Celebrating Imperfect Communion

Restricted participation in celebrating eucharist remains a very visible victim of ecclesial divisions. Ecclesial self-understandings, theologies of eucharist, and notions of ecumenicity are deeply interwoven. Modern ecumenical engagement presupposes a more critical historiography in its attempts to deconstruct naively self-interested narrations of ecclesial identity, particularly in the ways in which competing visions of apostolicity were connected to a primal plenitude of koinonia. Such deconstruction draws on the sustained and liminal experiences of encounter and dialogue between the churches over the course of the past century, which is itself an expression of communion not unlike that discerned by historians of earliest Christianity.