| This is a further reflection on the nature of councils of churches, from one of the great "ecclesiologians" of our day. Seeing councils primarily as "servants of unity", Fr Tillard contributes to the discussion about their ecclesiological nature. |
It seems clear to me that the future of the unity of God’s church will increasingly be played out in the thick of human life, where the followers of Christ strive to implant the divine gift of reconciliation in the wounded body of humanity. For that is what is at stake. One of the most serious consequences of the Canberra assembly is that, in bringing into the open the conflict between missionary and "missionarized" churches -- the old forms of Christianity and the new churches of the South which do not want to break wholly with the old traditional religions of their peoples -- it created the impression that the church is an accessory to the rupture which wounds the world and that it has even made it worse. The mission of councils of churches is specifically to heal this rupture by re-establishing communion concretely -- in those spheres where human beings live out their destiny.
The servant church
We must begin by recalling the ecclesiological status of councils of churches. As it happens, there is considerable confusion about this. Of course everyone accepts that a council of churches is neither a united church nor even a confederation of churches. The important definitions in the 1950 Toronto statement, which forbids the World Council of Churches to regard itself as a super-church taking decisions on behalf of the member churches, apply.
By its very nature every council of churches, global or local, is an organization for diakonia, for service. Its ecclesial status derives from that. Automatically it is part of the church which "serves" God’s plan, the "servant" church.
This is where the problems start. They arise from the fact that for some decades the idea of service (diakonia) has been used in ecumenical circles without any effort to give it a genuine ecclesiological basis. Service is seen as a gospel value which follows from the nature of the church, as "the consequence of what the church is’, as "the manifestation of ecclesial existence", as the "supreme ecclesial activity". But such ideas of diakonia are radically inadequate. In fact, diakonia belongs to the very esse of the church. It is one of the elements which make the church a koinonia and weave the fabric of its existence.4 Diakonia creates the church before making it visible, and makes the church visible by creating it.
In ecumenical discussions the term "service" often has the meaning which civil organizations attach to it (service to the third world, service to refugees, etc.), having lost the Christological and ecclesiological meaning given to it by the church fathers and pioneers of the ecumenical movement. That meaning, which comes from scripture, is theological and involves not only charity but faith, which is inseparable from charity. This is at the heart of a sound theology of councils of churches and united churches.
In the New Testament diakonia appears as that which defines the reality of Jesus Christ, who was sent by the Father to "serve", to minister to his plan of salvation.5 It is also what defines the apostolic mission: the apostles are those who are sent (elihim), in whom is manifest the "service" of the Lord Jesus who sends them, as the Father sent him, in the "service" of the mysterion. Diakonia is what defines the Christian community presented in the "summaries" in the Acts of the Apostles (2:42-47; 4:32-37; 5:12-16) as wholly bound up in a communion of which mutual diakonia --both spiritually and on the material plane -- constitutes one of the essential bonds. Without "service’’ Jesus Christ is no longer the person whose nature was discerned by the apostolic faith; the apostolic mission is transformed into a vague commission to conduct religious propaganda; and the church of God becomes one religion among others, entirely focussed on the believer’s personal intimacy with God. Even the key terms of the Christian faith -- agape, koinonia -- lose their meaning, since their definition includes diakonia as one of its elements.
This diakonia has two objects, one of which is subordinate to the other and indeed has its source in that very subordination. They are: God and the work of God. I do not say "God and the world" or "God and humanity" or "God and creation" or "God and the others", but "God and the work of God". This reference to God gives Christian diakonia its special character among all the "services" which human solidarity and generosity continue to generate. Here we have a diakonia which consists of Christians sharing in God’s activity of coming to the aid of his work of creation in Jesus Christ and with the power of the Spirit. But this divine activity -- and, in its wake, the Christian action which participates in it -- aims at the same time at the success of the plan for creation (both in this and in the other world) and the glory of the Father. No one perceived this better than Irenaeus, at the threshold of the patristic period: Jesus Christ is at the centre of creation and salvation.
