– Book Review 5 – Leonardo Boff, Ecclesiogenesis

Author: Leonardo Boff, was educated in his native Brazil and Munich, Germany. He is author of numerous books, including Jesus Christ Liberator, Ecology & Liberation, cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, and most recently Holy Trinity, Perfect Community.

Theme: The Basic Church Community (community base Christian gathering where the laities plays a central role) is the new way of church which up to this point has relied on structure and hierarchical organization.

Summary: The author uses the basic church community seen in the country of Brazil as a model to speak of the new way of church; which breaks the structure of the traditional organization and focuses on the people and the community. The issues that are raised through this from of emerging church (although the authors does not identify as such) is the definition of church, the will of Jesus regarding it and the practical aspect of clergy-less Eucharist and Women Priesthood.

Reflection: Here again we see the discussion regarding: what makes a true church? Or what is needed to be identified as church? It is the ongoing discussion of the emerging church vs. the traditional local church (each claiming to be the church Jesus originally desired). Actually my understanding of the church has changed in many ways due to the various readings in the class. At first I had negative views of the ideas that spoke of the universal or invisible church (it seemed to ignore or even reject the traditional local churches to the extremes). Also the movement towards the purely social justice (at the expense of the Spiritual aspect) seemed to be an incomplete solution for the current problems of the church (which many characterize as the lack of social justice and community values). I am beginning to see that it is not an issue of one or the other; nor can’t it be simply summarized by “doing both.” The church should definitely work towards a holistic church but that will look differently depending on the culture and context. It all comes down to the idea of being faithful to the context and modeling the incarnational ministry of Jesus. As great as the new ideas (such as community based, world church, and etc…) might sound, I realize it is very unrealistic in my current context of Korean-American church. To follow the model of base community or other emerging church would be unthinkable. But in fact, that is actually ok, since the whole idea here is not to have an x, y, z formula. My case study, which is the Korea-American church plating, can not and should not follow the “look” of the basic community church but to seek how to incorporate the idea of community, social justice and many more kingdom characteristics into my context. I can not get rid of the structure or the hierarchical organization but what I can do is to turn that upside down; just like Jesus did. The solution is not to get rid of it (since it is impossible) but to communicate the idea of bottom-up leadership which could be interpreted as “serving.” Another way in which I could incorporate these ideas is to have the congregation realize that Jesus always spoke to the community rather than to an individual when speaking of “church;” to have people realize how individualistic we have become and that church is the gathering of believers (the community of God).