The Servant Church

My favorite writers on the Church are Adrian Dulles and Edmund Schillebeeckx, neither of whom were notable liberals. Both have significantly influenced my concept of the Church as well as that expressed by the Bishops at Vatican II, Dulles in delineating various models of Church, Schillebeeckx in forming my vision of the Church as the Body of Christ who acts and speaks through it in the world today. Richard P. McBrien’s “The Church” is probably the best and most readable book on the subject in fifty years. When I started to formulate my vision for the Church of the future, not the heavenly New Jerusalem, but the church down and dirty in its members, I tried to put that vision in words in the context of the world today. I think it is the same vision as that expressed by Vatican II in the document De Ecclesia (About the Church).

My vision harks back to the early church we find in the Acts of the Apostles. It is the church described by Paul who wrote, “Have that mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross”. (Phil 2:5-8). It is the church of the ghetto and