Talk:Messenger

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A "messenger" is a representative of a local community of faith believers to a gathering of other messengers. I am more familiar with the term among Baptists, but I believe it was a common usage in other denominations. The usage goes back at least a few centuries in America. What qualified a person to be a "messenger"? What powers did they have as a group? What, exactly was this kind of messenger? Is there an obvious derivation from a more familiar meaning of the word messenger? There are countless examples of the usage in print. The one at hand is South Carolina Baptists 1670-1805, Leah Townsend, The Florence Printing Co., Florence SC, 1935.Garedessary (talk) 22:58, 27 September 2008 (UTC)garedessary[reply]

The definition given at the top of the page strikes me as too specific to be used as such[edit]

Messenger is mainly a general term for any individual who delivers a message, as defined in Collin's English dictionary (Unabridged, sixth edition), The Oxford English Dictionary (a copy of which I don't have to hand to confirm the edition) and wiktionary (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/messenger). With this in mind perhaps this use of the word should be at the top?--Bisected8 (talk) 21:34, 16 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]