I write to take exception to the editorial on CCM [TLC, June 18]. First the conclusion: If not now, when? We've been at this for decades (I speak as a veteran of LED II and III since 1978). There will never be a "perfect" time when two partner churches have first, as it were, gotten their houses in order so that the ecumenical imperative can be neatly implemented. That is what I call the "parousia plan" for church unity - it will (perhaps) happen a nano-second before the Final Trump! Real ecumenism, like real life, happens in the middle of things. And CCM should happen now, because we, the Episcopal Church and the ELCA, are called to common mission.

Second, the claim that CCM is "considerably" different from the Concordat of Agreement, upon close examination of the documents, simply is not cogent. Nor is the Lutheran idea of ordained ministry "considerably" different from ours (I say this is a professor of ecclesiastical and ecumenical history, a long-time proponent of an authentic diaconate, and the co-drafter of the Anglican-Lutheran International Commission's Hanover Report: Diaconate as Ecumenical Opportunity). The Churches of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland are, of course, already in full communion with the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran churches and that should serve to give us confidence from a global perspective.

So let us go forward with this historic breakthrough in the ecumenical movement for the sake of the church's unity. Now is the hour!

(The Rev.) William H. Petersen

Bexley Hall

Rochester, N.Y.