wfn.org | WCC may replace its ‘anglo-saxon' style of governance

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Note #6253 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

6-November-2000
00394

WCC may replace its ‘anglo-saxon' style of governance

Orthodox members, a permanent minority, object to majority rule

by Stephen Brown
Ecumenical News International

GENEVA -- The world's leading ecumenical organization, the World Council of
Churches (WCC), in Geneva, could replace its present "anglo-saxon"
parliamentary style of governance by a more "consensual" style, if
suggestions from a meeting in Cairo last month are accepted.

	For several years the WCC -- which has more than 330 Protestant, Anglican
and Orthodox churches as members -- has been under pressure from its
Orthodox members who believe that the organization is dominated by Western
Protestant theology and morality.  The Orthodox churches often feel that
their voices are not heard in the WCC governing bodies, where most of the
delegates are from Protestant churches.

	To deal with complaints from the Orthodox churches, the WCC has set up a
"special commission on Orthodox participation in the WCC," made up of equal
numbers of Orthodox and non-Orthodox representatives. The special commission
was set up after the WCC assembly in 1998 in Harare.

	Interviewed by ENI in Geneva following the second full meeting of the
commission in Cairo last month, one of the Orthodox members of the
commission, Father Georges Tsetsis, said that there had been "almost
complete consensus" between Orthodox and non-Orthodox representatives about
a series of issues that needed to be tackled by the WCC.

	Tsetsis, a representative on the commission of the Ecumenical Patriarchate
of Constantinople, is a member of the WCC's central and executive
committees. He was the permanent representative of the patriarchate to the
WCC from 1985 to 1999.

	Under the present system major decisions are taken at the WCC's main
governing body, the assembly, held every seven years, and by the central
committee, which meets every 12 to 18 months, by majority votes of members.
The proposals emerging from the special commission could change that,
bringing a major overhaul of the decision-making process.

	Tsetsis told ENI that at the Cairo meeting Orthodox and non-Orthodox
members agreed that "we have to abandon the political logic of the
anglo-saxon parliamentary style" and move towards a "consensus approach
which will bring us closer to a common mind."

	However, reforms are likely to stop short of initial demands from some
Orthodox churches for a complete restructuring of the WCC.

	There was also agreement at the Cairo meeting, Tsetsis said, that worship
at WCC events should be "grounded in a living and authentic liturgical
tradition." (At many WCC worship events, the issue of the style of worship
and the sharing of the Eucharist have proved divisive. The Orthodox, who
attach greater value to liturgy than many Protestant churches, have seen
some major WCC religious services as "syncretistic," incorporating elements
of faiths foreign to Christianity.)

	"Many people, and not exclusively Orthodox, feel that so far we have had
experiential worship, inclusive language and so on, in the style of an
extravaganza, which is not necessarily rooted in their own situation,"
Tsetsis said.

	In recent years, two Orthodox churches -- in Georgia and Bulgaria -- have
withdrawn from the WCC, while the Russian Orthodox Church has scaled down
its participation in the work of the WCC pending the outcome of the work of
the special commission.

	The meeting in Cairo was the second full meeting of the special commission.
The results of the meeting will be presented as a progress report to the WCC
Central Committee meeting in Potsdam, Germany, early next year. A final
report should be presented to the following WCC Central Committee meeting in
September 2002.

	Before the Cairo meeting, there were separate meetings for the Orthodox and
non-Orthodox members of the commission. When the two groups met together,
Tsetsis said, "to our great satisfaction we found that there was almost
complete consensus to focus on a number of issues: the nature of the WCC and
ecclesiological issues, the meaning of membership, the tackling of social
and ethical issues, the way of deciding the agenda of the council and taking
decisions, and the style and content of the WCC's worship life."

	Tsetsis said that further work was needed on how decision-making by
consensus could be introduced into the WCC, and whether some form of
"qualified majority voting" was needed for situations where "full consensus"
could not be reached. But he rejected the idea that such reforms might
weaken the WCC.

	The co-moderator of the special commission, Bishop Rolf Koppe of the
Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), Germany's main Protestant body, told
ENI that at Cairo discussions had shifted from talking about the problems to
looking for solutions.

	One of the most sensitive issues discussed at Cairo had been membership of
the WCC. Many Orthodox feel that their position as a minority is reinforced
as the WCC accepts more and more churches, most of them Protestant, into
membership.

	Koppe, who is responsible for ecumenism and external relations at the EKD,
said that commission members had agreed to consider the possibility of a
structure in which smaller churches could be jointly represented, and to
look at the experience of the Protestant regional churches in Germany and
Switzerland which are represented in the WCC by national church structures.

	However, the idea of transforming the WCC, previously raised by Orthodox
officials, so that it becomes representative of the main church "families"
or confessional organizations rather than of individual churches as it was
at present, had not found "majority support," he added.

	"Many churches have no close relationships with a confessional body, and
other churches, such as those in Africa, may feel that they have more in
common with other African churches than their Lutheran or Methodist
counterparts elsewhere," Koppe said.

	A proposal by Metropolitan Kirill, of the Russian Orthodox Church, to
create a "second chamber" for the WCC to allow a looser form of
participation by churches who did not wish to be full WCC members had also
not found "majority support"in the special commission, Koppe said. It was
"difficult to imagine," he said, how the Roman Catholic Church and
charismatic groups could be included in such a structure.

	Asked whether the Cairo meeting was proposing to replace anglo-saxon
parliamentary procedures with decision-making by consensus, Koppe said that
he would not himself make such a sweeping statement. The non-Orthodox
representatives at Cairo had agreed that in general, consensus should be
used wherever possible, but there was also "a recognition that there would
have to be votes on certain issues, such as finance or personnel matters.
The issue is where we set the limits."

	The commission will examine the experience of national councils of churches
in countries such as Australia, where member churches have an "opt out
clause" allowing them not to participate in voting on matters which affect
their self-understanding as a church.

	Koppe agreed that there was concern that such a process might limit the
ability of the WCC to make strong statements, particularly regarding
conflicts such as the recent wars in the Balkans. But he pointed out that
the WCC's Harare assembly had been able to agree a strong statement on the
issue of Jerusalem through a process of consensus.

	On worship -- or "common prayer" -- representatives at the meeting in Cairo
thought that it was better at ecumenical gatherings to have a form of
worship rooted in a "recognizable tradition" rather than a "mix-and-match"
style of worship. However, Koppe added, there was a different understanding
of what was meant by liturgical traditions in different situations.

	"In Germany, for example, we have just produced a new liturgy that includes
aspects of Orthodox worship and prayers from Taize ... Our liturgical
practice includes significant ecumenical elements," he said.

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