Episcopal Press and News
Joint Commission to Press for Continued Ecumenical Participation at General Convention
Diocesan Press Service. February 3, 1967 [51-10]
The Joint Commission on Ecumenical Relations announced January 25 that it intends to ask the Seattle General Convention to "commend" the Principles of Church Union as a significant advance toward Christian unity and to make such Principles a subject of study and recommendations by an official committee in each diocese.
The Rt. Rev. Robert F. Gibson, Bishop of Virginia, and chairman of the Joint Commission on Ecumenical Relations, said that this portion of the full report was being released at this time so that those studying the Principles of Church Union, a document formulated by the Consultation on Church Union last Spring, would know what the Commission intended to recommend.
The Joint Commission will not only ask the General Convention to commend the report and ask that it be officially studied, but it will also ask for permission to participate in the development by the Consultation on Church Union of a plan of union for consideration by the governing bodies of the churches involved, and called upon all Episcopalians to study the reports and documents of the Consultation along with such documents as came out of Vatican II, and other attempts toward Christian unity.
The Commission report states: "Our support of the Consultation, and our recommendations with respect to it, therefore, arise not from any exaggerated claim as to what Principles of Church Union represents but rather from deep gratitude for what the dialogue has so far accomplished and equally deep confidence in the process of the dialogue itself. We believe that the agreements so far reached should be commended as a significant advance toward Christian unity, and that they should be given systematic and responsible study, and that our participation in the Consultation should continue, working toward the development, when such development is possible, of a plan of union which could then be brought to the constituent churches for their consideration. To ask more than this would be to go beyond the point the Consultation itself has reached. To ask less than this would be, we believe, faithless to what God has already led the Consultation to find."
