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Ecumenism fading away? Not before 2000!
Ecumenical prospects are looking good right now. Help is on the way for partners in inter-church marriages, churches are planning a joint celebration of the millennium, local ecumenical partnerships can expect stronger support, and Christians from all traditions may soon get an international council.
As Christian Unity Commission secretary Hilary Christie-Johnston told assembly members yesterday, "What an exciting time to be a Christian! Who could say that the ecumenical movement is fading away? Ecumenism is taking new forms, the focus shifts, but the impetus continues."
Or, as commission chairperson Dr Robin Boyd put it, "We did not become the Uniting Church in Australia in 1977 in order to share in an interesting ecclesiological experiment." For mission to be effective, he said, "unity is essential".
Not even sex is expected to stop it. "I don't think any decisions [on the sexuality report] will lead to a break-off in dialogue [with other churches]," Dr Boyd told a press conference following the assembly session on Christian unity.
He had earlier warned the assembly that "there are disturbing signs in this assembly of a post-modern retreat from ecumenism".
But assembly responded to the report by affirming the place of ecumenism, or being "but one part of the body of Christ", in its establishment of new congregations, decisions about mission initiatives, training and stationing of ministers.
It also encouraged all UCA councils and members to support ecumenical agencies "in promoting the fully ecumenical celebration of the new millennium".
That has the prospect of the nation's church leaders journeying together through the desert to the centre of Australia in May 2000. The climax would be in Pentecost 2001, with Christians in local areas celebrating what they already do together and seeking ways to live out Christian unity more seriously.
Another kind of union is possible internationally of the "four great families", as Mrs Christie-Johnston described them. They are the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant and Pentecostal churches.
A move starting in 2000 could lead to "an ecumenical council of the entire church of Jesus Christ, in the sense of the ancient undivided church, in order to overcome the remaining barriers which separate us", she said.
But ecumenism can work on the home front, too. Dr Boyd acknowledged that Uniting Church members married to Roman Catholics still faced problems, but the RC-UCA dialogue group "is about to publish a book which will really help such marriages – honouring both traditions, but especially honouring the integrity of the marriage".
He said that Christian unity needed the best biblical and theological scholarship available. Anything less was "trifling with mission as well as with unity". Bitter experience showed that mere co-operation between churches was "never more than temporary", while spiritual unity was "equally vulnerable to collapse".