Moravians, Episcopalians to celebrate full communion agreement during Feb. 10 festive service
Episcopal News Service. January 25, 2011 [012511-01]
ENS staff
The full-communion relationship recently agreed between the Episcopal Church and the Northern and Southern provinces of the Moravian Church in North America will be celebrated and inaugurated on Feb. 10 during a festive service in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, according to a press release from the Episcopal Church's Office of Public Affairs.
The service will be held at 6 p.m. at the Central Moravian Church in Bethlehem.
"This liturgical observance and celebration of full communion with the Moravian Church is an event that comes along once in a lifetime, if one is long-lived and fortunate," Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said, according to the release. "Instances of reconciliation between different Christian communions since the Reformation have been rare -- and the fact that we are marking this reconciliation with the Moravians is remarkable."
Jefferts Schori and Moravian Provincial Elders' Conference Presidents, the Rev. Dr. Betsy Miller (North) and the Rev. David Guthrie (South), will preside during the service. Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee Bishop Steven Miller, chair of the Moravian-Episcopal dialogue, will preach.
Other participants expected to attend the celebration include President of the House of Deputies Bonnie Anderson, more than two dozen Episcopal bishops, bishops of the Northern and Southern Provinces of the Moravian Church, members of the Episcopal Church's Standing Commission on Ecumenical Relations and the Moravian-Episcopal Dialogue, and representatives from ecumenical partners and from the Anglican Church of Canada, the release said.
The service, which will incorporate elements of both Episcopal and Moravian liturgies, will be videotaped and available for viewing on demand shortly afterwards on the websites of both the Episcopal Church and the Moravian Church in North America.
The Episcopal Church agreed during the 2009 General Convention to enter into a full-communion relationship with both the Northern and Southern provinces of the Moravian Church. The agreement officially is known as "Finding Our Delight in the Lord: A Proposal for Full Communion Between The Episcopal Church; the Moravian Church-Northern Province; and the Moravian Church-Southern Province."
Following that decision, the Southern Province of the Moravian Church voted Sept. 10, 2010 to enter into full communion with the Episcopal Church, echoing a similar vote by the Northern Province some three months earlier.
The Moravian Church is relatively small and concentrated in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin, although a footnote in the full-communion document notes that there are Moravian congregations in Canada that are structurally part of the Northern Province of the Moravian Church in America.
Moravians in America are part of the worldwide Christian communion formally known as the Unitas Fratrum, or Unity of the Brethren, which was founded in 1457 as part of the movement to reform the church in what is now the Czech Republic. Persecuted almost to extinction, members of the Unitas Fratrum eventually found refuge on the estate of German nobleman Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf. In the 1700s, they went through a rebirth under Zinzendorf's protection and grew into a global communion.
"We can give abundant thanks for the gifts that they offer us, and hope that the gifts we offer are helpful," said Jefferts Schori, in the public affairs press release. "Moravians are not widespread within the U.S. context of the Episcopal Church, but they are numerous in other places where Anglicans or Episcopalians are abundant – the West Indies, Tanzania, Honduras and Nicaragua in particular. We can be grateful that we will come to know them for their distinctive gifts in music, liturgy, and ethos of reconciliation. I would urge Episcopalians to go looking for Moravian neighbors and begin to explore together how we can more deeply serve God's people and God's creation in the world around us."
The Rt. Rev. Graham H. Rights, bishop of the Moravian Unity, said: "In our Ground of the Unity, Moravians declare that 'since we together with all Christendom are pilgrims on the way to meet our coming Lord, we welcome every step that brings us and other Christians nearer the goal of unity in Him.' This full communion agreement with the Episcopal Church is one more step toward that goal."
The Episcopal Church says that it understands full communion to mean "a relation between distinct churches in which each recognizes the other as a catholic and apostolic church holding the essentials of the Christian faith." The churches "become interdependent while remaining autonomous," the church has said.
The Episcopal Church also is in full communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht, the Philippine Independent Church and the Mar Thoma Syrian Church of Malabar, India.
The Northern and Southern Provinces of the Moravian Church in North America also share a full communion relationship with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America -- as does the Episcopal Church -- and a covenant partnership with the Presbyterian Church USA.