Unity in fullness: a reflection on the theme for the eighth assembly of the World Council of Churches - "Turn to God - Rejoice in Hope": Unfolding the Eighth Assembly Theme

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 1998 by S. Mark Heim

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what

is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of

Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the

fullness of God (Eph. 3:14-19).

The World Council of Churches began at Amsterdam in 1948, rising from three strong waves moving through the founding churches. One movement (Faith and Order) struggled to overcome inherited confessional divisions and realize the visible unity of the church. Another (Life and Work) sought to respond to crises of war and injustice in the broader human community. A third (the international missionary movement) aimed to evangelize the world. For the ecumenical pioneers, these three lines converged. The horizon point that drew them together was the visible unity of the church, a koinonia in faith, life and witness. The church should be united in order to render its praise and confession to God with one heart, in order to serve the world which God loves, and in order that the world might believe. So seamless was this vision (in theory) that it appeared a natural analogy of God's triune economy. On the 50th anniversary of the World Council of Churches, this convergence is less clear.

There is division of opinion about the future shape of each one of these movements. Tension often marks their relations to each other within the World Council. And a crucial fourth movement has been added to the picture, a process of dialogue with the world's religious traditions. The relation of this effort to the other three movements, and the extent to which it is or should be truly distinct from them, are topics which have exercised the WCC much in recent years. The time is right indeed to consider a common understanding and vision for the World Council of Churches.

The eighth assembly will be a crucial turning point in this respect. It will face questions raised by the particular world situation at the time it meets, by needs and upheavals in the global human family. Unavoidable decisions are at hand about the institutional life and vision of the WCC itself, and these take place in the midst of accelerating changes in the global face of Christianity. Meeting in Africa, nearly twenty-five years after the Nairobi assembly, the WCC will return to a continent that embodies many of these changes: Christianity's demographic tilt towards the South and away from the West, the growth of indigenous and Pentecostal churches, the growing prominence of the relation between Islam and Christianity, struggles towards democracy and free markets -- struggles crosscut with inequality and unrelieved poverty, important issues relating to cultural contextualization of the gospel.

The assembly will gather under the theme "Turn to God -- Rejoice in Hope". The theme highlights three classic dimensions of Christian life, each dramatically appropriate at the edge of the third millennium: repentance, thanksgiving, expectation. The challenge for the assembly will be to discern how these three aspects of the theme should shape the WCC's participation in the four movements mentioned above, movements which intertwine as the future of the ecumenical movement itself.

The assembly theme: three interlocking dimensions

The theme points to three "acts" in the Christian life of individuals and communities. These are bound together in one movement. Repentance is animated by hope and joy, and no living hope or thanksgiving lacks its renewed repentance. In fact, when we look closely at our lives or our churches, we often find it almost impossible to assign a sequence to these elements in any powerful movement of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes it is thanksgiving that swells into repentance, or unexpected hope that spills over into thanksgiving, or repentance that uncovers the first glimmers of hope. The sign of the Spirit is that no one of the three remains alone.

Turning to God is a turning away from what estranges us from God and each other, turning towards fullness of life with all creation in,communion with God. Repentance is no isolated moment of sorrow or even of amendment of our lives, because it is above all an act of participation in a relationship, shaped by the specific character of the God towards whom we turn. We can turn away from our failures, our tattered absolutes, innumerable times, only to seek newer versions of the same things. Repentance is a turning that carries us towards the one living God, linking us to the source by whom we may rightly measure our errors but from whom unfailing energy for transformed life radiates. It is not an act that deserves God's reward, but one in which, through grace, our stubborn barriers fall, barriers which have deflected the divine love that is ever flowing to every creature.

Thanksgiving, too, is a cardinal Christian act. It arises in the liberation from our captivities, but it is always primarily rooted in the one to whom we turn. This is why thanksgiving can flourish in every condition, even in those where, in all outward ways, we remain bound. We need not wait for every tear to be dried before rejoicing that God is a God who saves, who establishes justice, who does not leave us in our sins. Even when as yet we see only the dimmest signs that we -- individually or collectively -- might share in the divine life, we can give thanks for the source of that life.