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A NEW ECUMENICAL WAVE
by Gerard Kelly
A Public Lecture at the National Council of Churches Forum, Canberra, 12 July 2010
This evening I want to speak about receptive ecumenism. It is an area of ecumenical engagement that has received a lot of attention in the last couple of years and has brought with it a lot of energy. You may have already heard talk of “receptive ecumenism” and wondered what it is all about. At the same time, instinctively you probably already know something of it, as reception has been part of the ecumenical vocabulary for many years, especially since the publication of Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry in 1982. So we are really dealing with something that is old, but also something that is new. The best way I can describe it is to say that it represents a new wave in the ecumenical movement. Let‟s play with this image for a moment. Waves can be powerful and strike with a lot of force. They can also peter out and leave you sitting waiting for the next best thing to come along. They can give you an exhilarating ride; but sometimes they give you a rough ride. Sometimes in a perverse sort of way, the rougher the ride the more exhilarating it is. This image of a new ecumenical wave suggests some questions that all of us can ponder. Do you want to ride this wave? How might you catch it? Where will it lead you? Are you ready for the unexpected?
The New Ecumenical Wave This wave started in Durham, England. It is the brainchild of a Roman Catholic lay theologian at the University of Durham, Dr Paul Murray, and has taken shape around two international conferences. The first was held in 2006 and was called “Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning”.^1 This was followed by a conference in January 2009 on “Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Ecclesial Learning”. Both conferences assembled some of the most significant people in the ecumenical movement from across various church traditions and from significant ecumenical bodies such as the WCC‟s Faith and Order Commission. The second conference had a broader focus and gave space for several traditions to reflect on how they learn and what they are learning and can learn from others. The first conference had done the same thing, but with a focus on learning for the Roman Catholic Church. It seems to me that one of the coups that Paul Murray has been able to pull off is to receive the support of church leadership at the highest level for this new wave. From the moment he started to plan the first conference he involved the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. They became keen supporters of both that conference and the second one. They saw many areas of overlap between the receptive ecumenism wave and their own project of harvesting the fruits of the ecumenical dialogues.^2 More generally we can say that the time seemed ripe for this new wave. Over forty years of intense dialogue, both bilateral and multilateral, have set our churches in a new relationship with each other. Most of the suspicions of an earlier era have disappeared: at the
(^1) See Paul D. Murray, ed., Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning: Exploring a Way for
Contemporary Ecumenism (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008). (^2) See Cardinal Walter Kasper, Harvesting the Fruits: Basic Aspects of Christian Faith in Ecumenical
Dialogue (London: Continuum, 2009).
congregational level, people from different communities mix easily with each other; and at the level of church leadership, there are structures in place that give heads of churches the opportunity to meet regularly. So, despite the formal divisions that still exist among us, there is an awareness that more unites us than divides us. My own sense is that for some time we have been doing much to nurture what we already share together. But, of course, we can never be satisfied with this. Many of us feel that we are at an impasse. Despite years of dialogue and the overcoming of some of the major doctrinal issues that divided us, we often appear to be lost and looking for a way forward. This is another reason why the time is ripe for a new ecumenical wave – one that may help to give new energy to the ecumenical movement, and one that helps us concentrate on different areas.
Description of Receptive Ecumenism So what exactly is receptive ecumenism? Paul Murray says that the central idea requires that churches make what he calls a programmatic shift from asking what do our dialogue partners need to learn from us, to asking what do we need to learn and what can we learn from our dialogue partners.^3 He contends that the bilateral and multilateral dialogues, if taken in isolation, are not capable of “delivering the self-critical openness to practical conversion, growth and development”.^4 In other words, the focus in receptive ecumenism is not exactly the same as for traditional dialogues, which are concerned with matters of faith and order. This is not to say that matters of faith and order might not be relevant, but the focus will be different. The question might now be: given the consensus that has been reached in the theological dialogue, what can my church learn from the other? Framed this way, the question is about a willingness to be self-critical and to be open to grow through learning from others. By and large the theological dialogues have produced important theoretical outcomes. Receptive ecumenism should take churches to the next step, building on these theoretical outcomes and looking for concrete expressions in each church‟s own life. A further characteristic of receptive ecumenism is its potential to help churches look with fresh eyes at their own situation, particularly the challenges and threats they face. It is obvious that at this time many of our churches face critical questions in relation to their internal life. Some have even reached an impasse on important matters of faith and witness. Think of the struggle many of us face in dealing with matters of authority and power in the church, or of ministry in the church and its adequate provision as the number of clergy decrease. Think too of the demographic change that many of us face as our congregations age, and the challenge we face to retain our young people. Many of us face difficult questions about gender and sexuality. All of us, in some manner or other, are likely to be thinking about how to present the gospel in the postmodern world where indifference has often been replaced by hostility. Receptive ecumenism may offer a way to learn from others in facing up to these challenges. In some cases it could result in breaking through the impasse.
Reception is an old idea I have called receptive ecumenism a new wave – and indeed, there is something new here. But we must also remember that reception is an idea that goes right back to the earliest Christian witness. An appreciation of something of the nuances of this idea will help us understand better the potential of receptive ecumenism. Let‟s start with the New Testament,
(^3) Paul D. Murray, “Receptive Ecumenism and Ecclesial Learning Receiving Gifts for Our Needs”, Louvain
Studies 33(2008): 33. (^4) Ibid., 33.
Tradition. In other words reception would ultimately have to deal with diversity of theological expression. This, of course, means that they would have to confront new or different ways of thinking about these central questions of faith and order. While this might begin in a fairly formal way by making a judgement about the BEM text, it was ultimately a spiritual process that would have an impact on the faith, life and witness of each church. It had the potential to lead to practical and concrete changes in church life in each church. This spiritual process was summed up well in these words from the Preface to BEM: “In the process of growing together in mutual trust, the churches must develop these doctrinal convergences step by step, until they are finally able to declare together that they are living in communion with one another in continuity with the apostles and the teachings of the universal Church”.^7 The second and third questions took the process to a deeper level. One asked about the implications for relations with other churches, particularly those that were able to recognise in BEM the faith of the church through the ages. This question was intended to build on the outcome of the first question. It was not so much asking the churches to compare themselves with each other but to consider their relationship in the light of the degree of recognition each had in relation to the independent text. The process of reception envisaged here is still quite rudimentary, while at the same time being challenging. It was not a question of one church receiving into its own life aspects of the teaching, worship and witness of other churches. At this stage it was more a matter of beginning to see the teaching, worship and witness of the other in a different light, on the basis of a common recognition of the apostolic faith in BEM. The presumption is that this process will be on-going and that step-by-step these churches will grow closer together. No church was being asked to give up anything by recognising the other as an authentic witness to the apostolic faith. But reception will involve facing up to diversity. It will involve discerning to what extent the diversity is able to build up the unity of the church, but also to what extent it represents difference that destroys unity. The third question focused quite deliberately on each church itself, asking about the consequences of the acts of recognition that it had been able to make. In other words, where recognition had been possible a church would probably have come across different ways of expressing the faith. Using the text as a guide, churches were now asked about whether they could recognise in themselves a genuine continuity in the apostolic faith. To enter into this spiritual process of reception means that potentially the churches might recognise that there are aspects of their own faith, life and witness that need renewal. It may be that over time certain elements of the apostolic faith had become distorted or even forgotten. It may also happen, particularly in the light of the second question, that a church comes to recognise not only that there has been distortion or neglect in its own faith, life or witness, but also that the apostolic faith can be seen more clearly in another church. Recognising this can lead to renewal in one‟s own church. The premise at work through these questions is that reception begins with various acts of recognition. Taken together, this is understood as a spiritual process that leads to renewal and reform. There are echoes here of the famous dictum from the 1961 WCC Assembly in New Delhi: “The achievement of unity will involve nothing more than a death and re-birth of many forms of church life as we have known them. We believe that nothing less costly can finally suffice”.^8 When you think about it, this is surely the point made in other well-known principles in our churches, such as the Reformation semper reformanda or Vatican II‟s semper purificanda.
(^7) Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry , Faith and Order Paper 111 (Geneva: WCC, 1982), ix.
(^8) W.A. Visser ‟t Hooft, ed., The New Delhi Report: The Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches,
1961 (London: SCM Press, 1962), 117.
To express this another way, reception requires churches to be self-critical, and to be open to conversion and renewal. It is this idea that is at the centre of this new wave in the ecumenical movement, receptive ecumenism. We are all very familiar now with the results of the reception of BEM. The spiritual process of reception, which affects the deeper aspects of the church‟s life, has now been going on for more than two decades. We now have some idea of how the churches have engaged with the second and third questions. There are indications of positive outcomes. For example, many churches have used the insights of BEM in preparing new Eucharistic Prayers or Thanksgiving Prayers. In particular, there is a growing reception of the epiclesis as a central part of these prayers. Again, many churches have taken up the question of personal episcopal ministry as something they need to consider, and some have raised the possibility of introducing the threefold order of ordained ministry. Again, some churches that do not practise water baptism have begun to study this practice more intently and to ask whether they might adopt such a practice. All of these examples suggest that the spiritual process hoped for at the time BEM was published is taking place within the life of the churches. This is receptive ecumenism and it is having practical outcomes.
Receptive Ecumenism and Traditional Methodologies This description of BEM and the reception process into which it invited the churches raises a question for me. Is this what the Durham conferences were about? I think the answer is both yes and no – or maybe it would be better put as “yes, but more”. There is no doubt that the reception BEM called for was meant to take the churches beyond the dialogue phase of ecumenism, yet it depended on the dialogue. The dialogue could take the churches so far, but the next step required that they look at both themselves and their dialogue partners in terms of teaching, life and witness. So reception followed dialogue. I suspect, however, that most churches working with BEM thought of it primarily as a means of focusing on their relationship with their dialogue partners. Yet, in practice it has probably had just as great an impact on their self-understanding and self-identity. Indeed, many commentators acknowledged that one of the spin-offs of BEM was a renewed confessionalism among the churches. Now this can be positive or negative. It is negative if it builds walls around churches, effectively entrenching division. Sadly, in some cases this has happened. The positive dimension of this movement is probably better not labelled as confessionalism, but rather as the renewal of ecclesial identity. In this case it leads to a more authentic expression of church life, learning from the richness of the whole oikumene. This, I believe, is the point of this new wave – receptive ecumenism – and what sets it somewhat apart from the traditional notion of reception. It will help our churches focus on their identity, but not in a narrow sectarian way that is not open to change. Rather, receptive ecumenism is a way for churches to learn, to grow and to change. In this way they become truer to their apostolic origins, and thus more able to offer a precious gift to the whole church. So, instead of confessionalism we have genuine ecclesial learning!
Reception and Ecclesial Learning I want to sound a word of caution here. Despite this rather positive outlook, there is something else that we need to be aware of, and that is that there can be many non-theological factors that prevent ecclesial learning. Each church will have to ask itself “what prevents ecclesial learning from taking place?” Of course, there can be many factors, including
beyond the theoretical and abstract findings of joint studies and make judgements about concrete, particular situations.^13 This will involve a judgement about the capacity of the receiving community to embrace any change that may be suggested. It may also involve a judgement about the pace at which any change might take place in this community. We shouldn‟t imagine, however, that this judgement is simply a human decision. It should be a decision that involves a discernment of the Spirit, remembering that the Spirit fills the whole community with a supernatural sense of the faith so that it may be lived more authentically in the decisions and actions of daily life. Seen in the light of these criteria, ecclesial learning is a creative process. Like any good learning it will only be effective if each church takes an active part in it. Education theorists tell us that the most effective learners are those who assume control and responsibility for their own learning. Ecclesial learning should take an individual church a long way beyond simply taking what it sees in the other and trying to do the same thing. Rather, a church will chew over what it sees and hears, ponder what this could look like in its own, perhaps different, circumstances, and use all of its own traditions and resources to develop something that is fitting for this particular community.
Two Examples I would like to give two quite different examples of what I have been talking about. The first, I hope, will give you a feel for how the idea of receptive ecumenism is having practical outcomes in Durham and the north east of England. I choose this example because in it we see the potential for receptive ecumenism as envisaged by Paul Murray and the Durham conferences. The second example will be more personal and local and will refer to my own church.
The Durham Project on Receptive Ecumenism and the Local Church So let‟s look at Durham. There we have a project that is planned to take three to four years, and which involves nine denominational groupings in northeast England.^14 Each of the participating churches has agreed to make available data about their church life. The project is looking at three areas. The first is governance and finance, and considers how the churches are organised and administered. It looks at the connection between financial administration and pastoral strategy – on the principle that a business plan or budget is really about putting numbers on a pastoral plan. The second area is learning and formation. It asks about the structures and processes that promote the transmission of Christian identity, faith and mission. It is also concerned to identify what impedes learning. The third area is leadership and ministry. It is asking questions about how the churches are responding to issues surrounding the declining numbers of clergy and ministers. It is also concerned to identify how churches nurture active congregations. Let me say that I think the remarkable thing about this project is that so many churches have agreed to participate in it, and that they have been willing to open their books, as it were, to outside scrutiny. I think our churches are quite used to letting others see their particular ecclesial culture; perhaps we are not so used to letting others see the hard numbers about ourselves. The purpose of the project is to gather data and analyse it so that all the
(^13) Ibid., 44.
