The Ecumenical Movement

The scandal of division

By 1900 Christianity was more divided than ever. There were Catholic, Orthodox and Oriental churches, and hundreds of Protestant denominations, many competing with each other. Nowhere did these divisions look worse than on the mission field. Missionaries in India or China found themselves explaining to new converts why Methodists, Presbyterians and Anglicans could not share Communion, over disputes that had arisen in Europe centuries before. Jesus had prayed that his followers would all be one, "so that the world may believe" (John 17:21). Division seemed to undermine the gospel itself.

Edinburgh 1910

The World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910, chaired by the American Methodist layman John R. Mott, is usually considered the birth of the modern ecumenical movement (see The Great Century of Missions). It was mostly Protestant and Western. But its spirit of cooperation led to three streams:

1. Mission: the International Missionary Council (1921).
2. Life and Work: cooperation on social and practical issues. Its first conference, Stockholm 1925, was led by the Swedish Lutheran archbishop Nathan Söderblom, who won the Nobel Peace Prize.
3. Faith and Order: discussing the doctrinal differences that divide churches. Its first conference, Lausanne 1927, was inspired by the American Episcopal bishop Charles Brent.

Delegates at Edinburgh also heard a famous plea from V. S. Azariah, a young Indian clergyman and later the first Indian Anglican bishop: "You have given your goods to feed the poor. You have given your bodies to be burned. We also ask for love. Give us friends!"

The World Council of Churches

Life and Work and Faith and Order agreed in 1937 to form a single body. The Second World War delayed it, but in 1948, in Amsterdam, the World Council of Churches (WCC) was founded, with 147 member churches. The Dutch Reformed theologian W. A. Visser 't Hooft was its first general secretary. Its basis: a fellowship of churches that confess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Savior. Later it added "according to the Scriptures" and "to the glory of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit." The WCC is not a "super-church." It is a council in which churches work and pray together.

Several Orthodox churches were founding members, and in 1961 the Russian and other Eastern European Orthodox churches joined, under Soviet supervision. Today the WCC has about 350 member churches representing over 500 million Christians. The Catholic Church is not a member but cooperates closely, especially in the Faith and Order Commission.

From the 1960s the WCC became increasingly involved in social and political issues, most controversially its Programme to Combat Racism (1969), which gave grants to liberation movements in southern Africa. Many evangelicals criticized it for neglecting evangelism and theology. They formed their own networks, notably the Lausanne Movement (1974), led by Billy Graham and John Stott (see Evangelicals and Fundamentalists).

The ecumenical movement

Churches that united

In some places churches actually merged:

• The United Church of Canada (1925): Methodists, Congregationalists and most Presbyterians.
• The Church of South India (1947): Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists. It was the first union to combine churches with bishops and churches without them, a model for others. The Church of North India followed in 1970.
• The Uniting Church in Australia (1977).
• In the US, mergers produced the United Methodist Church (1968), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (1988) and the Presbyterian Church (USA) (1983).

Other agreements established "full communion" between separate churches. Examples include the Leuenberg Agreement (1973) among European Lutheran and Reformed churches, ending the dispute over the Lord's Supper that dated from Marburg in 1529 (see Zwingli, Calvin and the Reformed), and the Porvoo Agreement (1992) between Anglicans and Nordic and Baltic Lutherans.

Rome enters the conversation

For decades the Catholic Church held aloof. Pius XI's encyclical Mortalium Animos (1928) forbade Catholics to take part, insisting that unity meant others returning to Rome. That changed dramatically with Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. Its Decree on Ecumenism (1964) recognized other Christians as "separated brethren," truly baptized and in real, if imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church. It admitted that "people of both sides were to blame" for the divisions. Protestant and Orthodox observers attended the council. The Vatican established a Secretariat (now Dicastery) for Promoting Christian Unity.

The results included:

• Catholic–Orthodox: In 1964 Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I met in Jerusalem, the first meeting of pope and patriarch since 1439. In 1965 they lifted the excommunications of 1054 (see The Great Schism). Popes and patriarchs, including Bartholomew I and Francis, have met often since.
• Catholic–Oriental Orthodox and Church of the East: joint declarations affirming a common faith in Christ, ending the disputes of 431 and 451 (see Ephesus and Chalcedon).
• Catholic–Lutheran: the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999) declared that the 16th-century condemnations on justification do not apply to the other's present teaching. Methodists, Reformed and Anglicans later affirmed it. In 2016, Pope Francis joined Lutherans in Lund, Sweden, to begin commemorating the Reformation's 500th anniversary together.
• Catholic–Anglican: the ARCIC dialogues found agreement on the Eucharist and ministry, though the ordination of women and later disputes created new obstacles.

Spiritual ecumenism

Some of the most powerful ecumenical work has been prayer and shared life. The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (18–25 January) is observed worldwide. In 1940, in a French village near Cluny, a Swiss Reformed pastor, Brother Brother Roger (Schutz), founded the Taizé Community, where Protestant and Catholic brothers live together. Its simple, meditative chants draw tens of thousands of young people every year. Brother Roger was murdered during evening prayer in 2005 by a mentally ill woman.

Where things stand

The ecumenical movement transformed relationships. Christians who once burned each other now pray together, and centuries of mutual condemnation have been formally withdrawn. Yet full visible unity, such as sharing the Eucharist, remains far off. The main obstacles are the papacy, the ordination of women, and sexual ethics. New divisions have opened within denominations, especially over sexuality, often deeper than the old divisions between them. And the fastest-growing churches, Pentecostal and independent, are mostly outside the formal ecumenical structures. Many speak today of a "receptive ecumenism," in which churches learn from each other's gifts, rather than mergers.

Ecumenism at the grassroots

Much of the most important ecumenical work has happened far from official dialogues. In many towns, churches run food banks, homeless shelters and refugee programs together. Christians of different traditions have prayed together in prisons, labor camps and hospitals. Under Communism and Nazism they discovered that what united them mattered more than what divided them, an "ecumenism of martyrs," in Pope John Paul II's phrase. In the Global South, Christians often care less about European historical divisions than about shared challenges: poverty, persecution and the presence of other religions. Ecumenical Bible translations, such as many modern versions produced jointly by Catholic and Protestant scholars, have made the same Scriptures common ground.