Exploring Ecumenism

Two Types of Forum

The development of social capital in our neighbourhoods may seem to be a daunting undertaking.  I will in future posts look at why churches together should be addressing this issue and how they might go about it.  Today, I want to identify one last problem in our neighbourhoods and how many churches are already addressing it.

The basic need in any neighbourhood is for social spaces.  Places where people can meet informally.  Meeting rooms are often in short supply too but here I mean unstructured spaces.  These are of two types. 

One is often called the Forum.  Here local people will meet perhaps only a few times a year to debate matters of common concern.  My local Forum has been meeting 4 times a year for eleven years or so and rarely has attendance fallen below 60 people.  Usually these meetings have an agenda and some sort of structured process, more or less participative.  The meetings also involve a meal which is an opportunity for people to mix who might have few opportunities to do so otherwise. 

The word Forum goes back to the Roman Empire.  The Forum was a public gathering place.  The Forum was where news would be posted, it was a marketplace, the location of the courts and the baths.  It was the natural place to gather to share news and plan activities.  My local Forum does this only four times a year, surely a Forum would be more accurately be a place that is open every day?

Indeed it would.  And this is what so many neighbourhoods lack, a natural gathering place where people can meet and share news.  It is a place with perhaps tea and coffee (but not dependent on peoples' purchases to keep going), where information can be shared perhaps through notice boards or stalls, maybe some meeting rooms attached and also the availability of toilets.  Not so different from the Roman Forum.  Perhaps this is the vision behind community centres except that many do not offer this type of unstructured space.

When we look at many neighbourhoods today there are no such meeting places.  New housing estates often have no facilities whatsoever, where such a space might be opened up.  Ideally they need to situated at a local centre or on a main thoroughfare into the centre. 

Many churches occupy this type of place and some already offer a meeting point, at least for part of the week.  There are of course many issues.  The temptation to biase information sharing in certain directions may be a problem for some.  In a muilti-cultural area it might be difficult to encourage all to share in a space where there will be suspicions of an agenda for proselytising.  And yet, would it be right for churches to open such centres with no spiritual dimension?  I shall return to this question in a later post.

It is easy to identify problems.  The point is that organising depends on social capital and a meeting point or Forum is an essential first step.  Churches Together in a neighbourhood should be able to meet this need by identifying the most appropriate available premises and then resourcing it with time and finance.  They might do this in partnership with others and the premises might not be church premises.  The point they must agree about is why they are doing it. 

What our Church Leaders think about Ecumenism

It seems to me the key to successful ecumenical conversations is to find common ground.  The reasons for distrust between traditions are varied.  Last time I considered the position of the new small churches and their relationship with the mainstream churches.  The approach I took will be controversial but it is a powerful argument to say that ecumenical relationships are the mark of a true church.

This is a brief note to draw attention to a recent exercise carried out by the Church Times and the Baptist Times.  They asked the leaders of the five main traditions in England, namely the Church of England, URC, Baptist, Roman Catholic and Methodist churches, five questions about their views of ecumenism. 

Follow the link to read an overview and then another link will take you to a page where the details of what each leader said can be found.

The message is that the leaders of our main churches, do not share the emphasis of many ecumenists on formal talks.  Their focus is on local churches.  They all claim to value formal talks although the impression is they are not where the church leaders' hearts are.

This simultaneously opens up some common ground with the new churches but also raises questions about how the conversations of local churches can have the rigour of the formal talks.  For the mainstream churches, allowing for differences of emphasis, it is most important that the church engages in ecumenical talks as a whole church.  The question for them is not whether they should do this, but how.

The Problem with Ecumenical Partnerships

I suppose, compared with some people, I am a fan of partnerships.  It is an effective way of working, particularly in community regeneration.  I'm sure too that many business partnerships are entirely beneficial (at least to the business).  On the other hand I've sat on partnership boards and they can be bloodless affairs.  The problem is people are there to represent their organisations, so there is little opportunity to socialise or develop friendships.

That is why I have always felt a little uneasy about the Methodist Church's use of the word partnership when it speaks of its 'partner' traditions.  Partnership is a good thing but is it in this instance the right thing?

