Hines Comments on Dallas COCU Meeting
Diocesan Press Service. May 10, 1966 [43-1]
At a meeting of the Consultation on Church Union in Dallas May 2 - 5 authorized representatives of eight communions - after arduous working days but with remarkable unanimity - adopted a document, "Principles of Church Union" which represents the most significant step toward church union thus far taken by these churches in all of their history. It is important to note that the document is what it says it is, "Principles" calculated to guide the responsible church bodies in their eventual decision as to whether to authorize formal negotiations with the participating churches looking toward organic union.
Following reference to this Church's Joint Commission on Ecumenical Relations, which is responsible for Episcopal representation in the Consultation on Church Union, the document, "Principles of Church Union" will likely be commended for study in this Church, and, if the Joint Commission decides it should be submitted to General Convention, for appropriate action.
In the meantime an accompanying document, "An Open Letter to the Churches from the Consultation on Church Union" is transmitted to the members of the 8 churches for information and inspiration. The "Open Letter" states the case for church union in the light of God's will for the church on earth, the basis upon which the Principles are anchored. Having shared both in the deliberations and in the exhilarating experience which was the Consultation in Dallas, I commend the "Open Letter" for all churchmen with gratitude and hope.
Faithfully,
John E. Hines
Presiding Bishop
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE CHURCHES FROM THE CONSULTATION ON CHURCH UNION
God calls into being his own people for obedience to his mission everywhere in the world. In Jesus Christ, he has created the Church which is forever being empowered and renewed by the Holy Spirit. He constitutes a community bound together in faith, hope, and love, united to its one Savior and Lord, and commissioned to serve him in the service of men.
The Church is one, made so by the act of God in Christ. Its life is the one holy Spirit given through Christ. Because of this given unity, the dis-unity of the visible companies of Christian people is at any time and place a challenge to the truth -- even where the supreme claim of conscience seems to require separation for the truth's sake -- and a rejection of the unity implicit in the saving love of the one God for our single humanity. The Church is summoned to the service of the divine purpose for all men. We share with all Christian people the charge to be Christ's witnesses "to the ends of the earth. " (Acts 1:8 RSV)
We are commanded to declare by deed and word that "Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the father." (Philippians 2:11 RSV) The Church is created to make this Lordship known; its faith, its ministry, its structures, its worship, and its life are instruments of this mission.
Our impulse to mission and unity comes from the gospel we proclaim. Our God is a self-giving God, who comes to us in his Son Jesus Christ. This Man, who gave himself freely and fully to us, continually makes accessible to us the grace and peace of a living and loving God. All his gifts come through his Spirit, who is doing new things among us through his liberating, surprising power. By giving himself, the Eternal Father has called into being a single family in the Son and the Spirit. He has sealed with us all a single covenant, grounded in the same ultimate demand and promise. He has made us all stewards of the mysteries of the gospel and the Scriptures,. freely opening to us the inexhaustible treasures of the living Tradition of his people, in its oneness, its holiness, its catholicity and its apostolicity. To us all he has addressed his commands, his promises, his abundant mercies. We believe he has graciously included even the stories of our separate communions within the story of his mighty acts, from the first day until now.
It is this total gift of himself to all his people which we proclaim in the one baptism and at the one table. It is this gift which has reached us, and which we share, through many ministries under his ordering: apostles, prophets, teachers, nurses, physicians, housewives, musicians, workmen, farmers, missionaries, trustees and stewards of every talent. To say these things is not to assert claims for our churches but to speak the truth about our common indebtedness.
These gifts are often clearly seen and appropriated in our day-by-day association within congregation and community. Many of the channels and tokens of his self-giving are un-noticed and readily overlooked: acts of quiet neighborliness; the simple integrity and honesty of people in their dealings with one another; personal and public prayers of praise and intercession; the singing of psalms and hymns; the giving and spending of money; the celebration of festivals and sacraments; voluntary participation in public affairs; dependability in secular vocations; courageous efforts to secure justice and peace in national life. Every community is sustained in the fabric of its common work and worship by power from the same unseen source. It is wholly dependent on the least conspicuous and yet the highest gifts of all: faith, hope, love. Daily we live by them. As churches of Christ we delight to recognize their presence in one another. It is the actuality of gifts like these which we seek to acknowledge in the work in which we are now engaged.
