Council Sets Principles for Ecumenical Activity
Episcopal News Service. September 21, 1978 [78265]
GREENWICH, Conn. -- Acting on a General Convention mandate, the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church has laid down principles to guide the Church's ecumenical activity.
These principles place a heavy emphasis on encouraging and deepening local and regional ecumenical work and on supporting the national and international structures that best serve those local efforts and programs. A second major item is the deepening of communion with the members of the Wider Episcopal Fellowship.
The Council's action, taken at its September meeting at Seabury House here, is based on a 23-page report that is the result of a year-long church wide study of the Episcopal Church's ecumenical posture and programs. The report was presented to the Council at its February meeting and a committee of conference was created to derive the necessary resolutions from the report's conclusions.
In presenting the report of the conference committee, the Rt. Rev. Donald Parsons, Bishop of Quincy and Province V representative to the Council, spelled out the principles: "Our participation in ecumenical movement, in program and in funding, should emphasize diocesan and local ecumenism, support of national and international structures in order to facilitate the work of the churches rather than, in any way, to be a substitute for that."
Throughout his remarks, Bishop Parsons made it clear that the committee was trying to enable more than simple interdenominational work. "This can be a safe halfway house that hides from us the scandal of our divisions," he said at one point.
In the one-hour special order of business at the first day of the Council meeting, seven resolutions were passed to lay out and begin to implement the principles. The first of these received the February report.
The second resolution was the key one in laying down eight specific steps to guide t he general church program for the next triennium.
The first of these steps calls for supporting national meetings of the Episcopal Diocesan Ecumenical Officers and "promoting funding of programs of national and world ecumenical structures when they have a bearing on the dioceses and their parishes."
The resolution then commits the Church to participating in world and national ecumenical structures for communication, consultation and planning.
The third step calls for funding specific ecumenical programs that are consistent with the Church's goals and objectives.
The Church also remains committed to continuing the formal theological dialogues that are under way and urges the development of networks (local, regional and national) for pastoral and practical collaboration with other Churches, "particularly the Roman Catholic Church." This reflects the fact that the Roman Catholic and some other churches are not fully involved with the National Council of Churches and therefore work and dialogue has to be carried out by other channels.
The February report had emphasized the need for both lay involvement and a stronger spiritual dimension to ecumenical work. These are also supported in the guiding principles as is participation in the U. S. Conference of the World Council of Churches because that conference involves work and contact with churches throughout North America and opens still different channels.
The second part of the major resolution holds up the need to strengthen the concordat models of visible unity and intercommunion that are expressed in the Wider Episcopal Fellowship. These involve agreements with a variety of churches of catholic, episcopal expression but not necessarily members of the Anglican Communion.
Five additional resolutions were presented and approved to begin to implement the guiding principles. Three of these commit the Church to presenting its own goals and objectives to the National Council of Churches, the Consultation on Church Union, and a Christian, North American Conference and to begin dialogue in these groups on examining membership and function.
The remaining two spell out budgeting and accounting principles.
In the first of these, funding is divided so that the ecumenical budget itself funds the basic ecumenical structures and program units would fund those particular projects and programs in which they participate.
The accountability resolution calls for annual review of both the particular programs and the structures themselves, asks the structures to provide budget information annually by April, and strongly discourages "immediate appeals for additional amounts."