The Open Secret for the Open Society

Ecumenical Review, The, July, 2000 by Martin Conway

Unity, Mission and Social Responsibility as Inescapably Inter-related Challenges

An epistle from the Cape of Good Hope

I am writing this article in the city of Cape Town. As long ago as 1806 William Carey suggested this place as the appropriate venue for "a meeting of all denominations of Christians" in which it would be possible to "understand each other better in two days than in two years of correspondence".(1) That letter, even if it met no ready agreement in the Baptist Missionary Society, sowed a seed that was eventually to lead to the world missionary conference of Edinburgh 1910 and the International Missionary Council of which Lesslie Newbigin was general secretary at the time it was "taken up" into the World Council of Churches. What more appropriate place to be writing a contribution to his Unfinished Agenda?

It is all the more appropriate for being at present one of the home cities of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established by the new, democratic government of South Africa, and chaired by emeritus Archbishop Desmond Tutu.(2) The as-yet unfinished story of its work over two and a half years surely represents one of the most striking efforts in our time to incorporate into the public arena two of the central themes -- truth and reconciliation -- of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Challenges for an assembly dedicated to the virtues of hope

This is being written in 1998 also in the immediate run-up to the eighth assembly and fiftieth anniversary of the World Council of Churches, to be held and observed in Harare, Zimbabwe, in December 1998. Can the assembly, with its theme "Turn to God -- Rejoice in Hope", succeed in reawakening for Christians around the world a sense of hope comparable to that which, in the aftermath of the second world war, encouraged many to see in the ecumenical movement a promising instrument for a radically renewed church serving a new world?

To do so Harare will need to win through to a quite new sense of the power of God confronting, for instance, the current global economic (dis)order, the spread of the HIV/AIDS virus, and the relentless exhaustion and pollution of the natural resources of the planet. At the same time, the assembly will have to face what is often referred to as the "ecumenical winter", in which promising beginnings in moving beyond church divisions into more united and hope-filled churches have dried up in recent decades. There is a crying lack of practicable models for taking concrete steps towards unity. All this calls for a new quality of imaginative initiative and of persevering in commitment, by the WCC's member churches, let alone their sister churches outside the Council.

A dismaying decision

In particular, the Harare assembly will have to respond to the recent decision of the Orthodox churches in communion with the ecumenical patriarch, all long-standing member churches of the WCC, that their delegates should attend the assembly without voting, except on matters of direct concern to their church, and without leading any public worship. This decision is not altogether surprising, for these churches have been restive for some years about their membership in the Council, having found it hard to agree with the thinking and advice of those in their own communities who have taken leading roles in the thinking and acting of the WCC.(3) But that does not lessen the challenge which it puts to the WCC's present self-understanding and ways of working.

Issues of mission lie, significantly, behind that decision. Churches in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and above all Russia, have experienced massive shock as these Orthodox heartlands, now released from communist control, have been invaded by hundreds of "missionaries" from foreign agencies and fellowships. Bad enough to have to deal with gurus from India and New-Age enthusiasts from Switzerland. Worse still to have to cope with fundamentalist/evangelical and pentecostal Protestants from Germany, South Korea and the USA. Still more galling, I suspect personally, has been to find their sister great church of the patriarchate of Rome encouraging back into existence the uniate churches suppressed by Stalin, and establishing new congregations and bishoprics under the Vatican's supervision.

The Orthodox have found these new bodies -- many of them with more modern communications technologies and readily available money than the local churches -- as debilitating as they are disgraceful.

As leaders of churches that have suffered for centuries under the pressures of militant Islam, and now still more painfully for fifty years under an aggressively atheistic, totalitarian rule, why -- they feel -- should their witness to the gospel have to compete with brash "apostles" of what they cannot recognize as the faith once entrusted to the Christian church? And why have their WCC partners from the other Christian traditions proved so weak in restraining their own fellow-countrymen?

The words are often rough, the emotions raw. Gatherings of the WCC in this period have heard these cries but have found it difficult if not impossible to make a helpful response. Can the Harare assembly find, in its words and in its worship, fresh winds of hope?