As the other articles in this roundtable suggest, Catholics in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century were able to draw upon a long tradition of lay involvement in various lay apostolates, the renewed teaching on the role of the laity proclaimed at the Second Vatican Council, and the worldwide presence of forms of international lay organizations, including Pax Romana and Catholic student movements. Additional contributions to this discussion could easily include some of the other official and institutionalized forms of lay involvement that proliferated in the twentieth century—the rise of various new ecclesial movements such as Opus Dei, Focolare, and the Communità Sant'Egidio; the Catholic Family movement and other forms of lay-led renewal at the national and parish level that pursued the conciliar vision of the universal call to holiness with enthusiasm and persistence; the entry of thousands of laypeople into ministries and teaching roles previously restricted, in practice if not always in statute, to the ordained and to members of religious communities; and the particular roles of lay Catholics with historically oppressed or marginalized racial and ethnic identities in finding a voice in postconciliar Catholicism.

This article argues that the predominance of communion language in ecclesiology in the past fifty years frequently functions as another instance of the universalization of a theological position rooted in a particular, dominant context—the fragmented, post-traditional world of the late twentieth-century West. First, it briefly discusses the concept of a contextual theology. It then traces three of the major contexts in which communion ecclesiology developed: the ecumenical movement and its desire for a new language of Christian unity, the Roman Catholic community's desire for language pointing to the spiritual/theological reality of the Christian church, and the broader cultural context of fragmentation and real or perceived disintegration of community found in late-modern Western societies. Finally, the article looks at some examples of ecclesiological reflection occurring outside of the dominant consensus of communion ecclesiology: the work of José Comblin in Latin America, and that of Elochukwu Uzukwu and other theologians of the church in African contexts.

This article looks at two major metaphors used in contemporary ecclesiology, the church as “the People of God” and as “the Bride of Christ,” which have functioned in some of the polarizing debates within the Catholic Church in North America. It then suggests some methodological reasons why reliance upon metaphors in ecclesiology, either through the balancing of different metaphors or the promotion of a dominant metaphor, is inadequate to the task of understanding the church systematically. It then suggests some avenues for future ecclesiological method that may help to understand the church better and so to respond better to contemporary ecclesiological debates.