How Entire Church Cultures Shift

When Words Lose Meaning, Truth Loses Precision

You have read your Bible. You have sat under preaching. You have heard Hebrews 13:16 — "But to do good and to communicate forget not" — and quietly assumed it was a reminder to greet people warmly, to stay in touch, to be approachable. You have heard Hebrews 9:27 — "It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment" — and watched preachers pound pulpits with it as though the verse begins and ends with God's wrath. And in both cases, you walked away with less than the text actually gave you.

This is not your fault. Walk with me.

As I studied Hebrews 13, I noticed in verse 16 that the word ‘communicate’ in the KJV was translated in the Yoruba version as ‘pínfúnni’ which means ‘giving or charity’. Immediately it caught my attention; ‘communicate’ in English  today means to talk to people, share ideas. So I took a deeper dive to investigate. 

When you check the Greek New Testament, in Hebrews 13:16 and look at the word the KJV translates as communicate. The original word is κοινωνία — koinōnia. You may recognise it. It is the same word translated fellowship in Acts 2:42, the same word used in Romans 15:26 for a financial contribution to suffering saints. Its core meaning is not speech. It is shared life — participation, partnership, the giving of what you have so that another can live.

When the KJV translators wrote communicate in 1611, they were being precise. The Latin root, communicare, meant to share, to make common, to distribute. In their English in the 1600s, "to communicate" was "to give a portion of yourself to another." It was almost a perfect carrier for koinōnia.

But language shifted.

Today, communicate means to talk. To express. To transmit information across a distance. And so the modern reader of Hebrews 13:16 reads a command to have good conversations — and completely misses a command to live a sacrificially shared life.

The text has not changed. The language lens has.

Now imagine you are a pastor over a congregation of a thousand or more. You read Hebrews 13:16 from your pulpit without doing the excavation. You teach communication — good interaction, warm greetings, open dialogue. Your congregation nods. They go home. And over years, without anyone deciding it, your church quietly becomes a gathering of listeners, not a community of sharers. Conference-style. Polished. Largely disconnected.

This is how entire church cultures shift. Not through rebellion — through precision loss.

The writer of Hebrews was not telling the early church to talk more. He was saying: do not forget to distribute, to carry one another's burdens, to make what is yours available to another — for with such sacrifices God is well pleased. The early church heard koinōnia and asked, "Who lacks? What can I give? How do I carry this person?" That question birthed Acts 2:44–45. That question is what we have slowly, quietly, stopped asking.

The same precision problem appears in Hebrews 9:27, though the mechanism is different. Here it is not a word that has drifted — it is a verse that has been severed from its sentence.

"And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment."

Churches quote this verse to press the reality of divine judgment, and they are not wrong about the doctrine. But they are wrong about the verse. Look carefully at what the writer does next. He does not stop. He places a colon — a deliberate grammatical signal that the thought is unfinished, that what follows explains what precedes.

Verse 28: "So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation."

The subject was never judgment. The subject was Christ. The writer used the universal reality of death-followed-by-accounting as an illustration — an analogy — to make a point about the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus. Just as a man dies once and then faces what follows, so Christ was offered once, bearing sin, and will come again. The colon connects them. Sever the verses, and you lose the Christology. You are left with a warning stripped of its hope. Think of it this way, if I say “Just as it is not possible to give birth without pregnancy: so it is not possible to be saved without Jesus”, and then someone breaks the second part of the sentence away and begins to emphasize the process of childbearing, they would not be entirely wrong because the statement about childbeating is true, even science supports that. But wait a minute, that’s not the nucleus of my sentence. I only used childbearing to illustrate my main point.

This is what happens when we read verses instead of reading the full arguments/intention of the writer.

Language is the container of revelation. When the container cracks, the content leaks. The Holy Spirit did not inspire vague impressions — He inspired specific words, in specific languages, arranged in specific structures, for a reason. The koinōnia that built the early church would not be recovered by feeling — it will be recovered by precision. The Christological argument of Hebrews 9 will not be achieved by good intention — it will be preached correctly by reading the colon and connecting the second part of the sentence.

You do not need to be a Greek scholar. But you need to be a person who loves the Word enough to ask: what did this word actually mean? Why is there a colon here? What is the writer actually arguing?

The instruction is still available. The question is whether we want it badly enough to do the work.

I ask that the Holy Spirit will help you and me, so that we will not lose the weight of meaning behind His word. In this contemporary world, many things are becoming vague. We live in a culture where the meaning of words and concepts have so much shifted from the depths they used to have. You would do yourself and your audience a huge favour if you pay attention and to the extra work.

Peace to you and Mercy.