Yet how often we seem to deny these gifts of God by our divisions and dissensions. Looking at us, the world is unimpressed by our claim to love one another, when It sees how we are fractured and divided by our lesser loyalties. Our protestations that Christ has broken down the walls between men are belied by the barriers we erect to cut off even Christians from one another. We act as if the Church were ours, forgetting that he "is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham." (Matthew 3:9,RSV)
Many things which Christ counted essential tend to become non-essential in our eyes; and things which he views as non-essential we often treat as essential. Even though we all affirm the same basic confession and are bound by common loyalty to the one Lord, we do not allow his demands to yoke us together in common tasks nor his promises to draw us together as pilgrims to the same City. Bound by the same Scripture, we do not listen together to its judgment or together receive its grace. Baptized into the dying and rising of Christ, we allow neither ourselves nor others to grasp the full power of that baptism. We join him at his Table, receiving his body and blood, but we are not thereby impelled to sorrow over our divisions nor led to heal them. Our churches often appear to the world not as servants of the servant Christ but as affluent, self-perpetuating enterprises competing with one another. These things the world sees, and is dismayed and alienated by them, alienated from God and from us.
The uniting of our churches will not, of itself, automatically cleanse us of these sins. In fact, our effort to unite in a common obedience no doubt will release divisive forces. The gospel has always been "a sword, " as our Lord said it was, awakening and making rebellion manifest in the hearts of those called to serve God. Nor is this rebellion to be found especially among those who resist, or those who support, any plan for unity. In every life human loyalties will still conflict with that purity of heart which God sets before us. Measured by his immense understanding of our nature, and his unfailing expectation, we will continue to fall short of the glory he wills to reveal to us. Even to use the word "Church" -- whether in referring to our own denomination or the wider unity we seek -- places us under the awesome judgment of the one Lord of that one Church. Nonetheless, we must obey God who is calling us to a kind of obedience today only possible to those who give themselves wholeheartedly to a deliberate relinquishing of every separation, and a resolute will to accept the fact and cost of unity.
We recognize also that the united body proposed will still be far from the wholeness of the Body of Christ. To this we say that we think of it as a uniting as well as a united church. We have imagined its structure, as best we could, in such a way as to keep it open to all others who with ourselves seek a wider unity of catholic and evangelical traditions, alike reformed by every true obedience to God. Similarly so have we tried to design it so that exponents of greater freedom and of greater authority alike must listen to that gospel which alone gives true freedom and authority in our service of Christ. We seek a form of the church which, in faithfulness to that gospel, will order our Christ-given liberties for the more effective discharge of our Christ- given tasks.
We do not try here to trace the long history of our separations nor the complex account of what has happened to us as separate bodies within American life, nor by the same token, what has happened to American life because of our separations. It is instructive to remember the diversity of our national, linguistic, cultural and confessional origins -- a diversity which has often enriched our common heritage. But it is of far greater importance to keep pressing the question of what God requires of Christians now. One century's divisions may be pointless in another century; the theological questions of one generation may not be those of another. Indeed, such divisions, cultural or confessional or whatever, may have become simply the excuses we use for retaining separatenesses which have little or nothing to do with the gospel in our day.
As we in the Consultation have studied our situation and the various issues involved in our search for visible unity, we have been made aware, as surely every person so occupied must be, of how much more unites us than divides. We are impressed with the ways in which the same tendencies and movements increasingly pervade all our churches. "Evangelical" and "catholic" refer to attitudes, institutions, customs, standards found to some degree in all; "reformed"' speaks of a will to seek God's judgment which every church rightly claims. While our structures differ, the currents of American tradition and life sweep through them all. Traditional cultural, linguistic and sociological idiosyncrasies tend more and more to disappear from our membership. Indeed our whole society is characterized by a deep impulse toward unity. Even those forces which seem quite secular in origin may not be merely "conformity" but an intimation of God's will which we are bound to hear and obey, if the church is to retain integrity and faithfulness in its mission.