Since the church of God is, in the Spirit, the body of Christ, not only "born of the flesh" but (as the author of the Epistle to Diognetus so well showed) fully incarnate in society till the day of the Lord, it is -- in Christo -- embedded in the diakonia of Christ. It is born out of and in that diakonia. If the church is the "servant" of the work of God, it is so by being universally itself and -- even in this caning as "servant" -- by being the work of God, the fruit of the salvation effected in Jesus the Servant. Augustine would say that the church is taken from the rib of Christ dying on the cross, as he acted as the servant of the Father’s plan. The church is a new Eve, who is "flesh of his flesh, bone of his bones", his bride and partner for the propagation of the diakonia of the gospel of God (evangelion tou theou). The supreme grace God has bestowed on the church is to include it in the communion with the servant Christ and thus associate it eternally with the glorification of the Father in Christ the Lord.
Only in unity can the church truly be that "servant" There are two main reasons for this, closely linked to the two objects of the church’s "service": God and the work of God.
1. Clearly, the work of God revolves around what scripture calls reconciliation. This must be understood in the widest sense. It is not simply a matter of bringing together the broken fragments of a humanity which turns what ought to be an enriching diversity (of races, languages, cultures and functions) into a wall of division and often hatred. Nor is it enough to add to this task the restoration of harmonious relations between humanity and nature (water, forests, the animal creation, the earth, the air), which, despite the Psalmist’s song, is constantly ruined by a misconceived and often deviant social development. The walls have to be broken down and true relations reestablished with the cosmos, but by communicating to human beings (and in a way to nature itself) the communion with God which, as the writer of Ephesians has shown us, is connected with the cross.
But, in the presence of God, how can we communicate reconciliation in the name of Christ while we are unreconciled Christians? How can we even be credible prophets of that reconciliation when we show ourselves to the world as divided and tom while confessing Christ and his power to unite? The diakonia of the work of God calls for the unity and thus the reconciliation of the "servant" community.
2. Moreover, the inmost will of Christ Jesus is that the Father should be glorified in and by the service of reconciliation. We must be careful not to interpret John 17:20-24 in a purely pragmatic way, as is often done. In the Johannine gospel the Son does not call for the unity of the disciples solely in order to remove every hindrance to the spread of salvation among human beings. He also desires this unity to show the power which the Son has from the Father alone, the Father who has communicated it to him -- a power that can achieve what no worldly power can effect, the gathering together of the children of God in unity. Recognition of this "work of God" (cf. John 5:36; 10:36-38) shines out in the glorification of the Father. And serving the glory of the Father is central in the Johannine tradition. The Father shows who he is through the unity of the disciples. Just as much as the diakonia of salvation this kind of diakonia of glory -- serving his glory in this way -- calls for unity.
Thus it is essential to state that ecclesial diakonia cannot be achieved simply by sharing, mutual aid, identifying with poverty and the needs of the poor, striving for human rights, combating all forms of racism, commitment to transforming the world. It cannot even be achieved by the mere "service" of faith and evangelizing mission which are its supreme activities. To all these activities ecclesial diakonia adds a reference to unity in the "service" of God as an essential qualifier.
In ecclesial diakonia, unity and the "service" of God are regarded as constitutive elements. They make diakonia what it is precisely because it belongs to the depths, the very nature, the esse of the church of God, which is communion and service because the church is his possession -- because it is the work of God, who has bought it through the blood of the Son (Acts 20:28).
Councils of churches as servants of unity
We are now in a position to evaluate ecclesiologically the mission of councils of churches as "servants" of unity.
The first point to stress is that although a council is not a united church but a group of churches in which each keeps its full independence, a church entering a council does so with its whole being. It does not join solely with the aim of mutual aid in this or that church activity or aspect of life lived according to the gospel. It does so with the purpose of a co-operation that aims both at the total spiritual well-being of the groups concerned and their common desire to be genuine "servants" of the work of God in that part of the world where they are set. Thus it seeks, inseparably, the good of. Fraternal charity among groups of baptized Christians and solidarity in the exercise of what Charles Foucauld called "universal fellowship", which takes in the whole human family.