Theodore Runyon in The New Creation writes:

Clearly orthodoxy by itself is not the answer, and just as clearly orthopraxy by itself is insufficient.  Not even putting the two together will work.  Believing the right things, plus doing the right things, still does not add up to what Wesley considers essential.  This is our clue that there must be another factor to be taken into account, a tertium quid not covered by the usual standards of right belief and right practice.  What is this third factor?  I have called it "orthopathy", from the Greek ortho (right) plus pathos (feelings affections, and in the larger sense, experience), the new sensitivity to and participation in spiritual reality that marks genuine faith.

Wesley applied orthopathy to faith (he called it experience) but it is experience of things spiritual.  This is intended to be a practical spirituality, not personal subjective faith.  I think it can equally be applied to ecumenism.

Formal talks are concerned with orthodoxy.  Unity in Mission emphasises orthopraxis.  But it is experience that makes the difference.  The experience that cements relationships to a common enterprise.  

A lot of local ecumenism is based upon friendships between ministers of different traditions.  The positive dimension to this is that such friendships can make a significant positive difference and this can be seen time and again.  The problem is when one of these friends moves on, the ecumenical enterprise can be lost. 

Yes, friendship may be more powerful than partnerships but it needs to be friendships between the lay people, the people who have a long term commitment to the area, if their work is not to be in vain.

Positive and Negative Reflections upon Receptive Ecumenism

I will return to the Receptive Ecumenism Conference in future as the conference papers become available.  In this post I shall summarise my current position.  The conference was only a week ago and there is an immense amount to assimilate.  To structure my comments I will refer to previous posts about two and three dimensional ecumenical reception.

Receptive ecumenism between traditions

In many ways this is the dimension where receptive ecumenism makes the most helpful contribution.  Its contribution is to offer a new distinctive objective to ecumenical conversations.  Formal talks tend to seek ways in which we can persuade other traditions to become more like our own tradition.  This approach recognises that all traditions are deficient in some ways and that other traditions may be able to offer new approaches to tackling these deficiencies.  The deeper hope is that if this is pursued with sufficient vigour the traditions will move closer together.  I see this as being both in terms of cognitive closeness, in that certain beliefs might converge but perhaps more significantly in terms of affective closeness.  The latter would be where each tradition learns to value the contribution of others and will seek to preserve other traditions for their contribution to the larger Christian project.

Whilst I welcome all of this I am not able to shake off a degree of suspicion that ecumenical reception is a strategy to maintain the faith and order debate.  So long as it is seen as a means to deliver ecumenical reception of faith and order agreements I think it will be viewed with suspicion in some places.  The problem is that the normative model of formal church decision making processes has not been examined critically.  This can be seen more clearly as we move onto the second dimension.

Receptive ecumenism within traditions

I would not in any way wish to convey the impression that the local church was ignored but whilst formal conversations between church leaders are the main game in town, it is inevitable that the local church is marginalised in thinking.  The Centre for Catholic Studies is conducting a three year collaborative research project to assist with understanding receptive ecumenism amongst local churches.  This is an empirical study and as such it is to be welcomed but I have some methodological reservations.

The project reads as a comparative study of local churches in various traditions in the north east.  It seems an odd omission that the study does not include an examination of ecumenical relationships between these local churches.  A couple of us raised this point at the conference and the response was that the team conducting the project is ecumenical.  There was not much time spent on the topic and it may well be that this will be addressed now it has been raised, as some of the local people present promised to raise this directly with the project.

It is an interesting response though because it may betray underlying top-down assumptions.  The problem is to get the results of formal talks adopted locally and we do that by examining local churches, identifying their problems and then seeking amongst the traditions for solutions.  By omitting talks between local churches from the study, those talks are devalued.

Whilst this opens up a number of assumptions which need examination it perhaps also illustrates that church leaders and academics do not know how to manage the practicalities of multiple local talks.  This does not mean they don't happen or that they don't count.  What it means is that local churches will never behave as they are expected to because the reality of their relationships is not visible from a national or formal perspective.

Receptive ecumenism between the traditions and the rest of the world.

