wfn.org | EKD Calls for Ecumenical Progress through "Church Fellowship"

["Frank Imhoff" <FRANKI@elca.org>]

Example of Leuenberg Church Fellowship

HANOVER, Germany/GENEVA, 7 November 2001 (LWI) - The Evangelical
Church in Germany (EKD) says progress in ecumenical relations could
be brought about through a "fellowship of churches" model.

This would amount to a re-ordering of relationships among churches
that are divided from one another by their different confessions, the
EKD Council said in an October 30 statement. It noted that the
concept of the existing fellowship among Protestant churches could
serve as an example.

An EKD text on this subject, "Church Fellowship according to
Protestant Understanding" says such a fellowship among churches
includes, as a practical consequence, pulpit and table fellowship. It
assumes that the churches recognize one another as churches. The text
was written by the EKD Advisory Commission on Theology, chaired by
Professors Eberhard Juengel and Dorothea Wendebourg of the Protestant
Faculty of Theology, University of Tuebingen, Germany.

The EKD, which brings together 24 Lutheran, Reformed and United
churches in Germany, proposes the Leuenberg Church Fellowship as an
example. The alliance of 103 Protestant churches in Europe and South
America today is based on the 1973 Leuenberg Agreement, signed in
Leuenberg near Basel, Switzerland. Its members are mostly Lutheran,
Reformed and United churches, but include also Methodists and
pre-Reformation churches such as the Waldensians and the Church of
the Czech Brethren. The agreement ended a more than 450-year-old
division among churches in Europe.

The EKD Council admits that a fellowship of churches in this sense
remains difficult to achieve with the Roman Catholic Church, despite
the good ecumenical cooperation which exists. It is obvious that the
Roman Catholic idea of the full visible unity of the churches is "not
compatible" with the Protestant model of church fellowship, and
similar difficulties exist concerning the Orthodox churches, said the
statement.

The EKD Advisory Commission on Theology notes that there cannot be
just one, historically developed form of ministry as the basis of
fellowship among the churches. The commission says the hurdles on the
way to increased fellowship with the Catholics particularly include
the primacy of the Pope, the exclusion of women from ordination to
ministry, and the importance accorded to church law in the Roman
Catholic Church. The commission calls for these obstacles to be
removed.

(Based on an Evangelischer Pressedienst -epd- [Protestant Press
Service] report)

(The LWF is a global communion of Christian churches in the Lutheran
tradition. Founded in 1947 in Lund (Sweden), the LWF now has 133
member churches in 73 countries representing over 60.5 million of the
64.3 million Lutherans worldwide. The LWF acts on behalf of its
member churches in areas of common interest such as ecumenical
relations, theology, humanitarian assistance, human rights,
communication, and the various aspects of mission and development
work. Its secretariat is located in Geneva, Switzerland.)

[Lutheran World Information (LWI) is the information service of the
Lutheran World Federation (LWF). Unless specifically noted, material
presented does not represent positions or opinions of the LWF or of
its various units. Where the dateline of an article contains the
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acknowledgment.]

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