The Rev. William Rusch, Lutheran minister and one of the drafters of the Concordat of Agreement, spoke April 8 at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale about the status of Lutheran-Episcopal relations.

He discussed Called to Common Mission, a revised document developed by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) that will be considered at the Lutheran Churchwide Assembly this summer. However, some Lutherans oppose Called to Common Mission, and its passage this summer is far from certain. If it is passed, Episcopalians will consider it at General Convention in 2000.

R. William Franklin, dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, also spoke, adding his perspectives gained from many years' participation in Episcopal ecumenical efforts, particularly in Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogues.

At stake is whether or not the historic vision of two churches, sharing in full communion of worship and ordained ministry while remaining distinct in their traditional and institutional identities, can be realized.

Mr. Rusch, currently the director of the Commission on Faith and Order for the National Council of Churches, said the Concordat is without precedent in ecumenical relations in both churches, and involved real sacrifices on both sides. The greatest area of discord has been over the issue of the ordering of ministry - bishops, priests and deacons - in the context of apostolicity, and the Anglican view of the historic episcopate as essential.

It is in this area that Dean Franklin believes the dialogues have produced exciting ecumenical movement.

"The theological breakthrough that ... I think will be remembered in church history, is essentially this: to separate the understanding of the apostolic succession from the understanding of the historic episcopate," he said. "That is to say that the apostolic succession can be preserved through eucharistic communities worshiping faithfully through time without necessarily a linear progression of bishops, hands laid on one after another."

If Called to Common Mission is accepted in both churches, the Episcopal Church will allow for the full interchangeability and reciprocity of all Lutheran pastors and deacons without any further ordination or rites. The ELCA, at least in previous documents, has been called upon to affirm the threefold ministry of deacons, priests and bishops in historic succession, and to understand bishops in life service to the gospel. In the Concordat, the ELCA would have dispensed with its ordination requirement of subscription to the unaltered Augsburg Confession for Episcopal clergy serving Lutheran parishes, to allow for the relationship of full communion. That concession is not in the text of Called to Common Mission.

The speakers pointed out ecumenical gains risk being obscured as the discourse centers on the historic episcopate instead of the goal of full communion. The 1996 Concordat provided for the historic succession to be passed on through the participation of three Anglican and three Lutheran bishops in the consecration of a Lutheran bishop. If Called to Common Mission passes unaltered, the succession would come rather through the agency of Swedish Lutheran bishops, achieving the putative goal at the cost of greater union between the two churches.