity than like him. The body becomes like its head. If the effective head of a congregation is anything other than Christ, the congregation will gradually look like whatever it has placed at its center.
The headship of Christ is also the only basis for genuine unity in a community of people who disagree about nearly everything else. Paul's argument in Ephesians 4 is that the church's unity comes from its shared connection to one head through one Spirit. Unity constructed from shared demographics, shared preferences, or shared politics is fragile and finally sectarian. Unity constructed from the shared bond of each member to Christ holds across every other division, because the head is the same for all of them.
The church exists because the tomb was empty. Its head is alive, present, and active, directing his body with the same authority he holds over every power in the universe and the same love with which he gave himself for it on the cross. The ligaments and sinews hold. The body grows. The head has never been absent.
Sources
Arnold, Clinton E. Ephesians. Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010. See commentary on Ephesians 1:20-23 and 4:15-16.
Dunn, James D. G. The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon. New International Greek Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996. See commentary on Colossians 1:18 and 2:19.
Fee, Gordon D. Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study. Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007.
Lincoln, Andrew T. Ephesians. Word Biblical Commentary. Dallas: Word Books, 1990. See commentary on Ephesians 1:22-23 and 5:23.
O'Brien, Peter T. Colossians, Philemon. Word Biblical Commentary. Waco: Word Books, 1982. See commentary on Colossians 1:18 and 2:10.
Liddell, H. G., Scott, R., and Jones, H. S. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Entries: κεφαλή (kephalḗ); σῶμα (sōma); ἐκκλησία (ekklēsía).
Strong, J. Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Entries: G2776 (kephalē); G4983 (sōma); G1577 (ekklēsia).
See Also
Names of God:
