Women and Ecclesiology - bibliography included

Ecumenical Review, The, Jan, 2001 by Janet Crawford

The text however fails to offer any concrete proposals as to how these aims might be achieved, or what changes might be needed in the churches to accomplish these aims.

Church and Worm is, like BEM, a convergence text, that is, it focuses on areas of agreement, on what it is possible to say together. It is carefully written, combining passages of objective description with questions which have been formulated in deliberately neutral terms. It touches on issues which had been raised in the CWMC study -- theological anthropology, scripture and Tradition, women's ministries and the ordination of women, power and authority in the church, language -- but it loses the cutting edge and radical questioning evident in the earlier study. There is no hint in Church and Worm of the passionate nature of the struggle for the full participation of women in the church, nor of the growing tensions which the search for a renewed community of women and men was creating, within and between the member churches of the WCC and in the very structures of the WCC itself.(35)

Koinonia

At Budapest in 1989 the Faith and Order commission began to plan a new and comprehensive study on ecumenical perspectives of the nature and mission of the church, focused around the concept of koinonia or communion.(36) Concern was expressed by one of the female commissioners who asked:

   Will discussing koinonia help heal the wounds of women and not cover them
   up? ... If women and men share a common koinonia within the church, does
   this mean that I should expect to live in that koinonia in the New Creation
   now, where the promise is that in Christ there is "neither male nor female"
   (Gal. 3:28)? Or should I accept that this will only happen in the kingdom?
   That is, if we approach this problem from the standpoint of koinonia, am I
   going to be told that the ultimate evil is to disturb the koinonia? ... Can
   focusing on koinonia really help women talk to those who regard us as ...
   unwilling to set aside petty concerns for the good of the church? Can
   discussing koinonia help?(37)

More than a decade later there is little evidence to suggest that the theme of koinonia has helped to "heal the wounds of women", or that ecumenical discussion focused on this concept has encouraged the inclusion of women's perspectives on ecclesiology. At Canberra in 1991 the seventh assembly of the WCC adopted a statement entitled "The Unity of the Church as Koinonia: Gift and Calling" and voted to send it to the churches.(38) The short statement, which had been prepared by Faith and Order and, after significant sharpening and clarification, adopted officially by the churches at Canberra, affirmed the calling of the church "to proclaim reconciliation and provide healing, to overcome divisions based on race, gender, age, culture, colour, and to bring all people into communion with God"(39) It concluded by calling the churches to take a number of steps towards full, visible unity. But in these there was no mention of anything to do either with women's place in the church, or with the church as an inclusive community of women and men. Indeed in the whole text there was no hint that questions of women's participation, including the ordination of women, had anything to do with the visible unity of the church. That is: koinonia in the Canberra statement referred to the unity of the churches, and not to community within the church.