Workshop on Unity Draws Over 400 Ecumenists from Several Traditions
Episcopal News Service. May 26, 1999 [99-074]
(ENS) Drawn by a common commitment to the search for Christian unity, about 400 representatives of Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches met in Rochester, New York, in May to celebrate recent advances, discuss continuing barriers to unity -- and to dream about the future.
"Without love at the center, the ecumenical journey will flounder and collapse and our carefully wrought compacts and agreements will be lifeless," warned Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold at the opening plenary of the Episcopal Diocesan Ecumenical Officers (EDEO), one of the denominational organizations that meet as part of the Workshop for Christian Unity.
"The division and distress of our world -- to which communities of faith have so sadly contributed -- and God's passionate desire to reconcile and make all things new, call us to repentance: to yield our several certainties and allow ourselves to be pulled out of our ecclesial securities, by the power and urgency of God's deathless and recreative and reordering love."
Several speakers addressed both the recent successes and continuing frustrations in the ecumenical agenda. Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick of the Presbyterian Church USA urged participants to push through the barriers because unity among the churches will help them address a wide range of issues in a broken world.
"We live in a difficult ecumenical era," he said, but "the dreams are no less valued and important." He saw many signs of hope, citing progress on the Consultation on Church Union, which is bringing together nine different churches. Churches of the Reformed tradition, including the Presbyterians, have recently established a relationship of full communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).
The struggle for a similar relationship between the ELCA and the Episcopal Church stalled when the Lutherans failed by six votes to adopt a Concordat of Agreement at their 1997 Churchwide Assembly. They will vote again next summer on a rewritten proposal, "Called to Common Mission" (CCM), but opposition is well organized, centered on aversion requirement that the Lutherans adopt the historic episcopate.
"We are asking to be reincorporated into the historic episcopate, which most of Christendom has," Prof. Donald Armentrout, an ELCA pastor who teaches at the Episcopal seminary in Sewanee, told Lutheran and Episcopal ecumenical officers. "The ELCA is being asked to adopt a sign of apostolicity that is not necessary but may help us in our mission to the world."
Bishop William Burrill of the Diocese of Rochester called the continuing divisions among Christians "obscene," arguing that Lutherans and Episcopalians should be uncomfortable with the obscenity of a divided church. "We have got to help our people hear the Gospel," he said.
The Rev. William Rusch, an ELCA pastor who is director of the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of Churches, argued against those who contend we are in the middle of an "ecumenical winter."
Using the World Council of Churches Assembly last December in Zimbabwe as an example, he is encouraged by a proposal for a Forum of Christian churches and ecumenical organizations that would bring a much more diverse group to the table to discuss common issues -- including the Roman Catholics and some of the emerging evangelical churches. And he cited a new dialogue with Orthodox churches that object to what they perceive as a politicized agenda of the WCC.
While the Roman Catholics and the Lutherans move closer to a common statement on justification, erasing one of the major disagreements emerging from the Reformation, the Episcopal Church's dialogue with Roman Catholics has hit a few bumps in the road, especially in light of Pope John Paul II's encyclical blocking any consideration of the ordination of women. Yet participants in that dialogue have adopted a new level of realism -- and determination.
"Disagreements are always serious, but they are tolerable in an environment of mutual respect," Bishop Ted Gulick of Kentucky said at a luncheon meeting of the Episcopal Church's ecumenical officers. As the new co-chair of the Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue in the USA he finds encouragement in the Vatican's decree on ecumenism which, after pointing to the split at the time of the Reformation, adds, "As a result, many communions, national or denominational, were separated from the Roman See. Among those in which some catholic traditions and institutions continue to exist, the Anglican Communion occupies a special place." One of the tasks of the dialogue, he said, "is to find language which describes and articulates the unity that is the Spirit's gift."
In her keynote address at the workshop, the Rev. Ellen Wondra of Bexley Hall Seminary in Rochester also took encouragement with the hard work and steady progress of ecumenical efforts. "Our work is a sign that our churches are also in the midst of a conversion -- from dividedness to communion and unity," she said.
Continuing divisions are "complicated and they are deeply rooted," she added. "We are dealing with firm beliefs and also with entrenched attitudes and behaviors," but also "a tendency to overstate the difficulties, and to understate our own capacities to deal with them."
Wondra is convinced that "a mature approach to our situation entails the recognition that conversion is the graced work of generations as well. And a mature approach entails our taking risks -- carefully considered, of course, but risks nonetheless."
She labeled as sinful "the dividedness among us as indicative of the dividedness within us, in which we both want and do not want to be changed" and the kind of reliance on ourselves that produces discouragement. "As Christians and ecumenists we have much to rejoice in -- God's calling to the church to be one is indeed coming to pass. May we all, then, be of good courage and steadfast faith, open to each other's wisdom and needs, and open to the new realities into which God is, even now, bringing us."