Thus a council of churches goes right to the heart of the dynamic of unity through mutual diakonia, which is itself directed towards unity in the service of God as we have described it. In other words, by seeking (to an extent which varies according to circumstances) to make diakonia a reality which represents communion -- an essential dimension of the church of God -- every council of churches is an agent for the healing of division, thus sharing in the work of the Spirit, welding koinonia together once again. It does so in the radiant light of baptism, awaiting the moment when everyone can celebrate the eucharist together.
This point must be pressed home, for it is essential. Councils of churches have a sacramental basis. It would be a very serious mistake to think of them simply as’ associations founded on mutual good will or on the recognition of the need for organization or greater efficiency. They are the fruit of the Spirit, who keeps the churches in the initial dynamic of baptism which incorporated them into Christ.
Of course division means that the body of Christ is wounded. Augustine said that Christ’s tunic which the soldiers respected has been tom. The wound will not be healed nor the tear repaired till the day when reconciled Christian communities can sit down at the Lord’s table and partake of the great banquet of reconciliation. No longer will they find themselves opposed to each other and rivals in daily living.
Nevertheless, to talk about a wound is not to talk about the destruction of the body. Catholic tradition affirms on the basis of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, that the "character" imprinted by baptism sets the "mark" of Christ, the Head (kephale) of the body, on all the baptized. This ineradicable stamp of God’s faithfulness remains as the constant means of "welding" each Christian and congregation to the head of the church.6 The breach of koinonia among Christian communities does violence to this fundamental link each has with Christ, but it does not destroy it. This tie is, as it were, a loom on which the diakonia (in the exact sense defined above) in which the churches become involved when they form a council weaves sinews of real "ecclesial" communion among them.
The sinews thus woven are of two kinds, as it were, traceable below the surface in common action and common witness. But it is important to dwell on these two because of their more specific relation to the core of Christian revelation -- and because they are often forgotten.
1. Despite their divisions, the churches when united in a council confess and witness together to the existence of the living God whom scripture presents to us as indivisibly Creator and Saviour. Churches of all confessions are moreover unanimous in affirming that faith in this one God can reveal the meaning of human destiny and thus found it on hope in the midst of a world where the powers of death seem indestructible.
After the unrealistic enthusiasm of some for "progress", we are increasingly coming to understand that our essential mission involves us at this level of meaning. Much more, we know that it is in this meaning of the human vocation that the gospel concern for the dignity of the person is rooted and that commitment to the poor, the marginalized, the "un-happy" flows from it. But this meaning refers us to God.
In our societies, councils of churches are the contemporary expression of one of the fundamental elementa of the ecclesia Dei: to be the "witness to God" and "God’s defender" the apostle of "God’s honour" and consequently the "witness to God’s preferential love for the poor", the "defender of the rights of ‘these little ones’ and of the ‘meek"’, the apostle of the "dignity of the individual who is created in the image and likeness of the living God". I am increasingly convinced that on this point -- which we have been tempted to relegate to the secondary level -- councils of churches have a specific mission. It is what we may call their "doxological communion". Beyond the divisions they make real the unanimity of all the baptized in the proclamation of their faith in God, the foundation of unity. For it does seem that there is unanimity here. And its object is something fundamental.
2. To "doxological" communion -- which is an essential element of the communion of grace -- we must add communion in the modesty of human aspirations. By this I simply mean to express a conviction running through the whole Christian tradition since the days of the apostles. Christ’s followers have to live happily in this world but with a happiness which numbers among its sources a sober, moderate, temperate, reverent and sometimes even ascetic7 use of the good things of creation. There is certainly no question of refusing to see in them a gift of God to humanity. That would ‘be to contradict scripture itself. But we have to understand this gift and use it in terms of what the gospel reveals of the calling of human beings. The quest for unlimited wealth and the endeavour to dominate nature -- with the satisfaction of our desires as the only criterion -- are radically incompatible with the gospel.
The contemporary environmental crisis restores to the demands of Christian ethics the dimension which goes beyond narrow individual concerns. It puts them right back into the context of the work of God, whose essential place in the calling of the church -- to be a steward, a caretaker, not an overlord -- we have indicated above. But the different ecclesial confessions -- despite the emphases analyzed by Max Weber continue to share the same fundamental outlook on what the Tradition perceives of the modesty of human aspirations. Human monarchies are to be located at the level of grace. All Christian confessions resist a Promethean interpretation of the calling to be "the image of God". They censure the megalomania of desire. The Beatitudes remain the inspiration for their moral code.
Thus when a council of churches deliberately seeks to heed this vision of the human calling in its social attitudes, or more broadly in its reminders to the member churches, it is realizing one of the elementa ecclesiae, that of communion. For the church of God is a union between the call addressed in Jesus Christ and the response of a community which agrees to proclaim that call. And this includes conversion to what Augustine would call "the model of the Beatitudes".
If the churches once proclaim "with one heart and one soul" the call of God to the kind of humanity in which his work reaches its climax, then an essential bond of the koinonia of grace will already be implanted among them. They will then be the source of unity through their diakonia.
These two sinews of unity -- doxology and modesty -- are not the only ones which common action and common witness create. One could also observe that the mutual aid churches give each other in a council displays one of the characteristics of unity highlighted in the "summaries" of the Acts of the Apostles.8 Or one could describe the unifying power of the common martyria of certain councils of churches confronted by regimes that flout human dignity. But for our reflection here it will be more useful to focus not on the unity that has already been achieved but on the prophetic preparation for the full canonical communion9 of the churches when they refuse to allow themselves a clear conscience in face of the tragic fact of their division.
Receiving the gospel afresh
The councils of churches must be seen by their members themselves as a crucible in which, in the grace of the Spirit, God prepares in one place or another the visible and canonical communion of all those communities which are faithful to his Son Jesus Christ. But that requires the churches involved to have a common will to look for much more in their unity than support that allows them to be content with a situation that does violence to the gospel. They have to realize that unless its aim is visible communion in the eucharistic mystery, a council of churches runs the risk of turning into something similar to de Gaulle’s description of the Vichy government: an institution whose sole result is "to make the shame of defeat acceptable"; which, he used to add, is "a new shame" in itself.
In the light of this, the most important role of a council of churches which is firmly resolved to conquer division and not simply to handle it well is, as I see it, to receive the gospel afresh. And that is clearly a spiritual task.
This reception calls for two things. On the one hand the council must appear to the churches concerned as what it actually is: a focus of awareness reminding us of the impossibility of proclaiming the gospel of God in all its truth so long as divisions remain. The gospel is proclaimed by its fruits just as much as by the exact meaning of the statements which constitute it, by the truth of life just as much as by the truth of words. The two are radically inseparable. At the beginning of this reflection I asked how we are to present ourselves without blushing as witnesses to the truth of the gospel of reconciliation when we are divided in life and faith in the very name of that gospel? A council must display these two aspects of the truth.
We must even go further. For it is not only the proclamation of the gospel that finds itself compromised by division. The very reality of life in the gospel is wounded. Every time a community -- even Catholic, Orthodox or Anglican --celebrates the eucharist, that celebration bears the marks of a wound. Christians of other churches with whom bonds of deep communion exist, above all within the council that gathers them together, and which also belong to Christ -- are not present. Thus something does not ring true when the congregation proclaims in faith that it is celebrating the sacrament not only of their unity but of unity. Let it be said that there must be no concealing or suppressing of this wound. On the contrary its tragic dimension has to be made evident, and the gospel of reconciliation must be received afresh at this point of burning shame.
This re-reception of the gospel of reconciliation should not be limited to specific events nor even to the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. It must permeate the whole life of the churches that are members of the council. A difficult task! But if those responsible make it their concern, Christian communities are not closed to the question of unity. They are moving imperceptibly from ‘Why are we divided?" to ‘What is to be done if we are to be reconciled?" These two questions are of prime importance.
This is where we see the second requirement which the re-reception of the gospel of reconciliation imposes on any council of churches. A council’s task is to make room in the communities represented in it for a "spiritual space" in which the unity God desires may be received.10 It is deeply to be regretted that the great intuition of spiritual ecumenism -- of which Fr Couturier was one of the pioneers -- has lost its impact, replaced in the minds of many by a bureaucratic ecumenism in which more room is allocated to files than to contemplation of God’s plan. Ecumenism is too rarely seen in its "spiritual" colours.
This "spiritual space" has nothing to do with the exalted enthusiasm of certain movements in which emotion swallows up faith. It is made up primarily of prayer, of intercession. But the purpose of this is not limited to a general petition addressed to God who by his Spirit can change people’s hearts. It also includes -- as we await a common eucharist -- the practical concerns of congregations. In the days when spiritual ecumenism was taking off, it used to happen that at its Sunday eucharist a Catholic parish would pray for the needs of the neighbouring Anglican parish and vice versa. Or a rather wealthy Anglican parish might give a large sum for building a convent for Catholic contemplative nuns with nothing in return except concerned prayerful intercession. Alas, that now seems long ago and far away!
But prayer is not the only thing. A council of churches is also one of the privileged instruments for experiencing "poverty", an experience which might be said to represent the basis for the "spiritual space" that is our concern here. What I have in mind is, of course, "poverty" in face of the gospel. At a time when confessionalisms are coming to life again, it is essential to ensure that the churches do not see themselves as groups jealous of their confessional identities, but can recognize in "the other" a word of God which challenges, disturbs, perturbs them and in the end leads them to ask questions about themselves. Thus each church becomes for the other churches of the council the "reminder", so to speak, of the gospel dimension which gives that church its character, and in its turn it can see in the other churches features of the gospel which assist it to become aware of its own limitations and poverty. The council of churches is an instrument of the Spirit to break down the self-sufficiency of the churches.
This is particularly important in the case of churches with a long tradition, which are always tempted to shut themselves up within the awareness -- which often bears little relation to the gospel -- of their glorious heritage. The Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox church not only need each other but together need the fraternal diakonia of the other churches in order to recognize realistically the hardenings, changes of emphasis and excrescences which their long history has made unavoidable. Councils can evoke a self-examination of this kind.
An emphasis on "spiritual space" as one of the main fruits of councils of churches clearly implies a profound change in the way their identity is understood -- which is clearly to be seen in several councils. Many in fact seem to see themselves first and foremost as bureaucratic institutions, like the World Council in Geneva on a reduced scale.
That is hardly in tune with the nature of the church itself. Even as an institutional reality the church is never cut off from an explicit and determinative reference to the experience of grace. Its structures are always related to communion in the gift of the Spirit of God. That is the purpose which permeates them. To reduce councils of churches to their bureaucratic structure not only amounts to turning them (so to speak) into cysts on the body of the church but gradually neutralizes their strictly ecumenical calling, which is always bound up with the Spirit.
That calling consists, as I have said, in displaying the unity that is already present and preparing for full communion. But koinonia can only be displayed and prepared for in explicit, experienced recourse to the grace of the Spirit. Words are no longer enough. Without dismissing the role of bureaucracy -- which councils of churches clearly need and without which they would soon be going round in circles -- they will lose any impact unless they present themselves to the faithful to a greater extent as charismatic institutions (in the primary sense of the term), explicitly placing themselves in the great charisma of the restoration of the communion of grace. Choking under their structures, the churches are thirsty for the Holy Spirit.
To talk about a "charismatic institution" is by implication to refer to caritas, love. Going back to the fine formula which more or less defined the relations between Paul VI and Athenagoras I, we may say that a council of churches makes "loving dialogue" possible. This also links up with the experience to which most of those closely involved in the ecumenical task bear witness. By breaking the isolation and bringing about knowledge of each other, ecumenical encounter slowly erodes distrust, prejudices and traditional hatreds. While each church doubtless begins by hoping to impose its own views and confessional ambitions on the others, we find that among the members something gradually comes into being which triumphs over the interests and claims of each group. Contrary to some ivory-tower thinkers, in the ecumenical field caritas is not at the outcome, but at the very heart of what has to be achieved. It is in learning to love one another, in the knowledge that diversities exist and in respect for them, that we gradually learn the unity that God wants.
