ABSTRACT
This emerging, progressive ecclesial vitality stimulated the need as early as the 1970s, and with a growing urgency, to rethink the church. The classic ecclesiologies which tended to be deductive, ahistorical, clerical, and hierarchical, were deemed insufficient for giving an account of faith and ecclesial life in this situation, amid the waxing, developing Christian praxis. It became essential to narrate the believing life anew, to allow the light of the gospel to shine upon it, to impel it toward a further pledge and commitment.
