| The paper below was presented at the 1994 Central Committee meeting in Johannesburg, which featured a deliberative session on WCC-Roman Catholic relations. |
As the churches in Britain and Ireland worked during the 1980s to develop new ecumenical Councils they identified two kinds of ecumenism. There is the ecumenism that is based on drawing out from the churches the energy and the expertise. That form of ecumenism goes way ahead of the churches inviting them to follow if they can. Very often they cannot absorb the ecumenical agenda that the experts have developed and a gap opens up between the churches on the one hand and the ecumenical enthusiasts on the other. The benefit of this kind of ecumenism is that there is always something to challenge the churches. They are never allowed to forget that there is a dimension of their life and witness that they must always strive to accommodate. The problem is that the ecumenical agenda runs parallel to that of the churches themselves and isn’t easily able to penetrate the decision-making and priority-setting mechanisms in the churches. The ecumenical agenda often seems like an extra that is imposed from outside.
The other form of ecumenism is based on the churches themselves. The churches set the priorities and agree to work on them together. The churches recognise that there is an ecumenical dimension to all their life and work and increasingly they develop forms of cooperation that recognise that they belong together and that their life and witness are enhanced by the discovery of ways of working that draw strength from the involvement of the churches. The price that has to be paid is that progress in ecumenical cooperation is slower but the bonus is that the ecumenical endeavour is recognised and owned by all. This form of ecumenism then has the potential in the long run to take the churches further down the road of ecumenical cooperation and commitment.
It is this latter form of ecumenism that we have committed ourselves to in Britain and Ireland. We have now a wider membership than before, with the Roman Catholic Church as a full member, and we have, both in the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland and in the Councils in Scotland, England and Wales, opportunities for decision-making that draw their strength from the fact that the church leaders are involved. All church leaders whether they operate principally at the local level or the national level cannot escape from the ecumenical commitment that their churches have entered into. No longer is ecumenical engagement something that belongs only to the few. It is a recognised dimension of what it means to be Christian.
Our new ecumenical bodies in Britain and Ireland were formed in September 1990. These first three and a half years have been a time for exploring and deepening the commitment of the churches to one another. The church leaders at the national level meet residentially twice a year to worship together, to study together and to decide on what things the churches can best do together. These meetings take account of the different ways in which the churches themselves reach decisions. We don’t vote but-seek to proceed on the basis of reaching consensus. In that process all the churches are involved and we do not seek to impose the will of the majority on the churches that have reservations about any proposed course of action. It is a decision-making process that requires much prior consultation and the shaping of policy to take account of the views which the churches themselves express and hold.
I believe we have been led in this direction as a result of Roman Catholic membership in our Councils, although other churches have also come to see the strength of our new model. We no longer have a whole range of ecumenical Committees as we previously did in the old British Council of Churches. Now our function is to coordinate the work of the churches and gradually to find new models of cooperation which capitalise on the strength of the churches themselves. Because this session is focused on relations with the Roman Catholic Church, let me speak about our experience as I have seen it. The first thing I would say is that the Roman Catholic Church takes its membership of our council very seriously. I have more correspondence from the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales than from any other member church - correspondence informing me of things that the Roman Catholic Church is doing, of things where they would welcome and value ecumenical cooperation and suggestions for ecumenical activity. We have also found that the Roman Catholic Church, if it agrees to be involved in an inter-church programme, enters into the planning with much enthusiasm.
We have also found it necessary to re-examine our approach to such matters as the pronouncement of public statements and the debating of resolutions on public issues. There was a tendency in the former Councils in Britain and Ireland to proceed ecumenically by public resolutions. On the whole that is not the way the Roman Catholic Church operates. It is not that they are not willing sometimes to issue a public statement but that that is only one way in which the mind of the churches might be expressed. We have had to think through when a public statement is the preferred way of expressing ecumenical concern and when some other way is preferable. The Roman Catholic Church has though on more than one occasion brought to our ecumenical meetings the fruits of discussion in the Bishops’ Conference, seeking a wider ecumenical debate about matters of moment. Indeed we now increasingly find that the ecumenical arena is informed and reinforced by the debates that originate in the member churches and are then shared more widely. So at our last meeting the Roman Catholic Church brought a Bishops Conference statement on asylum seekers for wider debate, the Quakers brought a statement about the arms trade and the United Reformed Church a statement about economic investment in South Africa.
What we are engaged in is the opening up of the churches to one another so that they can share their strengths and support one another in their weaknesses.
There are of course frustrations. We still find it sad that when we meet together and experience a genuine sense of our oneness in Christ, when we meet for the Eucharist we are still divided. That is true also for the Orthodox in our membership but the membership of the Roman Catholic Church has reinforced that sense of frustration. We also have to recognise that the Roman Catholic Church is different from most of our member churches in that it doesn’t have its own decision-making processes internally that involve its own wider membership. This means that when our Assembly meets every two years, the Roman Catholic lay members are experiencing in an ecumenical context what few of them have any experience of in their own church. We are also learning to work with a church that has both an international structure and a localised one. We recognise that some of the wider ecclesial and doctrinal matters are decided in Rome and that on the ground the Roman Catholic Church is essentially diocesan rather than national. That means that its involvement ecumenically at the national level poses problems for itself as well as for us.
Nevertheless, our experience of ecumenism with full Roman Catholic involvement has been almost entirely positive. It has forced us to take the member churches far more seriously than otherwise we might have done and it has given us the potential of moving further forward in our ecumenical pilgrimage than the older models of ecumenism could have done. our experience in Britain and Ireland has been that Roman Catholic membership has forced us to be more imaginative in our planning of what the churches can do together and that is something we hope the WCC will one day experience for itself - but it cannot do so without a fundamental reappraisal of its structures and its ways of working.