CHALLENGE OF ECUMENISM
By
Rev. Tom Ryan, CSP
Celebrating
the origins of the ecumenical movement
The worldwide ecumenical movement will celebrate a 100-year birthday
of sorts in June. It was, you might say, an unexpected birth.
On June 14 - 23, 1910, 1,200
delegates, mostly white and male, gathered in Edinburgh, Scotland for
a World Missionary Conference, the third in a series of international
missionary conferences involving Protestant and Anglican missionary
societies. There were no Roman Catholic or Orthodox representatives.
It was conceived as a major
moment in a missionary effort to bring the world to Christian faith.
How it came to be identified as the precursor of the ecumenical movement
as we know it today makes for an interesting story.
It was an English-speaking conference, with about 85 per cent of the delegates from the UK and the US. There were eight working commissions, and their areas of focus covered a broad range including preaching the Gospel in non-Christian lands, education, non-Christian religions, the life of local churches, and Christian unity. The Christian Century magazine reported that “Everyone feels the presence in the conference of a power not ourselves, deeper than our own devices, which is making for a triumphant advance of Christianity abroad.”
Elective memory
Is it a misconstruing of
history to see the Edinburgh 1910 conference as the birthing event of
the modern ecumenical movement? Rev. Dr. Steven Bevans, a professor
at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, said in his talk on the origins
of the ecumenical movement at the US National Workshop on Christian
Unity in Tampa, Florida, April 19 - 22, that the answer is both “yes”
and “no.”
“It represents a decisive
moment in the origin of the ecumenical movement, culminating in the
founding of the World Council of Churches in 1948,” said Bevans.
“But in many ways, that is the product of an ‘elective memory.’
To a possibly greater extent than any other event in modern Christian
history, the conference has been subjected to reinterpretation.”
Even the conference’s
organizer, Joseph H. Oldham, hoped that the eight preparatory volumes
of the conference would be standard missionary references for years
to come. Yet in 1960 at age 84, Joe Oldham, said Bevans “did not
hesitate to interpret the event primarily in terms of its significance
for subsequent ecumenical rather than missionary history.”
Brian Stanley, the author of The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910, also admits that the assessment of subsequent scholarship is in some ways very accurate. At the conference a certain atmosphere was developed, certain ideas were expressed and a particular decision was taken that, in retrospect could be understood as the beginning of that “great new fact of our era,” the modern ecumenical movement.
Entry by the back door
To be sure, there were concerns
for Christian unity at the conference. The focus of Commission #8 was
precisely that. But the way the emphasis on the importance of Christians
working together in the mission of the church entered in was more by
way of the back door.
One of the proposals as to
whom to invite to the conference involved the exclusion of delegates
from Latin America and from any other places where Protestant missionaries
were working to convert Catholics to Protestantism. Many American Protestants
opposed this idea, because they too were working in some countries for
the conversion of Catholics to Protestantism.
In the end, the churches
involved in organizing the conference decided in favour of co-operating
with other churches — including the Roman Catholic Church —
in the missionizing effort. Leading voices were those of American Episcopalian
Bishop Charles Brent, working in the Philippines, who was in favour
of collaboration with Roman Catholics, and Anglican Bishop Edward Talbot,
who said, “There is no complete Christian unity without Catholics
and Orthodox.”
The World Missionary Conference
of 1910 thus foreshadowed a new era of co-operation among the churches.
Conference records reported frequent calls for unity both in the mission
field and at home, and many intercessions in the daily prayer services
“that they may be one so that the world may believe.” Lord
Balfour of Burleigh, England stated “We are drawing together now,
as perhaps we have never been drawn together before.”
Commission 8 members saw
the need for international co-operation in the missionizing effort,
and for a co-ordinating body to facilitate it. To this end, they brought
a proposal for a Continuing Committee before the General Assembly. It
passed by acclamation, with a spontaneous singing of a prayer of praise.
The moment was later seen to be a critical one in the birthing of the
modern ecumenical movement.
The theme of the centenary
meeting June 2 - 6, 2010 in Edinburgh is a missionary one: Witnessing
to Christ Today. All those not part of the 1910 conference — Catholics
and Orthodox — will be active participants.
And thanks to the ecumenical
movement, they all agree: unity is for mission.
Ryan directs the Paulist North American Office for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations in Washington, DC.
 |
|