The conference was very full and deliberately did not include mission as a major theme in its programme.  This was referred to from time to time but the place of mission with respect to receptive ecumenism remains something of a mystery.  I think the reason for this is that very little theology was offered that enabled the role of mission in ecumenical relationships to be made visible. 

Given that many churches prioritise mission and evangelism this is somewhat unfortunate.  Do we really want to continue with the impression that ecumenism and mission are somehow independent or even in competition?  There is an urgency to straightening out these relationships because the world is moving on and will not wait upon Christians' conversations.  The implications of climate change for example place ecumenical conversations into context.

The conference mentioned justification several times and seemed to see this doctrine (however expressed) as  a means of addressing mission.  Unfortunately, it is a doctrine that relates directly to inner church matters and to evangelism rather than mission as a whole.  As the conference progressed it seemed to me that sanctification might be a better doctrine to use when addressing these issues.  This is something I will explore further in future posts.

Four Priorities for Local Receptive Ecumenism

Receptive Ecumenism Conference:  Sunday 11 January 2009

As usual at these events we were asked about our hopes and expectations.  These were mine.  They're all about how ecumenical issues might be shared and developed locally.  I hope we will be able to

1. explore how local churches together might share in strategic thinking about ecumenism.  It is a fallacy that you need to be at least at national level to work strategically.  Communications and new approaches to participative group work should assist with this.
2. Theological papers should carry a Crystal Mark for plain English. 
3. consider seriously how to engage the interest of people aged under 30 years.
4. consider how theologians and others might transfer some of the debates to the Internet.  There is an urgent need to explore what can and can not be done on line.

Reactive Learning

I certainly don't want to give the impression that churches don't need leaders.  Leadership is essential.  The problem is that I believe the churches are facing a crisis of leadership.  When leadership is understood as a privilege rather than as a responsibility; it will inevitably result in poorly informed decision making. 

This crisis reflects a more general crisis in leadership in the wider world.  Education generally focuses on the detail of subject areas rather than on the practicality of making good decisions.  Well informed decisions require more than superficial knowledge of a subject area, although this can be helpful it also requires deep listening.

Reactive learning is, according to Presence,  about habitual thinking, seeing the world through habitual categories.  It is odd that this is so common in the churches.  Prayer, whilst in part an inner journey, is completed when attention is drawn outwards.  Good leaders make decisions.  They are not constrained by what others think but take time to consider prayerfully before making decisions. 

Good leadership means that those who are led have a stake in decision making but do not necessarily determine the outcome.  The Quakers are clear that they do not make decisions by consensus.  They listen for the spirit of the meeting.  Where there is a controversial issue, people will naturally turn up to a meeting with their view clear in their own minds.  The aim is allow these to be spoken but then to listen for the deeper truth behind all these presented truths.  This can be done by a single leader or collectively as the Quakers do.  However, the single leader must not make decisions alone and where sufficient are experienced, it is perhaps best that decisions are made collectively. 

Whether leadership is focused on one person or shared collectively, the implications for ecumenism are profound.  Decision making cannot be effective if it is cut off from local churches.  The likely implications of decision-making are so profound for the Christian practice of the adherents to the various traditions, that it is hard to see how conversations between senior people can ever be effective.  The problem is of course that collective decision making is also much more difficult.  Is there any way that everyone can have a realistic stake in ecumenical conversations?  Is it even desirable?

Leadership in Ecumenical Relationships

Presence on page 10 argues, 'Even as conditions in the world change dramatically, most businesses, governments, schools, and other larger organisations, driven by fear, continue to take the same kinds of institutional actions that they always have.'

The credit crunch is a recent example of this, where in Britain the stated intention of the government, supported by the BBC, is a return to normal.  Which particular normal do they mean?  The last few years where people have been encouraged to take on increasing amounts of debt they cannot afford, massive inflation in house prices and all of this supporting artificially high prices in the stock markets?  On the contrary the credit crunch is an extremely painful return to normal after a few years aberrant behaviour.  No reference is made to climate change or other damage to the environment or human relationships by the behaviour that has delivered us into this problem.