Thus we feel Christians are called to respond obediently to new conditions God appears to be disclosing to us in our time. In this spirit, we envisage a united church, holding in its structure and life all that is indispensable to each of us, bearing enough family resemblance to our separate traditions to verify the continuity of them all with it, yet itself unlike the churches any of us have known in our past separateness. Each of us may be justifiably proud of much in his heritage and his history; and the gold that will come through the fires of reformation will be a gift from each to all. But this re-forming, re-fashioning, re-creating will make new and unfamiliar demands of assimilation upon us. We will, in the course of time, become something other than the church that any of us now knows. The process is likely to be gradual; but our capacity to grow into what God desires us to be will depend upon our commitment to the Church as the instrument of mission in the world. Men can be slaves to the past because they cannot bear the unsettling of their foundations, or they can become pioneers on the frontier because this is where God calls them to be. To the bold, he will provide the faith and courage to welcome whatever new forms of church life true obedience demands. To the fearful, the security of the familiar will not give immunity to those penalties which the Lord of the future is bound to exact. The price of renewal is seldom small, but the price of turning back is always great.
These Principles proposes a plan which includes agents of continuity precious in each of our churches separately - the authority of Scripture, faithfulness to the Tradition, the witness of the historic statements of Christian faith, the central sacramental gifts, a ministry with authority as close to the universal and undoubted as any authority in a still-divided church can be, the unfailing, steadfast community of worshiping Christians in their congregations through the ages. We mean to remember, God willing, every lesson he has taught his Church in history, and to incorporate them in our way of life so that they will continues to guide and nourish. In this, we have been guided by two principles -- first, that we be true to every essential link with the apostolic gospel and community; second, that we guard every opportunity of action that will assist us better to bear responsibility for the future.
We know that we need a more soldierly discipline, but also a greater freedom within that discipline. We know we need deeper cohesion, but also a more enriching diversity. We know that, to fulfill God's task in the nation, every denomination of Christianity needs all its fellows. We know our need for a wiser use, at home and overseas, of all our resources. But we also are assured that as we commit ourselves to unity we shall learn afresh the depth and power of God's gifts through our faith, and be renewed in our ability to heed God's command to follow him. As the North American Conference on Faith and Order, gathered at Oberlin in 1957, said to us: "When we respond in faith to God's gift, with the eagerness of a man who sells everything to obtain the pearl of great price, we acknowledge an obligation which is far more compelling than what we happen to feel or will, far more urgent than the practical considerations which may seem to bring us together. It is precisely because God has made us one that we are impelled to acknowledge, express, and seek, our deepest unity." We hope that awareness of that "deepest unity" will be present in all discussions of the road ahead. Gratitude for it may enable us to be more swift to express essential bonds ("one Lord, one faith, one baptism") than to preserve non-essential differences. It may help us give priority not to our separate traditions but to the massive hunger of the world -- for peace and food enough, for meaningful work and hope of justice, indeed for the knowledge of a God himself concerned with such things. If so, God's promise of ultimate oneness will overcome our fears of the unknown, and give us courage to venture forward in his name.
Finally we say that the gifts of unity will surely be seen most vividly in the life of our own congregations and communities. Unity is no abstract ideal. What we shall find in this venture, we believe, is nothing less than a lost greatness in the church's life. As we begin to commit ourselves to one another in common action, certain gifts will no doubt come quickly -- better stewardship of our resources, wiser corporate planning, mutual support in difficult circumstances. Through those gifts, still greater gifts will come. Listening to one another, attempting now- unfamiliar tasks, learning now-unfamiliar ways of worship and witness, we shall no doubt be awakened to a new understanding of how great a thing it is to be a Christian in our time and place, and how great a work God is himself doing and calls us to share. Our present danger is not that of creating a "super-church." It is rather the danger of accepting something less than the Church Christ gives us, of understanding the mission of the Church as nothing more than the perpetuation of our differences, in increasing isolation from the real needs of our world and the measureless love of Christ for it. Over against this danger, which surely none of us can fail to see, stands the hope in God's gift, waiting for those who have the courage to reach out and take it. This is the venture and the prize to which we honestly believe we are now called.
We offer all these hopes and thoughts, and the proposals born of them, in the spirit of the Apostle's ascription: "Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen." (Ephesians 3:20-1, RSV)