EIIRN began its existence in the early 2000’s as a collaborative effort among academicians and practitioners committed to scholarship concerning the church, for the churches. The abiding ethos of the network from its inception has been that the church must be inclusive if it is to be relevant and if it is truly to fulfil its mission. To this end, EIIRN has sought to facilitate open and pluralistic conversation and collaboration regarding ecclesiology and ecclesial life, and to foster positive relationships among colleagues of diverse ecclesial and cultural identities, and in different places in the hierarchies of academic life. One can say that from its beginning EIIRN has sought to be “Ecclesiologists without Borders.”
Gerard Mannion was the founding Chair of EIIRN, but he did not work alone. A leadership team quickly formed around him in the first years, engaged in planning and carrying out the various programs of the network. One of the first steps it took was to propose in 2005 an Ecclesiological Investigations Program Unit as part of the American Academy of Religion. The proposal was successful with Gerard Mannion appointed by AAR as the founding chair. The unit held its first sessions in 2006. That same year EIIRN began planning a conference on its own. That first gathering brought together theologians and activists for both academic work and networking at the St Deiniol’s Library in Wales (former home of the British Prime Minister, William E. Gladstone) January 12-15, 2007. More conferences followed, the most recent being “Decolonizing Churches” held in San Juan, Puerto Rico June 22-25, 2022. A full list of the conferences and their themes can be found elsewhere on this web page at http://ei-research.net/events/
Mannion moved to the University of San Diego in 2011 where he was a Professor and Director of the Center for Catholic Thought and Culture. In 2014 he moved to Georgetown University where he occupied a Chair in Catholic Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, and was a senior research fellow at the Berkley Center. EIIRN tended to move with Professor Mannion during this period. Following his untimely death at age 49 in September 2019, the leadership team that worked with him in the network reformed itself as a formal steering committee and elected Dale Irvin as the Chair of the network.
Among the decisions that the new Steering Committee made in 2019 was (1) to move to a biennial international conference schedule; (2) continue to work within both AAR and more recently the European Academy of Religion as program units; and (3) to move toward incorporating on our own as a non-profit within the USA to enable us to raise funds on our own. The following spring the global pandemic set in, and both our plans for the 2021 conference and the efforts to incorporate were set on hold for a year. But then in 2022 we met in San Juan for an extraordinary international gathering on “Decolonizing Churches,” and now have completed the process of becoming a separate non-profit corporation under USA law. Three initial reflections on the “Decolonizing Churches” conference are included in the spring 2023 issue of the Journal of World Christianity. In addition, two volumes of the conference papers will be forthcoming in the EIIRN series with Palgrave Press. Our new status as a non-profit will allow us to pursue even more of this kind of work in the future.