Why do institutions behave in this way?  I believe it is a crisis in leadership.  We lack good role models for leadership and as leaders perceive a loss of their own authority they panic and cease to offer the very leadership they are there to deliver.  The problem is an implicit understanding of leadership as an award for good behaviour rather than as a responsibility taken on the behalf of others.  Many leaders say they believe the latter but observation of their behaviour suggests the former is their real belief.

This has two unfortunate side effects.  First, it means decisions are made by uninformed, leaders who panic because they do not understand why their actions do not lead to their expected result.  Second, many people are left out of the decision making loop who, although on their own would be no more competent than their leaders, together through a pooling of insights might be able to inform leadership.

In general, churches seem to mirror what is happening in society rather than set examples of good leadership.  Too many leaders are fearful of loss of authority and do not make full use of the experience available to them through their congregations.  Within my own tradition, we can look back to a time when lay people had a significant stake in leadership.  Through well ordered societies, classes and bands Methodists not only supported each others' spiritual development but learned how to organise.  Consequently, their learning spread into many working class movements especially during the nineteenth century.  The best leaders based their decisions on their critical listening to what was happening in the local societies.  Perhaps, this continues to the present day although the waters are muddier than they could be.

There is a blessing available to any leader in any tradition who is prepared to listen to what lay people are saying. 

The ecumenical movement should be a movement of lay people.  Indeed my conclusion after listening to the problems encountered by many local ecumenical initiatives is that their success depends upon lay leadership.  So many ambitious ecumenical initiatives hit difficulties, when key ordained leaders leave, because they have not successfully engaged the support of lay people.  Consequently, when the next ordained leader arrives, perhaps with less interest or experience in ecumenism, the previous work is devalued or abandoned.

So, whilst lay people are not trusted on the ground, their contribution to ecumenical policy is also devalued.  Progress to full visible unity is measured by the degree of agreement between senior theologians and church leaders.  As a consequence it is difficult to develop the methodologies whereby people at all levels in the churches might contribute to the growth of ecumenical relationships.

The Dual Nature of Biblical Morality

Sacks goes on to contrast philosophical morality and biblical morality.  To summarise, philosophical morality deals in moral absolutes, focusing upon what humanity has in common.  This type of morality underlies human rights.  It is abstract and even where it speaks of individuals it does so in terms of 'the individual' rather than by reference to real people.

Biblical morality is more complex because it adds to these universals a context bound morality dependent on history and memory.  So for each family, tribe, nation or church there will be a complex web of mutual obligations.  This makes the group distinctive.

This is not the same as situation ethics which is in fact a morality of universals, arguing that ethics depends upon the situation in which actions take place.  For the group, their morality holds whatever the situation.

My interpretation of this is that local morality has a wider scope than we normally understand as morals.  It is a web of behavioural norms in which a particular society operates.  Religious congregations will develop their own norms which make them distinctive from other congregations.  Those within the same tradition will have more in common but the local church will have its distinctive culture too.

This makes ecumenism difficult if it is seen as a movement towards unity.  To negotiate unity is to some extent to demand a change in behaviour.  Sometimes this might be a minor adjustment but the smallest changes can sometimes have major implications invisible to those who plan or agree them at national or international level.

For example, disposal of the elements following communion may seem to be a trivial matter.  But for some Methodists what might seem to be reasonable restrictions on what they may do can have profound implications for their understanding of what communion is.  It implies Jesus' presence in the elements themselves whereas some Methodists understand Jesus' presence to be in the fellowship who take part in communion.  Without understanding this the resistance to quite trivial changes might seem inexplicable.  This begins to help us understand why ecumenical reception is so difficult, as even within a tradition variation in beliefs might have profound implications.

To summarise in Sacks words:

There is no road to human solidarity that does not begin with moral particularity - by coming to know what it means to be a child, a parent, a neighbour, a friend.  We learn to love humanity by loving specific human beings.  There is no short-cut.  (Page 58)

Does Sacks description of morality apply to Christianity?  I think it does.  Indeed a discipline of congregational studies has grown up around understanding the cultures of congregations.  I think John Wesley also recognised this in his sermon 'The Catholic Spirit' - I'm sure I'll turn to both of these at some stage.

