Resumen: The critical points made in this chapter have been the following. To the extent that modern

ecclesiology is governed by an abstract, rationalistic and overly theoretical approach, it makes it difficult for theologians to acknowledge the realities of the church’s concrete identity. Ecclesiology is misguided if it attempts to construct, on the basis of a single model or principle, a systematic blueprint for the church that applies normatively always and everywhere. Such a blueprint can be very powerful and replete with profound theological language. Yet it may well prove to be a harmful response to the ecclesiological context and thus practically and prophetically false. Ecclesiology is not a doctrinal theory that can be worked out without close attention to the concrete life of the church. Practicalprophetic ecclesiology is not well done by trying to find the best model of the church, nor need it always describe the church in terms of a particular model, since models function less as systematic principles than as summary principles for other, ultimately more significant proposalsecclesiology is a practical-prophetic discipline that seeks, above all, to help the concrete church perform its main tasks ever more adequately. Ecclesiology should be expanded by incorporating critical analyses of the concrete church and its context into the arguments for its proposals, so that these can be analyzed, challenged and improved. It should also make as explicit as possible the various elements of the imaginative judgments that govern its construals and analyses, again with a view to making them available for critical consideration. Ecclesiology, on this view, serves the church in medias res, as a contextually-applicable set of practical-prophetic proposals.

the concrete church made merely in o