wfn.org | Workshop on Unity

[Daphne Mack <dmack@dfms.org>]

For more information contact:
Episcopal News Service
Kathryn McCormick
kmccormick@dfms.org
212/922-5383
99-074

Workshop on Unity draws over 400 ecumenists from several 
traditions

by James Solheim

(ENS) Drawn by a common commitment to the search for 
Christian unity, about 400 representatives of Protestant, Roman 
Catholic and Orthodox churches met in Rochester, New York, in May 
to celebrate recent advances, discuss continuing barriers to 
unity--and to dream about the future.

"Without love at the center, the ecumenical journey 
will flounder and collapse and our carefully wrought compacts and 
agreements will be lifeless," warned Presiding Bishop Frank T. 
Griswold at the opening plenary of the Episcopal Diocesan 
Ecumenical Officers (EDEO), one of the denominational 
organizations that meet as part of the Workshop for Christian 
Unity. 
    
"The division and distress of our world--to which 
communities of faith have so sadly contributed--and God's 
passionate desire to reconcile and make all things new, call us 
to repentance: to yield our several certainties and allow 
ourselves to be pulled out of our ecclesial securities, by the 
power and urgency of God's deathless and recreative and 
reordering love."

A complicated ecumenical agenda

Several speakers addressed both the recent successes 
and continuing frustrations in the ecumenical agenda. Stated 
Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick of the Presbyterian Church USA urged 
participants to push through the barriers because unity among the 
churches will help them address a wide range of issues in a 
broken world.

"We live in a difficult ecumenical era," he said, but 
"the dreams are no less valued and important." He saw many signs 
of hope, citing progress on the Consultation on Church Union, 
which is bringing together nine different churches. Churches of 
the Reformed tradition, including the Presbyterians, have 
recently established a relationship of full communion with the 
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).

The struggle for a similar relationship between the 
ELCA and the Episcopal Church stalled when the Lutherans failed 
by six votes to adopt a Concordat of Agreement at their 1997 
Churchwide Assembly. They will vote again next summer on a 
rewritten proposal, "Called to Common Mission" (CCM), but 
opposition is well organized, centered on aversion requirement 
that the Lutherans adopt the historic episcopate.

"We are asking to be reincorporated into the historic 
episcopate, which most of Christendom has," Prof. Donald 
Armentrout, an ELCA pastor who teaches at the Episcopal seminary 
in Sewanee, told Lutheran and Episcopal ecumenical officers. "The 
ELCA is being asked to adopt a sign of apostolicity that is not 
necessary but may help us in our mission to the world."

Bishop William Burrill of the Diocese of Rochester 
called the continuing divisions among Christians "obscene," 
arguing that Lutherans and Episcopalians should be uncomfortable 
with the obscenity of a divided church. "We have got to help our 
people hear the Gospel," he said.

Ecumenical winter?

The Rev. William Rusch, an ELCA pastor who is director 
of the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of 
Churches, argued against those who contend we are in the middle 
of an "ecumenical winter."

Using the World Council of Churches Assembly last 
December in Zimbabwe as an example, he is encouraged by a 
proposal for a Forum of Christian churches and ecumenical 
organizations that would bring a much more diverse group to the 
table to discuss common issues--including the Roman Catholics and 
some of the emerging evangelical churches. And he cited a new 
dialogue with Orthodox churches that object to what they perceive 
as a politicized agenda of the WCC.

While the Roman Catholics and the Lutherans move 
closer to a common statement on justification, erasing one of the 
major disagreements emerging from the Reformation, the Episcopal 
Church's dialogue with Roman Catholics has hit a few bumps in the 
road, especially in light of Pope John Paul II's encyclical 
blocking any consideration of the ordination of women. Yet 
participants in that dialogue have adopted a new level of 
realism--and determination.

"Disagreements are always serious, but they are 
tolerable in an environment of mutual respect," Bishop Ted Gulick 
of Kentucky said at a luncheon meeting of the Episcopal Church's 
ecumenical officers. As the new co-chair of the Anglican-Roman 
Catholic dialogue in the USA he finds encouragement in the 
Vatican's decree on ecumenism which, after pointing to the split 
at the time of the Reformation, adds, "As a result, many 
communions, national or denominational, were separated from the 
Roman See. Among those in which some catholic traditions and 
institutions continue to exist, the Anglican Communion occupies a 
special place." One of the tasks of the dialogue, he said, "is to 
find language which describes and articulates the unity that is 
the Spirit's gift."

No time for discouragement

In her keynote address at the workshop, the Rev. Ellen 
Wondra of Bexley Hall Seminary in Rochester also took 
encouragement with the hard work and steady progress of 
ecumenical efforts. "Our work is a sign that our churches are 
also in the midst of a conversion--from dividedness to communion 
and unity," she said.

Continuing divisions are "complicated and they are 
deeply rooted," she added. "We are dealing with firm beliefs and 
also with entrenched attitudes and behaviors," but also "a 
tendency to overstate the difficulties, and to understate our own 
capacities to deal with them."

Wondra is convinced that "a mature approach to our 
situation entails the recognition that conversion is the graced 
work of generations as well. And a mature approach entails our 
taking risks--carefully considered, of course, but risks 
nonetheless."

She labeled as sinful "the dividedness among us as 
indicative of the dividedness within us, in which we both want 
and do not want to be changed" and the kind of reliance on 
ourselves that produces discouragement. "As Christians and 
ecumenists we have much to rejoice in--God's calling to the 
church to be one is indeed coming to pass. May we all, then, be 
of good courage and steadfast faith, open to each other's wisdom 
and needs, and open to the new realities into which God is, even 
now, bringing us."

--James Solheim is the Episcopal Church's director of news 
and information. The ELCA news office contributed to this report.
For more information contact:
Episcopal News Service
Kathryn McCormick
kmccormick@dfms.org
212/922-5383
http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/ens