With insight born from a longstanding experience and life lived together with the people, the paper deftly marries the doctrine put forward by the Second Vatican Council – on what is the church and howto be ‘church’ – with its actual practice and application through the journey of the Basic Ecclesial Communities in the Philippines in the past 50 years.Culturally-sensitive in its theological approach, the paper gleans the stories and rich accounts of the people in the BECs and provides are markable and even radical picture of the faith and human life of these communities. The paper, thus, harvests a substantial, if not comprehensive, validation of the impetus of the change that Vatican II initiated in the Church.