The Problem

The concept of "local church" is fundamental for any meaningful discussion of, or for plans for, the implementation of "Basic Christian Communities". The "local church" understood in the sense of some administrative unit of the Church at some level of Church structure is not what makes the "local church" an important issue in the Church today. Seeking parallels in the early history of Church expansion in the form of the churches the Apostles left behind (1) can help us to understand the tensions of locality and catholicity experienced by the followers of Christ from the time Christianity evolved as an expanding social organization.

The expansion of the Church over space and time eventually came to mean that the expansion of communities accompanied the political, economic, social and cultural domination of one society by another. This process was accompanied, as could be expected, by divisive and secessionist tendencies at the level of diakonia within local communities, and at the level of koinonia between communities.

As illustrations of intra-societal conflicts, we have the case of Ananias, who was reluctant to share his goods [Acts 5:1-11], and the necessity of the creation of the ministry of "deacons" when Hebrews and Hellenists had a conflict over the distribution of alms [Acts 6:1-6].

The "heresies" of the early centuries and thereafter illustrate the inter-societal trend of cultural domination in the Roman empire and should be analyzed along these lines, rather than treated as purely doctrinal conflicts. As long as the communities were few and small, personal apostolic admonitions (as seen from the Pauline and Johannine epistles) seem to have succeeded in maintaining the balance between locality and universality without serious damage to koinonia, but as larger political-cultural boundaries were being crossed and apostolic authority was taking dominant political-cultural forms, diversity of ecclesiologies was not an easy alternative to heresies and schisms.

With the emergence of what is called the European World-Economic System (2) and the global expansion of Christianity, it became even more difficult to maintain this balance. In the new colonial set-up, Europe became the "centre" and the "pole of religious expansion", while the colonies became the "periphery", where consensus operated in structures of dependence and domination. In this bipolar context, the catholicity of the Church was linked with the metropolitan church and its western association with the Roman church. Ideological cultural hegemony was located there, and the churches in the "periphery" were only missionary appendages to the church at the "centre". Since Vatican II, it appears that we have been witnessing a change in the approach of the dominant Roman Catholic Church towards the churches of the Third World, the non-Catholic churches, and the other religions. Is this a new self-understanding, or only a tactical theological concession to the post-colonial world situation?

1.Cf. Raymond E. Brown, The Churches the Apostles Left Behind (London : Geoffrey Chapman, 1984).

2.Wallerstein, I., The Models World-System, 2 vols. (Florida, U. S. A., Academic Press Inc., 1974-80)