Watch out for elephants
Our world is changing more quickly and dramatically than many of the dedicated women and men who work at the long and lonely task of promoting Christian unity can appreciate. The modern ecumenical movement, which was born about 100 years ago and gave rise to institutions such as the World Council of Churches, seems to be getting a little creaky in the joints and could well be bypassed by global developments.
On the plus side, participants can point to a host of accomplishments and encouraging developments. Christians from a wide variety of traditions around the world certainly know more about and understand each other better than they did a century ago. And many previously impenetrable barriers separating denominations have been breached. We can worship quite freely in many different churches without so much as a raised eyebrow. It wasn't that way before.
A spirit of cooperation and careful listening fostered by ecumenically minded people is also creating a more helpful climate for better understanding between followers of the world's great religions. This too is a (mostly) helpful contribution.
At the same time, however, the movement is well advised to open its eyes to some obvious gaps in its agenda. This point was presented forthrightly at a recent gathering of the North American Academy of Ecumenists when Canadian Council of Churches general secretary Karen Hamilton used her 10-minute slot to identify some of "the elephants in the room." In what she called the "paradox of ecumenism," Hamilton allowed how "we've come a long way," but spent her energy focusing on "the long way we still have to go."
Evangelicals ahoy
Specifically, Hamilton pointed to the ecumenical movement's relative lack of interaction with evangelicals. "We need to work at this," she said. In fact, evangelical Christians are involved in interfaith work; they are engaged in significant social care; they are active in high-level academics and global enterprise of all sorts. But decades of mutual suspicion have kept the two streams from flowing together.
That is changing, but it is tremendously uncomfortable for both camps. Broadly speaking, evangelicals accuse ecumenists of selling out the gospel, while ecumenists blame evangelicals for "sheep-stealing," for aggressively recruiting converts from already Christianized people. The tension will not go away without considerable resolve by all concerned.
But the centre of influence is clearly migrating away from the mainline. Hamilton observed that some 4,200 delegates from more than 200 countries are gathering in Cape Town, South Africa a little later this month for the third Lausanne Consultation on World Evangelism. This is likely the largest and most diverse gathering of Christian mission strategists and practitioners ever convened.
Yet the North American ecumenists seemed scarcely aware of it. This has got to change. Evangelical practitioners have driven much of Christianity's tremendous expansion over the past century. Hundreds of thousands of churches throughout the world are "facts on the ground" that cannot be ignored. Or should not.
Other "elephants" challenging the ecumenical movement include the relative absence of youth in its ranks, at least in North America. Most young people simply assume a high level of ecumenical cooperation, but few are willing to do the demanding work of acknowledging the detail of differences that divide, of untangling the factors that created factions, of slogging through the stuff to reach a better place of understanding. Instead, we just want to get along.
Finally, Hamilton stated the obvious: the ecumenical movement of the past century has to a great extent been organized and resourced by Protestant mainline churches in North America. But these very churches have been hemorrhaging members and their mission budgets are disappearing. Without sponsoring bodies and a modicum of infrastructure, it will very difficult for ecumenical work to continue.
Problems aside, the quest for Christian unity as an element of Christian witness is an admirable pursuit. It was no problem for this evangelical to pray alongside a host of Christians from many traditions, asking God to "Take us from where we are to where You want us to be. Make us not merely guardians of a heritage, but living signs of Your coming Kingdom."
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