(^14) See Paul D. Murray “Receptive Ecumenism and Ecclesial Learning”, 43-45. See also the newsletter
“Receptive Ecumenism and the Local Church: A Regional Comparative Research Project” at http://www.centreforcatholicstudies.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Receptive-Ecumenism-Newsletter.pdf, accessed 28 June 2010.
participants might learn something about how the difficulties they experience in their own cultures and practices might be fruitfully addressed by learning from each other, and receiving examples of “best practice” from each other. A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity, with a small group in Sydney, to meet with Professor Geoff Moore, from the Durham Business School, who was visiting Australia. He is one of the key research people involved in this project, and is focusing on matters of governance, strategy and finance. He spoke to us about some of the results that are emerging. The project is at the stage where the data from all the churches has been analysed and each church has received a copy of its own results. A summary of the data relating to all the churches is also being prepared and will be shared among the participants. Already some churches have been surprised at the picture see reflected back to them by the researchers. Geoff Moore noted that most churches are struggling with what it means to think strategically. Strategy feels like the wrong word for them; it feels alien to being church. He also observed that the capacity to think strategically is very closely related to the governance structures of the particular church. This is raising ecclesiological issues for the churches. In a recent interview for the Faith and Leadership Centre at Duke University in the USA, Moore spoke about his hopes for the receptive ecumenism project in these words: “I hope that the project will do two things. One is that it will make a difference to the local churches. If it doesn‟t have an impact in the local churches, we‟ll feel that in some sense the project has failed. On the other hand, the impact is likely to be felt over a number of years; it‟s not going to be easy to say, „They did that because of this.‟ There are a lot of other factors in play here and things take time in any organization to work their way through. If in five or ten years the churches that participated don‟t look back and say, „That was actually quite a significant project that helped us to move from where we were to where we are now,‟ then I think in some sense we‟ll feel we didn‟t quite do it as well as we should have. That‟s making a difference locally. The question then is, will it make a difference nationally and internationally? There‟s no doubt that the project itself has a very international dimension, a range of people from different countries, churches and so forth engaged with it. The bigger question is, does this local practical project end up speaking to the churches and changing the way they see themselves and, hence, move us towards a fuller unity?”^15 As you can see, this ecumenical work is a very different paradigm to the normal ecumenical methodology, which is characterised by theological dialogue. The focus here is on the practical and the organisational. The three areas of exploration were chosen because they are crucial areas where all churches are confronted with questions about best practice and how to respond to the demands of modern organisational and economic life, while at the same time remaining faithful to the gospel. The practices can vary greatly, and they have often developed from certain theological presuppositions. Eventually this will open doors onto the theological, but only after travelling a very different route from the normal paradigm. As Paul Murray says, the purpose of this project is to assist the churches to learn. Each will learn things that will help it grow in its capacity to respond to the demands of contemporary life. Rather than the focus being on what other churches can learn from our church, it is now clearly on what our church can learn from others.
The Reception of the Joint Declaration on Justification in the Roman Catholic Church The second example I want to speak of is much more traditional in terms of the way we think of reception and also much more closely connect to religious and theological issues.
(^15) “Geoff Moore: A Fuller Unity”, at http://faithandleadership.com/qa/geoff-moore-fuller-unity?page=0,1,
accessed 28 June 2010.
a gift to be received from our ecumenical partner, and it may help us see or grasp something that we haven‟t noticed before, or help us understand with new insight something that has always been familiar.
Conclusion I began this talk by referring to receptive ecumenism as a new wave in the ecumenical movement. I chose this analogy deliberately because it suggests movement and energy. In this sense the Durham Conferences and receptive ecumenism have offered a new way to invigorate the ecumenical movement when it seems to many people to have lost momentum. I hope, though, that I have also shown that just as a wave has its origin a long way from where we catch it near the shore, reception is an idea with deep roots in the Christian tradition and in the ecumenical movement. These deep roots suggest that receptive ecumenism is not an ephemeral moment in ecumenical time, but has the potential to develop into a lively instrument for ecclesial learning.
