The nature, story and study of the Christian church have become very popular areas of
inquiry across various religious communities, in courses of theology and religious studies
and in the field of scholarly debate. The very fact that you have this volume in your hands is
itself proof that, in recent decades, ecclesiology has become of great topical interest once
again. This also means, as a perusal of the chapters will quickly indicate, that the amount of
literature in and on ecclesiology itself has grown to enormous proportions. If one looks at
the content of academic journals in recent years from a wide variety of sub-disciplines –
historical, ethical, systematic, practical, missiological, sociological and philosophical – one
finds an increasing number of papers where the central focus is particularly upon the church
itself and ecclesiological questions and concepts. There have even been a number of journals
established in recent years which are devoted solely to questions of an ecclesiological
nature, and many publishers have commissioned series of ecclesiological relevance. The
number of conferences devoted to ecclesiological themes across the international scholarly
community is legion.