Anglicans and Lutherans in Canada Endorse Proposal for Full Communion
Episcopal News Service. July 9, 2001 [2001-180]
James Solheim
(ENS) Meeting at adjacent college campuses in Kitchener-Waterloo, the Anglican Church of Canada's General Synod and the national convention of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada overwhelmingly endorsed a proposal for full communion between the two churches July 6.
Similar to an agreement in the United States between the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that was inaugurated in January, the Waterloo Declaration commits the Canadian churches to wide-ranging cooperation in mission and provides for the interchangeability of clergy while maintaining individual identity, structures and governance.
Delegates to the General Synod greeted the vote with a standing ovation and then burst into singing the Doxology. Archbishop Michael Peers said that the vote was the result of 30 years of "personal association, of being together, and commitment to this enterprise." He then received from Lutheran representatives gifts of bread and wine as "symbols of the feast that we share." Shortly after the vote, Peers received a phone call that the Lutherans had also passed the resolution "overwhelmingly."
In his presidential address the day before, Peers called the relationship with the Lutherans a "profound blessing" and said that the decision in favor of full communion was done in "a particularly Canadian way--allowing for convergence rather than insisting on it. That is what friends do." He added, "This is not a merger in which two partners lose their identity in the creation of something new. We each remain free to be who we are."
One potential result, Peers said, is "a greater transparency" in which "we will learn more about who we are as Anglicans even as we come to know more intimately our Lutheran friends." He expressed particular thanks for "the prayers and encouragement of others in our worldwide communions have helped us enormously."
Bishop Christopher Epting, deputy for ecumenical and interfaith relations, joined two of his predecessors--the Rev. William Norgren and the Rev. David Perry--and Professor J. Robert Wright as part of the Episcopal Church's delegation to the historic occasion. "It was a privilege and honor to join our Canadian sisters and brothers at the festive banquet and joyous Eucharist marking this next step in their journey together as Anglicans and Lutherans in full communion," Epting remarked.
Seeking reconciliation
Peers spent much of his presidential address on hundreds of lawsuits brought by indigenous people who claim they were abused in residential schools run by the churches for the government. The lawsuits threaten to bankrupt the church, unless the government provides some relief as co-defendant.
"A sense of urgency rises out of the costs of the litigation we continue to face," said Peers, who complained that there is "a lack of clarity" in dealing with the government, making it difficult to "move ahead." He added, "There is a need to make decisions about our future, but we are in a place where that feels enormously perilous."
In the meantime, the church is seeking reconciliation with indigenous peoples. "Healing and reconciliation cannot be forwarded by a refusal to deal with our history," he said.
Noting that "the work of healing has hardly begun," Peers said that "it will be the work of generations to come."
Facing realities
Preaching at the opening service of General Synod, Bishop Steven Charleston, dean and president of Episcopal Divinity School in Massachusetts and a member of the Choctaw Nation, said that he came as an indigenous person himself "to bring you a message of enormously powerful healing." Urging the delegates to deal with the reality of their situation, he observed that "you are not turning away from your past and pretending that it never happened" but instead "are facing the realities which are not unique to Canada at all, but are in fact the realities of relationships among peoples of all cultures in every continent on the face of the earth."
Charleston said that the Canadian church was helping its members to look at each other not with fear but "with an amazing, astounding degree to hope... with a sense of community that is of absolute importance to the rest of the world.... What I see so clearly in my eyes is a church that is not teetering on the point of ruin, but just standing on the threshold of glory."