There is no denying that in the field many walls of suspicion have already been broken down. "The other" is no longer the enemy we shun. Nevertheless, we must be realistic. On the one hand, the churches are increasingly fearful of any serious questioning of their own confessional identity; and this is giving rise to tensions and making new reasons for distrust appear. On the other hand -- and this became clear in Canberra -- the collapse of the walls built up between the churches has created a climate of indifference, far more than a genuine gospel caritas among the churches. Declarations of solidarity which are often purely verbal follow aggressive statements which express the real attitudes. And in this sphere councils of churches undoubtedly have a specific mission in the field. Their experience of caritas, overcoming their initial fears, cannot remain the prerogative of the delegates alone. It must enter into the churches at every level in order to transform indifference there at least into interest in the other churches and concern for their fate. Here newsletters are not enough. There has to be a pastoral care of unity.
Pastoral care of unity
I have deliberately avoided this expression "pastoral care of unity" up to this point. What it means in this context can only be understood in the light of further study of the nature of "spiritual space" and a criticism of the excessive bureaucratizing of ecumenical institutions, which conceals and distorts the dynamisms of rediscovered love.
Given where we are at present, if the member churches of councils want faithfully to conserve the Spirit’s call to communion, they must, look on their presence in these councils as an essential form of their own cura animarum, cure of souls. Consequently, councils of churches themselves must promote a pastoral care of unity.11 They can no longer rest content with organizing "tactics for unity" -- tidying up interchurch relations.
Without this common pastoral care of unity, in fact -- and here I can only remind you of a few of its fundamental features -- "ordinary members" of the actual congregations "at the base" will never be linked with what is going on "at the top" in the council itself, in the official dialogue commissions, in the meetings of officials at the highest level.12 Councils of churches must themselves be the promoters and guides for this essential pastoral care of unity, not intervening as councils in the life of each church, but nevertheless exercising a strong oversight (episkope).
First among the laws of such a common pastoral care of unity is an imperative ,made all the more necessary by the current recrudescence of confessionalisms, In the light of the re-reception of the gospel, we must learn in all "poverty" to get beyond divisive confessional differences, though without drifting into a vague and specious unanimity for the sake of unanimity. In other words, church members must be taught to see a gospel value in the doctrinal features of the "other" church, even if it is possible at the same time to show why one’s own tradition is uncomfortable with how that value is interpreted in the "other" church.
Clearly there is no question here of a pastoral care which offers a voluntarist way of achieving communion: uniting because we would like to at any price, even if it means being casual about doctrinal foundations. On the contrary, we are seeking to base unity on the communion of faith which makes a common re-reception of the gospel possible. To that end every effort is made to bring out the substantial points of agreement, from which the points of divergence can be discussed and re-evaluated. Instead of approaching the "other" church head-on, in terms of where it is different and what breaks communion with it, we approach it from the positive standpoint of what we have in common and what, despite everything, sustains a communion of grace which is often very profound. We then discover that what unites us carries the day over what divides us. The experience of councils of churches is clearly ideal material for such a discovery. It is in fact their daily bread.
This discovery, with the accompanying well-known tension between inclusion and exclusion --"inside-ness" and "outside-ness" -- must lead us to praise the faithfulness of God.
By definition, of course, a council of churches includes all the churches which are members. That is not where the problem lies. But all churches, not just those with a long tradition, have certain standards. They exclude from their communion anyone who does not accept their "confession of faith" (Westminster, La Rochelle, Augsburg), their distinctive ritual (believers’ baptism), their dogma (Roman primacy), their structure (the episcopate). Since each is tempted to consider itself (whatever it says) at least as the community that is most faithful to what Christ desired, this confessional exclusiveness will inevitably (in its own eyes) cause some uncertainty regarding the inclusion of those it excludes in the "church of God according to the gospel".
Unlike the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, which reserve to themselves the character of churches, Protestants will generally agree that all communities of baptized persons have a right to be called a church. Even so, the churches of those "excluded" from their confession are (to borrow an expression from an English theologian’s description of Anglican comprehensiveness) accepted more out of evangelical fair play than theological conviction.
