What is the church: the Faith and Order agenda

Christian Century, Oct 23, 1996 by S. Mark Heim

Moshi, Tanzania

WHEN MEMBERS of the World Council of Churches' Faith and Order Commission gathered at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro, their task was to chart new paths on several fronts. The two-week August meeting was one of the infrequent sessions of the full 120-member plenary commission (which last gathered in 1989 in Budapest). Both Faith and Order's program and its methods were up for discussion.

The recent history of the Faith and Order movement has revolved The to around a clear if daunting agenda. To further the full, visible unity of the Christian churches, Faith and Order has sought first governance to reconcile church division over baptism, Eucharist and ministry, and then to find avenues of common confession of the faith and a means for Christians to make common decisions about their life together. This plan guided study and dialogue while providing a working definition of what unity looks like.

A generation of work on this agenda produced the Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry document (1982), which has helped foster unparalleled mutual recognition of the sacraments among the churches. Following the BEM text came Confessing the One Faith, an ecumenical explication of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, which was sent to the churches in 1991 for their reflection and response. The World Conference on Faith and Order, which met in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in 1993, issued a list of specific challenges to the churches, urging them to use the theological convergence expressed in these two documents as the basis for steps toward mutual recognition and full fellowship.

In Tanzania, the commission faced the need to chart a new phase of its life. In general terms, this next phase was outlined at Budapest and Santiago: it was to-center on ecclesiology--the nature of the church. Despite the many positive effects of BEM, the churches' official responses to it also highlighted differences. Many statements pointed out the obvious: there is more to the church than baptism, Eucharist and ministry, important and vexing though these topics have been in relations between the communions.

The dialogue surrounding BEM led many to recognize that in most cases the elements of authentic Christianity as one church understood it were also to be found in other churches. But recognition of that fact did not lead to the conclusion that separate churches were or could be one church. Even when churches assemble the same elements, the varied ordering and roles of the elements can still yield decisively different understandings of the church.

The ferment around BEM pointed to the larger question: what is the nature of the church within which baptism, Eucharist and ministry are configured, the body of which they are living parts? Here lurks the "endgame of ecumenism," the final ecumenical topics: questions of authority, governance and primacy.

At an earlier stage of the struggle for unity these questions were largely put aside as too touchy and also too premature until progress could be made on comparatively more hopeful fronts. At Moshi these topics were explicitly placed on Faith and Order's agenda. This represents at least an implicit acceptance of the invitation extended by Pope John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical Ut unum sint--an invitation to an ecumenical discussion of the meaning that primacy might have as a ministry of unity within the whole church.

This, however, is only half the impetus toward the focus on ecclesiology. Existing alongside the Faith and Order studies of confessional differences has been a stream of reflection on the relation between the churches and the world. Two long-term studies--on the Community of women and Men in the Church and on the Unity of the Church and the Renewal of Human Community--were the primary avenues through which the commission's agenda was changed and expanded by the inclusion of voices and perspectives largely absent at the origins of the Faith and Order movement. "Unity and renewal" or "church and world" became shorthand phrases that referred not just to these specific studies, but to an approach that stressed that Christian unity is not an end in itself but serves the fulfillment of God's purposes in creation as a whole. Here, too, the conversation pointed toward ecclesiology, raising the question whether the church is not constituted as much by its participation in God's ongoing activity in history as by continuity in tradition.

These two streams of thought have been in tension within Faith and Order, a tension at times stubborn, at times creative. The traditional and charter-mandated aim of visible Christian unity can be criticized as excessively organizational, at the extreme substituting a concern for mediating between historical ecclesial structures in place of faithfulness to God's mission in the world. The "church and world" stream can be criticized as excessively instrumental, at the extreme making the church and its unity means for furthering a prophetic plan of social transformation perceived and endorsed by an elect as likely to be found outside the church as within it.