The Church as a Transformative Community: A Scoping Review of Ecclesial Community Life and Social Change

Abstract

This scoping review maps how the Church, understood as a lived ecclesial community rather than merely an institution, has been conceptualised, structured, and evaluated as an agent of social transformation across theological, ecclesiological, and community development literature. Following PRISMA-ScR guidance and the Arksey and O'Malley (2005) framework as refined by Levac et al. (2010), a systematic search of five databases on 3 July 2026 identified 3,600 records; 47 underwent detailed screening, and 29 articles, dissertations, and empirical reports met the inclusion criteria and were thematically synthesised. Six themes of markedly uneven depth emerged. Church-based development and advocacy initiatives, and institutional barriers to transformative engagement, were dominant; leadership, governance, and lay participation was substantially represented; Base Ecclesial Communities and Small Christian Communities, and worship and sacramental life, were moderately represented; and digital and dispersed ecclesial community was the most sparsely evidenced. The Church emerges as a structural and spiritual hybrid; simultaneously an institution, a diaconal organisation, and a network of grassroots cells, whose transformative capacity is theorised to reflect the interaction between participatory structures, institutional constraints, and spiritual conviction; this interaction is, however, more often theorised than demonstrated through comparative empirical measurement in the reviewed literature. A synthesised conceptual definition of the Church as transformative community is proposed. Key gaps include limited cross-regional and cross-denominational comparison, insufficient attention to gender, a scarcity of longitudinal studies, weak integration between ecclesiological and community development evaluation methods, and limited research on digital ecclesial community. Screening was conducted by a single reviewer, and ten of the 29 included sources (34%) are practitioner-authored or insider-positioned; both constraints should be borne in mind when interpreting the findings.