Myles Werntz, Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2025), pp. xv + 184. $24.99

Myles Werntz's bold intervention into the field of ecclesiology has its genesis in his experience of 'coming up short', when brought to recognise a lacuna in his knowledge of global Christianity by an assignment to teach a course on it (p.2).Faced with this realisation, he endeavoured to range far more widely in his engagement with varieties and expressions of Christianity and of the Christian community.In this regard, the project bears the mark of all the best scholarship: an outgrowth of the scholar's curiosity aiming to learn something not already known.The result is a wide-ranging, but focused study on how the Christian churches have endeavoured (and still endeavour) to make sense of themselves and their identity, even amid realities that would seem to belie that self-understanding.It is wide-ranging in that Werntz draws from an impressive array of geographic and denominational perspectives, particularly Catholic, Orthodox, and Pentecostal Christianities.It is focused in that it takes as its organising framework the four classical notae ecclesiae of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed: unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity.Each chapter takes one of these notes and considers how it has been variously understood among the Christian churches.The consideration of unity traces trajectories in Catholicism (beginning with an ecumenism of return to the 'one true church' to the embrace of other communities as composed of separated siblings), in the ecumenical movement and especially the World Council of Churches, to the commitments of the Eastern Orthodox, to a pneumatologically-conceived unity among Pentecostal Churches, to the hermeneutical unity proposed by early fundamentalism.Along the way, considerations of challenges to unity, such as racism and Christian nationalism, receive attention.The church's holiness is traced in its liturgical and political contours especially, along with considerations of how the Pentecostal traditions add physical healing to the mix of assessing sanctity, and how various churches (specifically, the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the United Church of Canada) have struggled to reckon with the failures of holiness that trouble their pasts.Catholicity is considered under the rubric of an openness to the whole, which opens up space for engagements with globalisation, the economic analysis brought into focus by traditions of Latin American liberation theology, and questions of inculturation and mission.I was left wondering why mission was considered here rather than as a