The fifteenth international conference of the Ecclesiological Investigations International Research Network (EIIRN) will be held June 26-28, 2024, on the campus of Chicago Theological Seminary in Chicago, Ill., USA. The theme of the conference will be “Embodying Ecclesial Diversity.”
Ecclesial diversity has existed since the church’s founding. Diverse nationalities, ethnicities, rituals, and praxes characterized churches from their first days. As the Christian movement spread into new regions, it continued to diversify, accommodating to new contexts and cultures. Its accommodations to dominant cultures partially accounted for the church’s rise to predominance, even as these same accommodations paradoxically both supplanted and supported existing systems of injustice. Moreover, churches too often came to replicate practices of exclusion, inequality, and oppression within their own collective lives, failing to fully affirm the full dignity of all bodies who were within them. For the church to realize its own identity, it must celebrate and empower the diverse bodies that now make up the body of Christ. In doing so, it should attend to what is theologically at stake in the church honoring ecclesial diversity, as well as what might be theologically necessary for the church to be transformed. What is a church that honors ecclesial diversity? What are the marks and practices of such a reimagined church? This gathering will seek to identify how the church does – and often does not – attend to its own evolving diversities, and to explore pathways that might heal, restore, embrace and transfigure the body of Christ.