of God and the world is rooted in the ‘creative imagination’, by which Avis means a "symbolic realism" with emphasis on both terms. The character of the Christian faith is symbolic in that it does not describe reality unequivocally, but it is realist in that all its metaphors, symbols and myths converge on the reality of God. Based upon a participatory ontology, Avis offers an alternative to both an "objective" or "literal" approach to the truth of the Christian faith and a liberal "mere metaphor" discourse. His latest study in theological method is In Search of Authority: Anglican Theological Method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2014), which is intended as the first of three volumes on the validity of Anglican theology, with special reference to the issue of the sources of authority in theological method. Ecclesiology Most of Avis's work can be classified as ecclesiology: the study of the essence and structure of the Christian church. The emphasis is either on the historical background (as in Anglicanism and the Christian Church), or on the identity of Anglicanism amidst the Christian churches and contemporary society (as in The Anglican Understanding of the Church; Church, State and Establishment; The Identity of Anglicanism and The Vocation of Anglicanism), or on ecumenism and ecumenical consensus theology (as in Ecumenical Theology and the Elusiveness of Doctrine; Christians in Communion; Reshaping Ecumenical Theology and Reconciling Theology). His editor's introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Ecclesiology, which he has edited, summarises his understanding of ecclesiology as a theological discipline. He is currently at work on a multi-volume personal project under the general title Theological Foundations of the Christian Church, the first volume being Jesus and the Church, 2021 (see bibliography below). Avis's view on the identity of the Anglican churches will be treated separately below. Practical theology Where theology, ecclesiology and ecclesial practice meet, Avis’s work becomes practical-theological. This is most clearly the case with A Church Drawing Near: Spirituality and Mission in a Post-Christian Culture. Rooted in an analysis of the present Western-European cultural situation (between modernity and post-modernity) and in a pastoral translation of the ecumenically well-received koinonia theology (the "wholeness paradigm"), Avis offers a model for parochial practice which tries to relate the "common religion" of contemporary people to the specific contents of the Christian faith. In trying to do justice to both, without suggesting that they can be too easily