Churches Celebrate Pioneering Work of Lausanne Conference 75 Years Ago
Episcopal News Service. August 28, 2002 [2002-196-5]
Church leaders gathered August 25 to mark the 75th anniversary of the first World Conference on Faith and Order that took place in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1927.
That meeting has been described as literally the first time since Christendom began to be divided that official representatives of churches discussed divisive questions of doctrine in an effort to learn rather than simply to dispute. It paved the way alongside other church unity efforts for the foundation in 1948 of the World Council of Churches (WCC).
Metropolitans, bishops and priests were among the WCC leaders and local Christians from all major denominations who crowded into the city's cathedral for an ecumenical service to mark the anniversary. In a simple ceremony at the Lausanne cemetery, WCC representatives laid a wreath on the grave of Charles Henry Brent, a U.S. Episcopal bishop who was the moving force behind the Lausanne conference and died in 1929 during a visit to the city.
Today the WCC has 342 member churches from around the world from all mainstream traditions--Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox--with the exception of the Roman Catholic Church, which has nevertheless been a full member since 1968 of the WCC's Faith and Order Commission.
One of the major achievements of Faith and Order was the production 20 years ago of a key text on 'Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry'--three of the main doctrinal issues that separate churches. With at least 12 million copies produced in some 30 languages, the text led to hopes of an imminent ecumenical advance, and some were disappointed when there was no spectacular breakthrough. But the church landscape 'has changed and is changing' as a result, according to Mary Tanner, a member of the Church of England and former moderator of the Faith and Order commission.
Tanner pointed to new rules in her church to allow eucharistic hospitality and shared ministry in the many local ecumenical partnerships in towns and villages in England. The Church of England had come into communion with Nordic and Baltic Lutheran churches and drawn closer to Lutheran and Reformed churches in Germany and France. Anglicans and Roman Catholics had reached 'substantial agreement in faith,' she said. 'Each of these new relationships of communion, or closer fellowship on the way to visible unity, are based upon the fruits of the ecumenical conversations begun in Lausanne,' she told the symposium.