wfn.org | [PCUSANEWS] Ecumenism must become more inclusive, WCC leaders say

[PCUSA NEWS <PCUSA.NEWS@ECUNET.ORG>]

Note #8991 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

05579
Oct. 26, 2005

Ecumenism can't afford to remain
'private club for hierarchs,' WCC leaders say

by Chris Herlinger
Ecumenical News International  

NEW YORK - International church leaders meeting in New York say the movement
toward Christian unity will prosper only if it becomes more inclusive and
less dependant on institutional structures.

	Institutional ecumenism "is in stagnation," said Catholicos Aram I,
of the Armenian Apostolic Church. "The challenge is, how can we go beyond
institutional ecumenism and make it a healing reality?"

	Aram, who also is the moderator of the central committee of the World
Council of Churches (WCC), made his remarks on Oct. 22 during a symposium on
the future of ecumenism.

	The subject is important to churches and church leaders trying to
deal with social changes that are shifting the center of Christianity away
from Europe and the United States, to Africa, Asia and Latin America.  
   
	Aram said the ecumenical movement can no longer afford to be "a
private club for conference-goers and church hierarchs," a theme that has
been sounded by the Rev. Samuel Kobia, the Kenyan Methodist who serves as the
WCC's general secretary. Kobia has said WCC member churches must be in
dialogue with evangelical, Pentecostal and Roman Catholic churches that don't
belong to the council.

	"New conditions and trends may pose impediments to 'business as
usual,' blocking one's well-traveled way or making nonsense of comfortable
custom," Kobia said, noting that no institution spawned by the ecumenical
movement, including the WCC, "is eternal."  
   
	The global council has 347 member churches in more than 120
countries.

	"If we are determined to act as we have always acted, to depend on
institutions shaped entirely by past realities, we may be halted in our
tracks," Kobia warned, because the current model may become "too clerical,
too dependant on leaders ordained by member churches" and lose "the energy
provided by active laity, including students, youth and women's fellowships."

	The Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, general secretary of the
Reformed Church in America, said the movement needs new approaches based on
"compelling spiritual vision, rather than predictable organizational momentum
- and by deep change, rather than incremental change."

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