In a plenary session dedicated to �Church Unity: Claiming Our Common Future� at the 9th General Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) meeting February 14-23 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the Rev. Norbert Saracco of the Good News Evangelical Church in Argentina was invited to bring a vision of �new possibilities� from Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, most of whom do not belong to the WCC.

�For evangelical churches,� said Saracco, �unity is not based on the recognition of a hierarchical authority, nor on dogmas, nor on theological agreements, nor on alliances between institutions. We have to accept that this way of doing ecumenism has gone as far as it can.�

A week later, in the Assembly�s closing session, the 691 delegates from the WCC�s 348 member churches said, in effect, �We disagree.� They did so by adopting an ecclesiology text as an invitation and challenge to the member churches to strengthen their alliance through theological agreement and to give an account to one another of their faith and the ways they order the life of their church. The Assembly is the highest governing body of the WCC, the world�s broadest gathering of churches and Christian organizations.

The Invitation referred to came in the form of a text titled �Called to be the One Church: An Invitation to the Churches to Renew their commitment to the Search for Unity and to Deepen their Dialogue.� The story of where this text came from within the WCC�s inner life will help in appreciating its contents.

The Orthodox churches have been minority members of the Council since its creation in 1948. Their �contributions� never brought about any real change in the Western Protestant-dominated style, structure and methodology of the Council. While many of these Eastern churches were under the restrictions of their Communist governments, they were willing to settle for less; just having a pretext to get out of the country, find solidarity with other Christians, and learn about what was going on in the rest of the Christian world was reward enough.

But when the Iron Curtain fell, these churches, hobbled though they were by seventy years of tight controls, slowly began to straighten up and conceive of participating in the WCC on their own terms. At the preceding Assembly in 1998 in Harare, Zimbabwe, the Orthodox churches asserted themselves by expressing concerns about certain ecclesiological understandings that they perceived at work in the Council. The Harare Assembly responded by establishing the Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the WCC to study these and other criticisms and to propose any necessary changes.

In its Final Report in 2002, the Special Commission indicated some ecclesiological issues that needed further study and clarification. With this in mind and in view of the tradition of Assembly statements on unity, the WCC Central Committee, the highest decision-making body between every-seven-years Assemblies, requested that the Council�s Faith and Order Commission organize a process leading to a statement on ecclesiology for the 9th Assembly.

This is the text �Called to be the One Church.� It seeks to state what the churches can say together about the Church, to affirm the churches� commitment to one another within the ecumenical fellowship, and to encourage a renewed and more intense discussion on issues that still divide them. It was accepted as an invitation to further and deeper dialogue.

The Roman Catholic Church is not a disinterested by-stander to the process. While it has declined to become a member for �structural reasons� (membership in the WCC is principally by national churches, and the Catholic Church relates to other world bodies as a world Christian communion), it has joint responsibility for preparing the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, full membership in the WCC commissions on Faith and Order, Mission and Evangelism, and provides staff in areas of mission and at the Bossey Ecumenical Institute. In his greetings to the Assembly, Pope Benedict XVI reaffirmed the Catholic Church�s intention to continue �a solid partnership� with the WCC in the quest towards the visible unity of the Church.

The Ecumenical Indicative and Imperative

In its opening paragraph, the Invitation brings forward a critical cornerstone of the WCC from its constitution and reaffirms that �the primary purpose of the fellowship of churches in the World Council of Churches is to call one another to visible unity in one faith and in one eucharistic fellowship expressed in worship and in common life in Christ, through witness and service to the world, and to advance towards that unity in order that the world may believe.�

The first line from the second paragraph reiterates that the churches in this fellowship �remain committed to one another on the way towards full visible unity.� Why the stress in both places on visible unity? Because the starting point is the ecumenical conviction enunciated by the WCC Central Committee meeting in Toronto in 1950, shortly after its founding: �The member churches of the World Council believe on the basis of the New Testament that the Church of Christ is one�. The churches realize that it is a matter of simple Christian duty for each church to do its utmost for the manifestation of the Church in its oneness, and to work and pray that Christ�s purpose for his Church should be fulfilled.�

Flowing from this ecumenical conviction is a grammar based upon an ecumenical indicative and imperative. The indicative is that, since it is God who assembles the one Church, unity is not something we have to create. It is a present reality given by God to the Church and is presupposed in every effort for unity. The ecumenical imperative is that Christians must give expression to the essential unity of the church. It must be lived and be made visible. What makes modern ecumenism different from church unity projects in previous centuries of the second millennium is that it begins with the ecumenical indicative: the present fact of our unity in Christ.

The work still before us is a consequence of our fundamental communion in Christ, not a prerequisite for it. In other words, it is the recognition of how God has bound us in one body that provides the proper setting for the work we undertake through the ecumenical movement. The goal is to allow the unity that already exists among us as God�s gift, to become more fully manifest in the way we Christians relate to one another, articulate our faith, worship, and act in the world.

Ten Questions

The 2,000 word, 15-paragraph document �Called to be the One Church� confesses one, holy, catholic and apostolic church as expressed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381, our common belonging to Christ through baptism in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, our call to share in the church�s mission of proclaiming the gospel and to work for the healing of divisions both within the church and within the human community.

Some will undoubtedly say, �There is little new in this document.� True enough. The issues addressed in the Invitation echo earlier Faith and Order studies: Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (1982), Confessing the One Faith (1991), Church and World (1990), and The Nature and Purpose of the Church (1999).

The issues in the Invitation are also related to studies by the WCC-Vatican Joint Working Group, which recently celebrated its fortieth anniversary. Pertinent references here are The Church: Local and Universal (1990), Ecumenical Dialogue on Moral Issues (1996), Ecclesiological and Ecumenical Implications of a Common Baptism (2004).