Churches and Taylorism

I want to clarify what I said about churches and Taylorism in a recent post.  Churches are not and never have been similar to businesses employing a Taylorist approach.  My point is that there are sufficient parallels between churches and traditional manufacturing businesses for there to be a degree of unconscious confusion. 

Aspects of Taylorism have entered the public imagination and often when the role of management in churches is debated I get the impression it is this model that is being criticised as unsuitable for churches.  On the principle that there's no smoke without fire I suspect that a lack of awareness of the range of approaches to management can lead to this confusion shared by some leaders and some of their critics.

Churches can be deeply hierarchical.  An immediate objection is that church hierarchies predate modern manufacturing businesses and so also Taylorism.  Churches were never intended to be led in this way but that does not mean that churches are immune to the influence of this approach.

Another similarity is that just as Taylorist businesses produce thousands of standard products so churches, sometimes across the world, produce standard activities to a timetable or lectionary.  The model of authority descending through hierarchies to be consumed by thousands of consumers must be seductive at least to some leaders.

Despite these similarities churches cannot in practise perform to the Taylorist model.  The reason for this is not theological but economic.  It is the threat of redundancy that enable Taylorist managers to achieve their goal of a standard product.  Workers who will not comply lose their jobs.

Churches face a very different reality.  They do not employ their congregations and although it is possible to discipline their ordained ministers, the members are far harder to control, especially as they pay the bills.  Consequently church hierarchies must resort to other sanctions if they wish to control the beliefs and activities of their congregations.  Leaders with a Taylorist mindset will employ any means to do this but others will see the need to use discussion and debate as a means to arrive at a consensus. 

This is one reason why reception is important.  Decisions cannot be imposed and in even the most top down traditions there still has to be consent from the ground up.  People might accept a degree of coercion but in reality it will not do as a means to conduct long-term change.

I offer this explanation of the tendency for churches to be top down in their approach to change.  This model of change is likely to be the default position of any leader who knows nothing of organisations or management.  For ecumenists, the search for effective ways of finding consent for the results of ecumenical talks is complex and needs close examination.

Ecumenical Reception - conversations in three dimensions?

It appears then that conversations take place in two dimensions; between and within traditions.  But this cannot be the full picture.  William Rusch in Ecumenical Reception writes on page 116:

It should be noted that to date there is virtually no evidence of even partial or preliminary ecumenical reception of ethical or gender issues that are now showing the potential of being church-dividing within and among churches.  Until some clarity is obtained on these subjects, further steps towards ecumenical reception will be hampered.

If the aim of ecumenical reception is full visible unity, it has to be asked what would be the consequence of achieving such a goal?  Our local churches wrestle with a range of ethical issues, sometimes as a result of a decision they have made, sometimes because they're forced to and sometimes without understanding what they are facing.  Sometimes local churches do this together.  Usually, we call this mission and sometimes it is asserted that unity is essential for mission. 

So, two churches of different traditions are wrestling together with a local issue.  How would closer agreement about the conduct of holy communion help them to do this?  Let me be clear, I'm not saying communion is irrelevant to the mission of these churches.  I am saying we need to understand how our ecumenical conversations are relevant to local mission.

The churches in Cleveland were able to collaborate over long term unemployment through RESPOND!  I have no recollection of ever discussing the traditional concerns of ecumenical conversations.  The churches journeyed very deeply into practical theology, especially through Dark Holy Ground but I don't think the formal differences ever made any difference.  It is a long time ago and my memory may be faulty but I think many churches jointly engaged in mission today would also fail to see the link.

Indeed formal ecumenical conversations might even inhibit collaboration if Rusch is right and the churches cannot agree about gender and ethical issues.  The cries asking why we always have to wait for the slowest before we can do anything would be deafening.

Of course, most local churches collaborate over mission and ignore the ecumenical conversations as at best irrelevant and at worst divisive.  Perhaps mission is a third dimension where formal conversations are prepared to enter into dialogue with the issues that engage local churches.  As we contemplate climate change, debt and racism (to name three out of many intractable issues of our time) what do our ecumenical conversations have to contribute?