The council of churches is the ecclesial body which is capable of guiding Christians to a lucid review of these traditional views of ecclesial inclusion and exclusion. Because a council of churches is not a united church -- i.e. the outcome of a decision for canonical communion -- but an association of churches retaining their full identity, it enables us to cheek how in terms of the life of grace the frontiers between churches are open and penetrable. This or that Anglican congregation with an evangelical tradition feels closer -- in its prayer, view of mission and approach to the faith -- to its neighbouring Roman Catholic congregation, with which it is not in canonical communion, than to other Anglican congregations in the town with which it is canonically in communion. This or that Catholic prayer group would rather turn to a Methodist minister with whom it is not in canonical communion to lead its meetings than to the Catholic priest appointed for the purpose by the bishop. This or that group of Orthodox academics even goes so far as to ask a "Uniate" priest, with whom they are not in communion, to help them in their understanding of the faith, rather than ask for that help from an Orthodox priest. The communion of grace and canonical communion overlap less and less. On the level of grace Augustine’s realistic observation is being confirmed more and more: there are those who are inside but are from outside, and there are those who are outside but are from inside.14
Here we have a phenomenon which is significant for unity. If unity is a work of the grace of the Spirit, the porosity of frontiers and the communion this prompts can hardly be foreign to the plan of Providence. In that indispensable common pastoral care for unity it would seem to be the responsibility of the councils of churches to highlight the fundamental difference between a communion of grace and canonical communion. First and foremost, a council of churches has the responsibility of showing at the highest level that a canonical communion which does not blossom on a communion of grace would be vain because marred in its nature from the start.
One of the functions of the council of churches therefore consists in broadening the celebrated Lund principle. It is not enough to do everything together that we can do together. We must also be everything together that we can be together -- always provided that we do not pretend there really is canonical communion and that we do not act "as if" it already existed.
This leads us to the final law on common pastoral care for unity, which it is appropriate to explicate a little. It is the law of "cautious wisdom". We may state it thus: "What matters is that the canonical communion at which the council of churches is aiming should be effected in the proper way so that it will be genuine, not so that it may be implemented quickly".
One could say much about this law of "cautious wisdom". Clearly if the communion of grace did not exist., this law would result in an ecumenical desert, and its outcome would be total discouragement, or even despair. The various phases of BEM, the drama of Orthodox-Roman Catholic relations, the history of the "reception" of ARCIC, the atmosphere at the Canberra assembly show us that canonical unity is not for tomorrow. The churches are no longer ready -- or are not ready -- to take the decisive step, of whatever kind it may be, which would unite them in a single communion, celebrating a single eucharist, after which their members would truly be one body in everyday fife, mission and worship. But we have seen that the communion of grace sustained by the Spirit of God is deep and wide.
There is no ecumenical desert. Councils of churches can build their common pastoral care for unity on the foundation of the communion of grace, preparing for canonical communion, or even resigning themselves to some kind of "flexible federation of churches", resting content with "accepting each other just as they are". Besides, is it really courageous to agree to act as if canonical communion had already been attained? I am among those who have never been convinced by certain practices of intercommunion; this whole study shows why. The visible unity of Christians is at the core of God’s plan. Even if from the start it has constantly seemed like a difficult programme which challenges hope, it would be cowardice to abandon it. Who knows whether God is not looking for this patience from the churches as a sign of their faith? If councils of churches are careful to foster that patience and do not allow it to become simply waiting in idleness, then they will really be "servants" of the church of God for the glory of the Father and the success of his work. That is their greatness and their need.
I was asked to present a theological reflection on the mission of councils of churches, as this is required to take shape in today’s context. I hope that these few reflections will be of service, if only to elicit reactions. It was at least necessary, however, to make a call for reform and for that purpose to examine the intuition of those who have been pursuing ecumenism for the last three decades. The regional or national councils of churches must fully claim the place that is properly theirs. The future of communion depends in large measure on them. Today they must renew the ties with their sacramental basis and their "pastoral" calling. They must move from the bureaucratic phase to the charismatic.
Notes: