wfn.org | Workshop on Unity Draws 400 Ecumenists from Several Traditions

[PCUSA NEWS <pcusa.news@ecunet.org>]

8-June-1999 
99218 
 
    Workshop on Unity Draws 400 Ecumenists 
    from Several Traditions 
 
    by James Solheim 
    Episcopal News Service 
 
ROCHESTER, N.Y. - Drawn by a common commitment to the search for Christian 
unity, about 400 representatives of Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox 
churches met here in May to celebrate recent advances, discuss continuing 
barriers to unity - and 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 of the Episcopal 
Church. "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 ... allow ourselves to 
be pulled out of our ecclesial securities by the power and urgency of God's 
deathless and recreative and reordering love." 
 
    Several speakers addressed both the recent successes and the continuing 
frustrations of the ecumenical movement. The Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, 
stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), 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." Kirkpatrick said he sees many signs of hope, 
including progress on the Consultation on Church Union (COCU), 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 in 1997 when the Lutherans failed by six votes to 
adopt a Concordat of Agreement at their Churchwide Assembly.  They will 
vote this August on a rewritten proposal, "Called to Common Mission," but 
opposition is well-organized, centered on aversion to a requirement that 
the Lutherans adopt the historic episcopate. A similar requirement has 
hampered the COCU conversations. 
 
    Episcopal 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. 
 
    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 claim we are in the middle of an "ecumenical winter." 
 
    Using as an example the World Council of Churches (WCC) Assembly last 
December in Zimbabwe, Rusch said he was 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," said Episcopal Bishop Ted Gulick of 
Kentucky, co-chair of the Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue in the United 
States. He said he was encouraged by the Vatican's decree on ecumenism, 
which assigned the Anglican Communion "a special place" in Catholic 
tradition. "One of the tasks of the dialogue," Gulick said, "is to find 
language which describes and articulates the unity that is the Spirit's 
gift." 
 
    In her keynote address, the Rev. Ellen Wondra, an Episcopalian and 
professor at Bexley Hall Seminary in Rochester, said she also is encouraged 
about 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 
admitted.  "We are dealing with firm beliefs and also with entrenched 
attitudes and behaviors," as well as "a tendency to overstate the 
difficulties, and to understate our own capacities to deal with them." 
 
    Wondra said "a mature approach to our situation entails the recognition 
that conversion is the graced work of generations." She said a mature 
approach entails our taking certain risks - "carefully considered, of 
course, but risks nonetheless." 
 
    She labeled as sinful "the dividedness among us as indicative of the 
dividedness with us, which makes us both want and 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 call to the 
church to be one is indeed coming to pass," she said. "May we all, then, be 
 ... open to the new realities into which God is , even now, bringing us." 

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