When Argentinean Dominican theologian Fr. Jorge Scampini, a resource person to the Faith and Order Commission, reflected on the Invitation with the Assembly delegates, he lifted up precisely the aspect of reception of these earlier studies. �These studies,� he said, �are the fruit of long and careful theological work, and they still have a word to say to us on some of the questions that await a response.�

Scampini encouraged the churches to recognize the ground already covered and to renew their commitment to make these studies more widely known and �received� by the churches. Doing so by adopting the Invitation, he said, could be a milestone in the history of the WCC as an institution, �taking relations between the member churches to a new stage.�

To this end, �Called to be the One Church� ends with ten questions on recurrent matters that each member church of the WCC is to respond to by the Tenth Assembly, projected for 2013. To make sure that the churches follow through, the commission on Faith and Order is to prepare periodic reports to the Central Committee of the number and content of responses received, deepening the understanding among member churches and furthering progress towards the visible unity of the Church. Such a process would represent significant progress in addressing the fundamental ecclesiological issues raised by the Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the WCC and shared by the Catholic Church.

What makes adoption significant is not just that the churches reiterate and seek to deepen their appropriation of earlier key understandings about the unity they seek, but that they do so now, in this present context.

The Present Context

The Moderator of the WCC Central Committee, His Holiness Aram I, catholicos of the See of Cilicia of the Armenian Apostolic Church, painted with broad brushstrokes a picture of the present context in the ecumenical movement. Mainstream Christianity is ageing and shrinking. The institutional church is losing much of its impact on society. Divisions in many churches on ethical, social, and pastoral issues are creating confusion and estrangement. The divide between �belonging� and �believing� is growing.

�We have entered a new period of ecumenical history,� said Aram. �The ecumenical landscape is undergoing rapid and radical change: traditional ecumenical institutions are losing their motivation and interest; new ecumenical models and norms are emerging; new ecumenical alliances and partnerships are being formed; and new ecumenical agendas are being set. The ecumenical panorama today represents a new picture.�

This bears some unpacking. Pentecostals, who now account for one in every four Christians in the world, and megachurches like Willowcreek with non-denominational congregations, and donor agencies like Christian Aid, World Christian Service, and Bread for the World, are forming their own new networks. Networking, as in the World Alliance of Evangelicals, is replacing institutions, and advocacy groups are shaping the agenda. An ecumenism of partnership and alliance is sidelining the goal of visible unity and bringing more and more churches to relate to the ecumenical movement as a forum or a space for encounter and collaboration.

Aram rightly declared in his Report of the Moderator that �free-lance� ecumenism is not enough: �We need ecumenical models that constantly challenge the churches not simply to co-habitate, but to grow together, to move from self-sufficient existence to interdependent existence, from unilateral witness to multi-lateral witness.�

It is within this context that the churches� reiteration of �full visible unity� in �Called to be the One Church� assumes its significance. Aram worried that the ecumenical vision is facing a two-fold crisis: the ecumenical institutions have started to lose contact with the vision, and the vision appears to be vague and ambiguous. �For many, unity is no longer an ecumenical priority, but rather an academic topic or at best an eschatological goal,� he said. �The Council must re-emphasize the vital importance of visible unity by re-embarking on convergence and reception processes.�

The New Buzz Word: Reconfiguration

Given all of the above, the WCC buzz-word is �reconfiguration�. The process of reconfiguring the ecumenical movement is in large part an effort to "choreograph" the intricate relationships among the various ecumenical instruments and new ecumenical partners, so that clarity, transparency, communication and cooperative efforts mark those relationships, allowing the ecumenical movement as a whole to offer to the world and to the regions and local churches the grace-filled spiritual message of Christianity.

The various �instruments� referred to include Christian World Communions, Regional Ecumenical Organizations, National Councils of Churches, World Mission Bodies, Specialized Agencies, as well as Christian churches not currently in membership in the WCC.

These independently constituted organizations have a wide variety of structures and varying degrees of relationship with the work and programs of the WCC. And in some cases they also have a composition of membership that is broader than that of the WCC, including as full members representatives of bishop's conferences of the Roman Catholic Church and Evangelical and Pentecostal churches that are not members of the WCC. The relationship among these organizations lacks clarity, a common vision, and cooperative efforts.

Yet another idea in the wind is that of a Global Christian Forum that would gather a broader representation of Christian churches than currently are members in the WCC for consultation on issues common to all Christian churches and inter-church organizations. Several regional consultations have taken place, with participation from a wide range of Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, the Roman Catholic Church and from representatives of WCC member churches, gathering together at a global level representatives of all four main streams of Christianity. The next global forum event is scheduled to take place in late 2007.

The process of "reconfiguration" is best understood, according to the WCC�s Policy Reference Committee, not as patching up the existing ecumenical structures, but as a dynamic process to deepen the relationship of the ecumenical movement to its spiritual roots and missionary identity, and to clarify the relationships among the various ecumenical instruments towards ensuring that the message and the effort be coordinated and coherent.

In his Report of the Moderator, Aram asked �What kind of Council are we: an organization that plans activities, sets programmes and initiates advocacies, or a fellowship that strives for the visible unity of the church? I would say both. I do not see any dilemma or ambiguity; these two aspects of the Council�s work condition and strengthen each other.�

And so said the whole Assembly with its adoption of �Called to be the One Church.� It is not just more paper and ink. Words matter. They have meaning. When Christians agree upon the words and their meaning, use and act on them together, the unity of Christ�s Church shines forth for the glory of God and the service of humankind.

Thomas Ryan, CSP, directs the Paulist North American Office for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations and participated in the WCC Assemblies in Vancouver (1983), Canberra (1991), and Porto Alegre (2006).

This article was published in Ecumenical Trends, Vol. 35, no. 9, October 2006